MATCHING ROOM

This is the infamous "Matching Room" at the CCAA. I wanted to tell you all a little bit about what is happening right now in China with my Dossier. Some of the text that will follow was found on RQ.

MATCHING In this final stage - families who have passed review are sent to the Matching Room. In this room are all the dossiers of children whose information has been sent by their SWIs to find them a forever family. The workers in this room have the very important task of matching the right family to each child. No one knows exactly how families are chosen for each child - but many people think that the CCAA workers are pretty amazing in how good a job they do.

How the Matching Room works...

First, they review the baby dossiers and make sure there are no issues with them. We are told that they then count up all of the baby dossiers that are eligible for matching that month and then look to see how far this stack will go in the parent dossiers without sending out a partial day, and they pull all of those parent files. That is the likely cut-off date. Sometimes something happens and they don't get this far. Sometimes something happens and they get farther.

Next they match orphanages up with agencies. This orphanage has six babies, this agency has six families. These two orphanages are in the same province and have a total of 12 babies, this agency has 12 families. When they are through with this is when (I believe) some agencies start to get information about the cut-off date. Or at least it is when they used to start getting information.

And then they start matching individual babies to individual families. At some point during this part of the process most agencies used to hear from their person in the matching room to let them know how many referrals they will be receiving and from what province(s). Some agencies shared this information with their clients. Some chose not to. Recently it is believed that many agencies are still getting this information but they are being given orders by the CCAA to not share this information with the families.

Just as in the review room, each matcher is assigned certain agencies and is responsible for communicating with their agencies. Some matchers tell their agency the cut-off date, some matchers tell their agency “you have X number of referrals arriving”, some matchers give their agency a list of that agency’s families that will be receiving a referral. And some matchers don’t say anything at all to their agencies.

The next question that comes up is generally how the matchers match families and babies. I’ve heard from several people who have had the opportunity to speak with someone who works in the matching room. The various conversations seem to all agree that they first look for something that stands out: a matching birthday, a baby who looks a lot like a parent, or a baby who likes music and a parent who teaches music. Several matching people have stated they match by bone structure of the baby’s face and the parent’s faces (this is why they need our passport photos, so they can compare our mug shot with the baby’s mug shot). Some have stated that they used Chinese astrology, also. Once they’ve matched the obvious matches they then start to look at things like age of child requested. The age requested is not a priority for them, they feel they are matching families and not filling orders.

And there you have it. Giorgia's little mug could be on one of these computers right next to my info waiting to be matched.

Oh, and as pointed out, sometimes there are similarities in the parents passport photo and the "mugshot: of my child.. So, for fun, here is my Passport photo. We'll have to compare on that fateful day!