The Kaz Process

I did talk with my coordinator Friday and got an update on the process. While I am close to getting my LOI, it will still be a while and most likely will not be this month. I did find out that the time from LOI to travel is very short for Shymkent and I may not have much notice so that will be an exciting time.

I thought this might be a good time to review how the process will proceed from here. I am currently waiting for my LOI or letter of invitation. You cannot travel to Kaz or get a visa to Kaz without a invitation. It also means that there is a child or children in the baby house that matches the request in your homestudy for age, gender etc. When you are sent the LOI, the Kaz embassy is also sent a registration number. Once they have that and you have the letter, you can apply for your visa. This involves sending your passport, some forms, and of course money to the Kaz embassy. They put a special stamp in your passport which allows you to enter the country. Some region take a while to get this number to the embassy, but I guess Shymkent is one of the fast ones so I will be expected to overnight the visa application to the embassy and have them overnight it back the next day. I will also have to find plane tickets to Almaty on very short notice. It does not sound like I will have much time to do these things so I will need to have everything ready to go. So it will be a matter of more waiting and then go and go fast.

As a note to my blog friends, most people invited to this blog are family or friends not from the adoption world. I have invited a small number of families that I have met who are also adopting from kaz and have graciously shared their blogs with me. I would just like to please ask all my blog friends to use discretion and not discuss anything they read on this blog with their coordinators or post anything on their blogs. I trust each and every one of you and I know no one would do anything that they felt would harm my adoption(and no one has), but I have found out that Shymkent is a region very sensitive to this. I know of another family I met from their blog that got hurt by something that they had on their blog that was passed on to one of their blog reader's coordinators. It ended up causing this family a lot of grief and did put their adoption in jeopardy. What the family had posted wasn't anything bad, it was just information on how their first day meeting went. I don't think the other family meant to hurt them, but the information got back to kaz and caused them a lot of problems. For those not involved in a Kaz adoption, this probably seems very strange, but this is their process and we must follow their rules.