How the CCAA system works

I thought I would post a little bit about how the matching process works from China just to give you an idea how hard it can be to find suitable children for families and why the wait is so long.

The CCAA database is massive, yet, Lillian, our agency director, was showing us that most of the children who are listed as "minor special needs" actually have major issues or birth defects. That makes it harder for her to match children with families (most of whom are willing to accept matches for minor special needs-- like us). When there are so many listed as "minor" but are actually "major" it is hard to sort through them all and find the ones who would make good matches for her families (for example, she showed us the file of a child china had listed as minor special needs, this child had Rickets, all of her fingers on both hands were bent at weird angles and she had severe developmental delays, mental retardation and couldnt walk or crawl-- she was 6 years old, it was very sad). She really does look out for each of her families and is hesitant to give referrals to families if the child has multiple issues or severe mental delays, knowing how hard these can be to deal with and that most of her families are looking for more "normal" children. At the same time, the CCAA shared list is shared by all the agencies authorized to match children. While we were there, we were looking at three files and when we switched screens, two of them were locked by other agencies. The "easy" (few special needs/minor special needs) children get swept up very quickly, which is another reason her job is so difficult. Its very much a game of chance or constant vigilance on the system to monitor new additions to the database and grab them as quickly as possible. I can imagine how hard it is for the smaller adoption agencies with fewer resources to match "good" children with their families. The CCAA used to issue individual lists to agencies, but they have stopped doing that. Now everyone matches from the shared list and it's a battle to find children for families when all of the agencies are competing for the "good" ones.  Even sadder is the number of children left on that list with severe special needs and no matching families.