Sherry...adopting internationally from South America

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My name is Sherry and I am the mother of three children. My oldest son (now 8) was adopted at 5 months from Paraguay. My husband and I traveled to Paraguay in the spring of 1993. He stayed for two weeks and I stayed an additional two weeks to complete our adoption in Paraguay. We used a local adoption agency to do our homestudy and a facilatator in Minn. acted as a liason between us and an attorney in Paraguay.

My middle son was adopted at 2.5 months (he's now 6) from Bogota, Colombia. My husband stayed with me in Bogota for three weeks and my older son and my new baby stayed an additional 5 weeks for a total of two months in Bogota. We used an adoption agency who had a program at a private orphanage to adopt my second son.

My youngest daughter (2) was adopted at 4 months from Medellin, Colombia. We traveled as a family to meet her when she was 2 months old and then I returned with my niece to bring her home. I spent a total of two weeks in Medellin. For our third adoption, we used the same agency we had used to adopt our son from Bogota, but we used a private attorney to act as a liason between us and the orphanage in Medellin.

The cost of international adoption greatly depends on what country you are adopting from and where you live. In our state, adopting internationally is about the same as adopting through a private domestic agency. The cost will usually be between $15,000-$30,000. When you adopt internationally, there are mountains of paperwork that must be gathered and completed. Some agencies will help you with this, but you are pretty much on your own for most of it. In all three of our adoptions, we were responsible for getting our list of papers in order.

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