What do you need to adopt a child ?

That is a pretty good question...

Once you leave the obvious answer (and truth) for what is, off course one needs love, and move on to look at it in a broader way there are a couple of things.
Once again this is very much my opinion!, so do feel absolutely free to react with other opinions, or mention things I might forget!
So, what is it you need as adopting parents...
Patience, Faith and Means...
Patience is a virtue... adoption is a long an slow process during which you will encounter several official participants.
Because of different reasons, ignorance, sloppy attitudes, and circumstances things will go differently and even slower than expected.Only by giving and receiving the right information and by keeping the channels of communication open, you will get through the difficult phases.
That is between, you and the official participants, between you and your adoption agency and off course, last but not least in your realtionship.
Faith, not necessarily as in a religion (although personally I do think this helps a lot) but mainly in yourself as a person, a parent and eachother as a partner in your relationsgip as well as in other people you encounter during the whole process. You will have to believe that everybody is reacting and working in your (and espescially the childs) best interest.That does not mean that you can/may not be critical of procedures and agreements, but always remember that a lot of (care) professionals have got an awfull lot of work, and hardly ever enough appreciation for what they are doing, so back to the first point have patience!
Have faith in the people you encounter, that they are doing the best they can given their cicumstances.
Also have faith that you are going to be parents and that it will happen!

To be clear, Adoption starts (generally speaking) nearly allways with a wish to have a child, to love, to bring up, to teach and to let go when the time is there.
Now with our second procedure we know a lot more about adoption as a whole, and circumstances, points of vieuw in the 'adoption triangle' etcetera.
More about my thoughts about this later.

What else do you need to adopt a child, (or even children) Means, which could be replaced with money, but it is more.
One has to realise that everything takes time (patience) believe that it will happen (faith) and make it possible yourselves bij saving up for the actual adoption procedure costs and everything before and after the adoption.
( And no I'm not goint to give a breakdown of the costs here, if you really want to know, i'm certain you can find out or ask me directly)
It means to you have to make choices, as you can only spend your money once!
Do we know exactly where the money will go too ? That is (and seems more today than ever) a question that is asked a lot of times. No, not exactly up to every hundred euro's/dollars/pounds, bir or shilling. But generally speaking we do get an overview of what the costs are and what is spend from our agency in broad amounts so we know where the lump sum "flows" to.
There are an awfull lot of people involved with an adoption, and each organisation, or part of government they work for get a 'cut', which is in itself not an enormous problem.People work, spend time on your case and need to get paid for that time & effort spend.
But what about corruption ? That is something I do not honestly know much about and do not think about a lot. We trust the agency, Wereldkinderen, we deal with and expect that they do their best to handle things fair, for us, the child and the country where it comes from.
Closer to home I do occasionally wonder WHY every certificate from the (Dutch) government has to cost so much money ( € 30.00 is normal for a piece of paper) , why nothing can go correct in 1 try and why there are differences between councils in price and so on.
This is really one of the things that costs a lot with the start of the procedure, the collecting of documents...
Visit in person, follow up by email, ask for a reply, phone up, send in again...
So, yes an adoption does cost a small car, but a lot of that is time, your own time, so there for means.
Eventually with the right amounts of patience, means and faith in a positive outcome you will be rewarded by the unconditional love of your adopted child!

That will be all for now, more later!