We are adopting through the government agency (ICBF) in Colombia, as it is the lowest cost (no huge donation required like at the private orphanages, although our agency does require a $300 humanitarian donation, it's not $10,000 like some of the private orphanages want!) The age thing works different depending on if you go through ICBF or a private orphanage. ICBF says 25-35 for a child age 0-3. Supposedly this works out to mean 25-28 for an infant, 29-32 for age 1-2 and 33-35 for age 3. However I have seen MANY exceptions to this rule, I think they just try to find the best fit they can for the family. I have heard of private orphanages allowing infant adoptions for people in their 40's.
The process itself hasn't been so bad. The paperwork sounded very overwhelming at first, but once we learned how to do it it really was a breeze. The wait on the otherhand.. well, ours has been kind of unique. Based on other people's experiences, we should be home with our son by now! It seems that through ICBF most people are waiting about 10-11 months for referral and are home with baby by 1 year. Private orphanages are taking MUCH longer for some reason, and many even have a waiting list to get on the waiting list. Somehow our paperwork got caught up in some kind of snafu. The Bogota regional office had "a whole bunch" of babies, so they requested "a whole bunch" of paperwork from the main office. Appparently a whole bunch means different things to different people (imagine that!) and the main office sent over too many dossiers. Ours was one of those, so now we are stuck in an infinite wait for the Bogota office to get more babies! Now had they just requested the number of dossiers they actually NEEDED, our dossier could have been sent to a different region and we could have been home with our son by now. Apparently though, once they have it, it takes an act of God to get them to let go of it. (Yes, I'm starting to get bitter.) Our agency told us that "after a certain length of time" they would be required to return it to the main office to be sent somewhere else. No one knows what that length of time is though. So here we sit, 11 weeks after the "pre-call" to tell us our paperwork had been sent out. Back then they said to expect to be IN Colombia in 5-6 weeks.
So I guess our story isn't the best to go by, I've seen a lot of people come and go through the process with no problems at all. We're just not among those people.
You can check out our agency's Colombia program at:
http://childrenshopeint.org/Colombia.htm
The agency has been wonderful, I don't fault them at all in this. Julie, to coordinator is a GODSEND!
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Brandy(33) DH Dan(33)
DS Samuel Sebastian(6) - Adopted from Colombia
DD Isabelle Caiyi(5) - Adopted from China
RNY Gastric Bypass surgery 1/30/2009
Highest/Surgery/Current/Goal:
306/301/199/165
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Agency in Illinois??? 
