Agencies

Some of you may know this:

In order to adopt from Russia, a person must work through an accredited agency. Becoming accredited has become somewhat of a big deal this past year. Right now, there are only 14 agencies that are officially accredited by the Russian government. What makes that even more of a big deal is that an agency's accreditation only lasts 1 year. With each passing day, more and more agency's accreditations are running out and Russia is not reaccrediting agencies. In fact, the last agency to become accredited was on April 12. Do the math, in 5 months, there won't be any agencies left to adopt from if Russia doesn't get there act together.

Here's the good news. The reason Russia has been dragging there feet is that they were passing a law that extends agencys' accreditation to 5 years. It only makes sense that they wanted to get this law fixed first before moving on to re-accrediting agencies. The law was changed about 2 months ago, so I believe that any day now we'll see more agencies get re-accredited. Of course, keep in mind that Russia is heading into their "holiday season". As near as I can tell, this "holiday" runs most of December and January. Their holidays are slightly different than ours. Apparently, the government all but shuts down entirely during this time. Must be rough....

(For the record, our agency is accredited through April 11). We're hoping everything gets straightened out before April, so that we won't miss a beat.