The Matching Room

Each month as we close in on Referral week, thousands of families start to stalk Rumor Queen's website for news of "Matching" happening and "Referrals" being mailed. If you are outside the Chinese Adoption community, those words might not hold a lot of meaning. But for those of us waiting 30...31...32..33 months for our children, we could recite the bulk of the process in our sleep...

When a dossier is sent to China it is logged into their system, and it is logged in on a certain date. Your date record is called your LOG IN DATE, or LID. This is the order in which they match families. Between your dossier being logged in and the matching room, Dossiers basically just gather dust from what I understand. With the wait stretching past 3 years, that can be a whole lot of dust!

Once the CCAA is finally up to your place in line (Held by your LID), your Dossier is either moved into the Matching room, or moved to the desks of the people responsible for each agency in the matching room.
Each color coded stack represents dossiers from a different agency. Imagine, these are just dossiers in the matching room!

Once a family's dossier is in the matching room, that is where the magic begins! They can use any sort of information in your file or physical characteristics to match families with children. Sometimes it's a birthdate and an anniversary, or birthdates, or a similar look in the eyes. Whatever criteria they use to match, Every single parent I've ever met has told me that the child they were matched with was the perfect child for their family.

After you have been "MATCHED" with a child, the referrals are sent to waiting families around the world. The referral tells you the name of your child, how old they are, what province they are in, the circumstances of their arrival at the orphanage, a daily schedule of your child's eating and sleeping habits, some brief information about your child's personality, and most important, Photos!!!

It sends chills through me to think that my file could be in the matching room right now, waiting to be matched with my daughter in just one short month.