Easter Sunday 2010

Easter Sunday was a busy day for us. We started out hosting a family brunch and Easter egg hunt in the morning and then attended the Easter celebration of Cincinnati's Bulgarian Cultural Club in the afternoon. This is this group's biggest annual gathering with people coming from as far as Dayton, OH, Columbus, OH and parts of Kentucky.

When we arrived at the party, we were overwhelmed by the large number of people and by the tables laden with food. Before we had even sat down, we were served slices of Kozunak, Bulgaria's traditional Easter bread. Earlier in the day, there had been a Kozunak contest and the slices on our plates came from the winning bread. Then we tried a main dish containing lamb, rice, spinach and green onions made by our friend Dani. She explained that lamb or lamb liver is prepared for the traditional Easter meal all over Bulgaria. As we looked around the tables, we could see that there were many different versions of lamb cooked according to various family recipes.

Around 4:00 pm, it was time for music and dancing. From everything we have seen, Bulgarians love to dance and this time, they chose traditional Bulgarian songs and dances. For the next two hours, we watched a line of dancers form and re-form, people joining in, others dropping out. The line of dancers wound around the tables, varying in length, but never stopping altogether.

We even learned about Bulgarian Easter egg fights in which you have to hit two eggs together just right in a certain manner to see which one will break. Without the visual aid of hard-boiled, died eggs, I cannot explain the exact method, but suffice it to say that the winning egg moves on to its next competitor until only one eggs survives intact. The holder of this egg is said to be blessed with good luck.

As always, we were among those who left early. Still, we had a wonderful time and cannot wait until our children will be able to be part of this celebration.

News Grab Bag

Over the past few weeks, there have been a couple of developments that affect adoption from Bulgaria.

On March 23, 2010, representatives from the Bulgarian Ministry of Justice, Bulgarian adoption agencies and Bulgarian Social Services met at a conference to discuss the state of international adoption. The conference underlined Bulgaria's current focus on referring older and/or special needs children to their forever families and made known that the program has been very successful in facilitating these kinds of options. It was noted that having current photos and videos of waiting children is especially helpful in finding them parents.

There was no announcement regarding a possible increase in referrals for relatively healthy toddlers. Ministry of Justice officials declared that there are currently over 2600 registered dossiers of waiting parents, most of them from Italy, Sweden, and the USA. The Ministry of Justice expects that by the end of this year, approximately 4500 new Bulgarian children will become eligible for international adoption and be entered into the International Adoption Registry. Nevertheless, it is unclear when these children will begin to be referred.

Many U.S. agencies and their waiting clients expect that with the registration of these new children, the speed and number of referrals will increase. However, in my opinion, the number of eligible orphans (which is currently estimated at over 2700) seems to have very little to do with the number of referrals being made. Instead, the real hold up appears to be at the Ministry of Justice where weekly adoption meetings over the last six months have resulted in an average of 12 referrals each (see the MOJ website for the results of the IAC meetings). To put this information into perspective, here's an approximate calculation: 2600 waiting families divided by 50 referrals per month makes for a possible 52 month wait, depending upon the criteria of the child a family wishes to adopt and the place they hold in the dossier line. Fifty-two months is over four years and yes, there are people who have, in fact, waited this long for their Bulgarian referrals. Many are still waiting. All we can do at this point is hope that the International Adoption Council will either increase the frequency of its meetings or begin to make a significantly larger number of referrals every week.

In better news, when Congress passed the Health Care Reform Bill last month, many people were unaware that this new law extends the adoption tax credit through the end of 2011 and raises it to $13,170. This credit is now also refundable, so adoptive parents no longer have to spread their adoption expenses over several years of tax filing. Hopefully many, many children can be united with their forever families before this tax benefit expires.