Our Dossier is Complete

All the papers that had to be apostilled

The last couple of papers we were waiting to come in finally made it here yesterday.  We added them to our big stack of papers, and our dossier was complete.  I immediately took them to the Post Office.  I was so excited, and all I wanted to do was dance.  I must say the Post Office people were not as excited as they should have been when I announced our dossier was finished.  If my life was a musical, the PO scene would have been fantastic.  Well, Brody and I danced and took pictures of us mailing it anyways.  When it's time to celebrate we just don't care who is around and watching us.

This means we should be on the waiting list very soon!!!!

Ok, so I know somebody is reading this going what's a dossier.  So I will do my best to explain it.  A dossier (pronounced "doss-e-aye") is the group of documents that you have to put together in order to begin an international adoption.  It's a lot of documents!

What Goes Into a Dossier?

While dossier requirements are different for each country, here is what India requires:

• Financial information- written letters from the financial institutions with which you do business stating your account balances
• Adoption Bond- petition for guardianship and post placement agreement.
• Original certified copies of birth and marriage certificates
• Particulars of Property- list of major items the family owns and their current value
• Employment verification - must be on company letterhead and have a recent date.  Must state position and salary.
• Homestudy – notarized copy of home study performed for adoption.
• Power of Attorney- gives the head of the orphanage in India permission to operate on our behalf before we arrive.  
• Results of criminal background check
• Copy of the photo pages of your passport
• 3 Letters of reference
• Name affidavit- states every possible combination of your name.
• There are also three other documents that our adoption agency will include in our dossier.

You can understand our excitement now that you know how much work goes into the dossier.  Ryan has been amazing at this!  We are just pumped about the completion of the dossier.  Not only do these documents have to be notarized but they also have to be apostilled too.  Depending on what state you are sending it to depends on the price.  It's $5-$15 per document.  And some of the documents above required multiple originals.  Documents must be sent to the Secretary of State in the state where they were certified of notarized (We had documents from 4 different states).

What exactly does ‘Apostille’ mean?

When you present a legal document in a foreign country, it is often very difficult to determine whether the document is genuine and legal.  In 1961, the process for legalizing documents for use abroad was abolished and replaced by a simple certificate of authenticity, called an ‘Apostille’, under the Hague Convention.  An apostille is a certificate that is attached to an official legal document to verify that the signatory on your document is genuine and person who signed your document is a recognized and authorized person of the organization that issued the document.  Each apostille is dated, given a unique reference number and registered. 

I just want to encourage those who are in this process, or thinking about doing it that YOU CAN DO THIS!  I know there will be moments of this process that you will want to pull your hair out, but just keep going and it will get done.  It will be so worth it when you are finally holding your child! 

Remember Psalm 82:3 "Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy."