Review Room and Matching Room explained

Because of the stress and confusion that the Rumor Queen rumor site sometimes creates, I have a tendency of talking bad it more than I talk good about it. The site mostly monitor "rumors" on Chinese adoption timelines, etc... from all over the world and report this back to anxious parents-to-be. (A friend who knows someone in China that's friends with someone in the CCAA says blah blah blah) But in a case like this, I think the Rumor Queen rumor site is a valuable resource. One of the most misunderstood parts of this process is what the Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA) in China does with our paperwork. How do we get matched with that baby? I copied and pasted and re-worded this text below from another site and it explains it in more detail. Take this for what it is... information from a rumor site. This is not confirmed information but is posted here to help people understand what happens.

We have made it thru the Review Room and are waiting for our turn in the Matching Room.

Review Room

1... The adoption agency compiles all of the necessary paperwork (called a dossier) from it's clients and when enough files are ready, sends these dossiers to the CCAA.

2... The CCAA receives the dossiers and logs them into their system. This is called our Log In Date (or LID for short).

3... Once they are logged in, they sit until it is their turn to be reviewed. The CCAA reviewer examines all the paperwork to make sure that everything is complete, that all documents are there and that there are no issues that need to be addressed.

4... The CCAA assigns a review person to work on files from the same agencies every month. The adoption agency knows how to put a dossier together based on how their review person wants to see it and based on the things their review person will approve or deny. The workload can vary from month to month depending on the volume submitted from the adoption agency. It is normal for one reviewer to still be working on February while another reviewer has made it to April. A month is not complete until all reviewers have completed all files for that month.

5... If all is fine, these files are considered to have completed the review process then sit until it is their time to make it thru the matching process

Matching Room

1... The CCAA reviews the baby dossiers from the orphanages and make sure there are no issues with them.

2... The CCAA then counts up all of the baby dossiers that are eligible for matching that month and then look to see how far this stack will go into the parent dossiers without sending out a partial day. They pull all of those families dossiers. The date of the last parent file is the cut-off date. Sometimes the amount of family files matched doesn’t get too far and sometimes they get farther. It just depends on the amount of children's files and the amount of family files.

3... Next the CCAA matches orphanages up with agencies. If this orphanage has six babies and this agency has six families, a match is done and the families from that agency would travel there. If two orphanages in the same province have a total of 12 babies and an agency has 12 families selected that month, a match is done.

4... The CCAA then starts matching individual babies to individual families.

5... How do the matchers at the CCAA match families and babies? It's been reported on the rumor site that they first look for something that stands out: a baby who looks a lot like a parent, or a baby who likes music and a parent who teaches music, etc.... Several matching people have stated they match by bone structure of the baby’s face and the parent’s faces. Maybe that's why we need to send a passport photo of our face; to compare our mug shot with the baby’s mug shot. Some have stated that they also use Chinese astrology. The age of the child requested is not a deciding factor as the CCAA considers the match to be in the best interest of the child and not what the family "wants".

6... Once a match is done, the CCAA sends the medical information and some pictures of the baby to us thru our agency. The wait until travel begins when the parents sign the agreement and return it to their agency to forward to the CCAA. Travel to China is about 9 weeks after the paperwork has been signed.