Zarezan Valentine

Last Friday evening, we attended a party celebrating Zarezan Valentine. The party was organized by the Bulgarian Cultural Club of Cincinnati which has about 80 members, most of whom are native Bulgarians who have ended up in this area for one reason or another. Of course, Zarezan Valentine is not a real holiday, but a combination celebration for two actual events that take place on February 14: Valentine’s Day in the U.S. and Trifon Zarezan in Bulgaria. If you would like to learn more about Trifon Zarezan, follow this link: http://sofiaecho.com/2006/02/13/643178_trifon-zarezan-day.

Having been to Bulgarian celebrations before, we knew we could be looking forward to good food, music, and many friendly conversations. The party officially started at 7:30, but Craig and I did not arrive until 8:15. Why? Because we have learned that Bulgarians are notoriously late for events like this and that it’s almost a matter of national pride. One woman even told us Friday night that it might be considered rude if you showed up on time for a party and disturbed the host in the last frantic tasks of preparation. Well, when we got there 45 minutes late, we were still early. Most people arrived around 9:00.

As expected, there was a large potluck buffet with a great variety of food. From salads to meats to breads and dessert, the meal was plentiful and delicious. Being German, I contributed a homemade Black Forest Cake. I used my mom’s recipe and the cake turned out great. I’ll never claim to be a talented cake decorator, but if you want something scrumptious and from scratch, I am your baker. The cake was completely gone by the end of the night, just the way I like it.



Of course, we met several new people at the party and were asked to retell our adoption story again and again. Bulgarians in the U.S. are very interested in hearing details about this topic as most of them do not have any idea how the process works. However, as they learn more, most are incredibly supportive and very appreciative because they do all seem aware that large numbers of children live permanently in their country’s orphanages. One woman even called us heroes and it was quite difficult to convince her that we are just ordinary people who wish to parent. Many Bulgarians are shocked that international adoptions take so long from the MOJ’s end, but attribute this fact to old bureaucratic habits dying hard and to the lack of funds available to the government.

As the night went on, the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics were airing on a large TV in the background. I hadn’t quite realized how many different nationalities were represented at the party until the Parade of Nations which brought cheering at different times from different people and provided a gateway for finding out where everyone was from. Of course, most attendees were Bulgarian, but there was also one person from each of these other countries celebrating with the group on Friday: Tanzania, the UK, the Ukraine, Botswana, and Columbia. Add myself from Germany and we were a pretty international bunch.

The one thing that I didn’t expect from this celebration was to find myself dancing in a large circle of Bulgarians later in the night. I am not really sure when the dancing even started at all. The TV was turned off at some point, the lights were dimmed, furniture (some with children sleeping right on top and undisturbed) was moved toward walls, and music started to play. I saw one lone couple dancing one minute and the next time I turned around, there were a dozen people in a large circle just cutting a rug. A person standing next to me must have seen the surprise on my face and said, “In a few minutes, we will all be dancing.” I didn’t really think that this would include me, but when an ABBA medley came on, I couldn’t resist joining the ever increasing group of dancers. It was a lot of fun, people were completely relaxed and comfortable and very un-self-conscious.

Another thing we have learned about Bulgarians is that they like to get together and celebrate for special reasons or just because. When they do, they party hard and long. My husband and I knew that we would be the first to leave. When we said our good-byes around 11:30, everyone was shocked that we were headed home at such an early hour. Even so, we had a great time and are looking forward to joining the group for their biggest annual celebration on Easter Sunday.

Happy Valentine's Anniversary

One year ago today, Craig and I mailed our application for an international adoption from Bulgaria to our placing agency. I remember hastily running off copies in the morning and then realizing that we were missing a document. We emailed our contact person at the agency and, even though it was a Saturday, she quickly sent it to us again. We filled it out and rushed everything to the local post office before it closed. It was very important to us to be able to get the initial paperwork for this adventure mailed on a day that celebrates love.

So, today is the first anniversary of the date we consider the official beginning of our adoption journey. Let’s hope that by the time the second anniversary rolls around, we will have a referral!

Cultural Education

In order to fulfill our required training, we had to complete three cultural education credits for our placing agency. They did give us some suggestions on how to receive these credits, but we chose our own activities as you can read below:

MacGahan Bulgarian-American Festival, New Lexington, OH, June 14, 2009 – 2 credits

The MacGahan Festival is an annual event to celebrate the life and accomplishments of Januarius MacGahan who was an American born in New Lexington, OH and who later worked as a journalist in Europe. His reports on the Turkish war atrocities in Bulgaria in 1876 changed the course of history and are credited with winning the country of Bulgaria its independence. You can learn more about MacGahan here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Januarius_MacGahan.

The MacGahan Festival draws an annual crowd of native Bulgarians who now live in the US as well as Americans of Bulgarian descent and New Lexington locals. Last year a delegation from Bulgaria was in attendance, including the Vice- President of Bulgaria, Angel Marin, and the Ambassador to the US, Lachezar Petkov. The VP’s hometown is Batak. MacGahan reported as follows from Batak, “We looked into the church which had been blackened by the burning of the woodwork, but not destroyed, nor even much injured. It was a low building with a low roof, supported by heavy irregular arches, that as we looked in seemed scarcely high enough for a tall man to stand under. What we saw there was too frightful for more than a hasty glance. An immense number of bodies had been partially burnt there and the charred and blackened remains seemed to fill it half way up to the low dark arches and make them lower and darker still, were lying in a state of putrefaction too frightful to look upon. I had never imagined anything so horrible.” This church remains in Batak today as a monument and remembrance that many Bulgarians visit.

The day began with a moving bilingual (Bulgarian/English) service at the grave of Januarius MacGahan. At the end of the service, VP Marin spread a handful of soil from Batak over the grave. After the ceremony, the group of about 100 visited the MacGahan statue near the New Lexington Court House for a photo op. Then we walked to the library where we participated in a live Skype chat with Bulgarian teenagers who have been researching MacGahan and who attend an English Language school in Sofia. After the chat, we had a meal which included some Bulgarian/Balkan specialties. The meal was followed by a number of speeches in Bulgarian and English and then by a slideshow about Bulgaria.

Craig and I even had an opportunity to speak personally with the VP who told us that his daughter is an adoptive parent and with Ambassador Lachezar Petkov who said that adoption procedures in Bulgaria had just been revised and should be more efficient and streamlined now. A few days later we found out from our agency that what he was referring to was the new family code the government had passed the day before the MacGahan Festival. We also met several native Bulgarians from Cincinnati who are part of an active group of about 100 in our area. We exchanged contact information with them and have since joined their online email group and taken part in some of their events.

All in all, this was a highly informative, interesting and touching day for us.

A Concise History of Bulgaria (Second Edition) by R.J. Crampton, Cambridge University Press, 2005, 269 pages (1 credit): I wouldn’t exactly call this book concise, but it is full of great historical information on the region that is now Bulgaria. The material is presented in an easily accessible way even for those who have no background in European history.

Kozijat Rog - Goat Horn (1 credit): This movie is set in the time of Ottoman rule over Bulgaria. A goat herder’s wife is raped and killed by Turkish men in front of her young daughter and husband. Witnessing this brutality becomes the bitterly defining moment for the path of both of their lives on which the movie centers. There are two versions of this movie, one from 1972 and one from 1994. The earlier movie is more cinematically stunning and artistically beautiful; it was submitted for consideration for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award in 1973. However, the 1994 version has English subtitles. Neither movie, in my opinion, is appropriate for children. Both movies are accessible for free online:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6158942232462202330# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2417750913312392171#.

Placing Agency Required Education

While assembling our dossier, we also tackled the task of fulfilling our required educational credits for our placing agency. These credits meet Hague Treaty Standards and satisfy Hague requirements. As our agency feels that this preparation is of great importance, each of us had to accumulate 35 credits by completing the following tasks:

1) Choose a pediatrician who is familiar with the care of internationally adopted kids – 1.0 credit
2) Locate an Early Childhood Intervention Program or similar local service – 1.0 credit
3) If applicable, arrange appropriate child care – 1.0 credit
4) Complete infant/child CPR course – 1.0 credit
5) Join a local international adoptive family support group – 1.0 credit and/or
6) Join an online international adoptive family support group – 1.0 credit and/or
7) Meet with another family who adopted internationally – 1.0 credit
8) Complete ALP online course Conspicuous Families - 1.5 credits
9) Complete ALP online course Let’s Talk Adoption – 2.0 credits
10) Complete ALP online course The Journey of Attachment - 2.0 credits
11) Complete ALP online course Finding the Missing Pieces: Coping with Grief & Loss – 2.0 credits
12) Complete ALP online course Adopting the Older Child – 2.0 credits
13) Complete ALP online course Medical Issues in International Adoption – 2.5 credits
14) Complete ALP online course Eyes Wide Open – 4.0 credits
15) Read Raising the Adopted Child – 2.0 credits
16) Read Adoption is a Family Affair – 2.0 credits
17) Read I Love You like Crazy Cakes – 1.0 credit
18) Read A Blessing from Above – 1.0 credit
19) Read Borya and the Burps – 1.0 credit
20) Read Through the Stars and Moon and Night Sky – 1.0 credit
21) Complete cultural education (more in my next blog) – 3.0 credits
22) Additional credits based on activities of our own choice – remaining credits

Fortunately, some of these tasks overlapped with the education we had completed for our homestudy agency, so we didn’t start totally from scratch with this big to-do list. We were able to fulfill these requirements by the end of last summer and now feel as prepared as you can get without having had the hands-on, real-life experience.

The Dossier

Once again, for any of you experiencing or experienced in international adoption, this blog will not be of great interest. However, for our friends and family, here’s the next step we had to complete after the homestudy: the dossier. A dossier is defined as a collection of papers containing detailed information about a particular person or subject, in this case, about Craig and me and our adoption. Dossier requirements vary slightly depending upon from which country you adopt, but here’s what we had to collect for ours:

1) Completed application to the Bulgarian Ministry of Justice (three original and signed versions of this same document were needed)
2) Power of attorney from us to our US agency
3) Power of attorney from us to our Bulgarian agency
4) I-797 C letter from USCIS (this means we filed form I-800A with the US government and they approved us for an international adoption from a Hague country)
5) Homestudy
6) Copy of the homestudy agency’s license
7) A recommendation letter from the homestudy agency
8) Medical certificates for each parent signed by a physician in front of a notary (this included a regular exam as well as HIV and tuberculosis tests – Craig enjoyed making the phone call in which he had to schedule HIV tests for his wife and himself)
9) Certified copy of our marriage certificate
10) Certificate of a Hague Accredited Child Placing Agency (our US agency)
11) A signed agreement for our Bulgarian agency
12) A financial form outlining our assets, liabilities, income, etc.
13) Photocopies of our passports
14) A privacy document
15) And a couple of photo pages showing us, our home, and our daily life

All of these documents had to be notarized and apostilled. An apostille is a certification from the Secretary of State's office verifying the authenticity of a document's notarization. In other words, it’s the Secretary of State affirming that we used a real, registered notary. Now in Ohio, between the notarization and the apostille, there’s a required little step called county certification in which your County Clerk of Courts gets to add his/her own stamp to certify that the notary we used is registered in the county he/she practices and that his/her commission has not expired. The only way to circumvent this intermediate step is to use a notary whose commission never expires and whose name is on file with the Secretary of State’s office. Even though we didn’t know this at first and caused ourselves some extra work and expenses, we were lucky to have a friend who is a lawyer and notary who not only notarized everything for us for free (Thanks, Whitney!), but whose notary stamp allowed us to skip the county certification and go straight to the apostille for many of the documents once we had figured out the system.

More Homestudy News

When I started making entries about our homestudy, I did not expect to be posting the blog you are about to read, but now here it is nonetheless.

Shortly after Christmas, we received a letter from our homestudy agency informing us that they would be closing in January 2010. Our social worker is going to work for another agency, opening a regional office here in Southwest Ohio for them. We were invited to transfer with her and, initially, we did want to follow her to her new agency. Therefore, we asked her to send us any paperwork associated with the switch along with a schedule of fees for a homestudy update, six post-placement visits, etc.

While we were waiting for this information, I called two other local agencies just to get a cost comparison. Then I sent a message to the Bulgaria Adopt Forum and was given two recommendations for a third local agency that I also contacted. I felt a connection with this agency’s director right away and also found their prices to be extremely reasonable and very much in line with what we had expected to pay to our original homestudy agency as well as with what the other two agencies had quoted.

Then, a few days ago, I received the paperwork packet from our social worker’s new agency and about fell out of my chair when I saw the three printed pages of fees that would be associated with a transfer. On top of the high homestudy update and post-placement report/visit fees, there were also a hefty transfer fee, a post-placement administration fee, and an annual program fee. The latter is $500, so considering that we need a homestudy update this year and three years of post-placement reports when our kids come home, that alone is $2000.

I sat down at the computer to make a side-by side spreadsheet to compare and add up all the costs between our social worker’s new agency and the other agency that I really liked. The final tally came to over $5500 for the first and just over $2200 for the second, all services rendered being equal. That’s a cost difference of well over $3000 and I knew there was simply no way my husband and I could justify paying that much extra money to remain with a social worker we like.

So, as disappointing as it was, yesterday I requested to have our homestudy case file transferred to a different agency. We won’t need any services from them until later this year, so they will simply hold our file for a while. We are sad to lose our first social worker, but I am sure we will get along just fine with whoever takes her place.

As you may have noticed, I did not mention any specific names in this blog as I am not trying to help or hinder either agency in their pursuit to create forever families. I just recommend that anyone beginning the adoption process carefully research all of the options. Yes, it is important to have a good rapport with your agency/agencies, but international adoption is an expensive adventure, so sometimes numbers do, by necessity, speak louder than words.

Homestudy Required Education

While we were gathering documents and working on various homestudy tasks, we also completed our 12 credit hours of required homestudy training. We chose to fulfill these credits solely through reading because this was the most affordable option and because, due to my background, reading and writing are my preferred methods of absorbing and processing information.

Here’s a list of everything we read for the homestudy:

• Are Those Kids Yours? American Families with Children Adopted from Other Countries by Cheri Register
• “Developmental Recovery and Deficit in Children Adopted from Eastern European Orphanages” by Sharon Judge, PhD, University of Tennessee–Knoxville
• “Top 10 Secrets of Successful Adoption Travel” by Adoptive Families Magazine
• “Adoption Subsidy Guide” by The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services
• “Positive Adoption Language” by Adoptive Families Magazine
• “Talking to Your Three-to-Five-Year-Old About Adoption” by Adoptive Families Magazine
• “Infants and Young Children in Orphanages: One View From Pediatrics and Child Psychiatry” by Deborah A. Frank, MD, Perry E. Klass, MD, Felton Earls MDS, Leon Eisenberg , MD
• “Language Development in Internationally Adopted Children” by Boris Gindis Ph.D.
• “Culture, Heritage, and Stereotypes” by Jerri Ann Jenista; Adoptive Families Magazine
• Introduction to Transracial or Transcultural Adoption by www.adoption.com
• Raising Adopted Children by Lois Ruskai Melina
• Attaching in Adoption: Practical Tools for Today’s Parents by Deborah D. Gray
• “Helping Traumatized Children: A Brief Overview for Caregivers” by Bruce D. Perry
• “Bonding and Attachment in Maltreated Children: Consequences of Emotional Neglect in Childhood” by B. D. Perry
• Openness in Adoption: Factsheet for Families (http://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/f_openadopt.cfm)
• “Talking to Your Six to-Eight-Year-Old About Adoption” by Adoptive Families Magazine
• Emotional Issues of Adoption
www.internationaladoptionhelp.com/international_adoption/international_adoption_emotional_issues
• Cultures of Transnational Adoption edited by Toby Alice Volkman
• The Family Book by Todd Parr