Referral Chain

The 1st picture is of dossiers in China (CCAA) in line to be matched with babies. I copied this picture from one of the blogs I read.

The 2nd picture is of a the "referral chain" I made today and laid on our kitchen fireplace mantel. This chain has 77 links for the number of days of dossiers to be processed by the CCAA before they get to our dossier LID, which is May 18, 2006. As of last week the CCAA has matched through March 2, 2006. The last referral match was unbelievably small (only 2 days) ... possibly because of Chinese New Year which started today.

Anyhow... the yellow links are for the balance of March referrals, blue links are for the 30 days in April and pink links are May 1 - 18. You really can't tell from this picture but I made the blue links slightly larger and the pink ones distinctively larger.

This is the Rumor Queens (http://www.chinaadopttalk.com/) explanation of the Matching Room.

How the Matching Room Works.

First, they review the baby dossiers and make sure there are no issues with them. We are told that they then count up all of the baby dossiers that are eligible for matching that month and then look to see how far this stack will go in the parent dossiers without sending out a partial day, and they pull all of those parent files. That is the likely cut-off date. Sometimes something happens and they don't get this far. Sometimes something happens and they get farther.

Next they match orphanages up with agencies. This orphanage has six babies, this agency has six families. These two orphanages are in the same province and have a total of 12 babies, this agency has 12 families. When they are through with this is when (I believe) some agencies start to get information about the cut-off date. Or at least it is when they used to start getting information.

And then they start matching individual babies to individual families. At some point during this part of the process most agencies used to hear from their person in the matching room to let them know how many referrals they will be receiving and from what province(s). Some agencies shared this information with their clients. Some chose not to. Recently I've gotten the feeling that many agencies are still getting this infromation but they are being given orders by the CCAA to not share this information with the families.

Just as in the review room, each matchers is assigned certain agencies and is responsible for communicating with theri agencies. Some matchers tell their agency the cut-off date, some matchers tell their agency " you have X number of referrals arriving", some matchers give their agency a list of that agency's families that will be receiving a referral. And some matchers don't say anything at all to their agencies.

The next question that comes up is generally how the matchers match families and babies. I've heard from several people who have had the opportunity to speak with someone who works in the matching room. The various conversations seem to all agree that they first look for something that stands out: a matching birthday, a baby who looks a lot like a parent, or a baby who likes music and a parent who teaches music. Several matching people have stated they match by bone structure of the baby's face and the parent's faces (this is why they need our passport photos, so they can compare our mug shot with the baby's mug shot). Some have stated that they used Chinese astrology, also. Once they've matched the obvious matches they then start to look at things like age of child requested. The age requested is not a priority for them, they are matching families and not filling orders. And I have to say that they've done a wonderful job matching us and our Big Girl, and now I trust they will do an excellent job matching us with her little sister.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 7th, 2006.