The best thing that your friend can do is to obtain a list of agencies working in China and start dialing and smiling, since singles slots come and go quickly.
Your friend can find a list of agencies working in China on the website of the Joint Council on International Children's Services (JCICS). It's not 100% complete, but it's probably at least 85% complete and includes some of the best agencies in the country.
To find the list, your friend should go to
www.jcics.org. Tell her to click on "Country Information." Then tell her NOT to click on "China". Clicking there will take her to State Department comments on the adoption process. Tell her to scroll down the page to the bottom, and click on "Country Programs." THERE she can click on China for a list of agencies working there.
To get contact information for those agencies, including phone number, email address, etc., she should go to the top of that page and click on "Membership Directory." Have her skip over the list by states, and go to the alphabetical list.
Your friend should contact each agency to see if it has any singles' slots. She might get lucky.
If an agency doesn't have one, she should ask if it has a waiting list or any other approaches to filling singles' slots, if and when they arise. If it has a waiting list, and there is no cost or low cost to get on it, she should put her name on the list, even if the agency says it's for 2008. Most of the lists move far more quickly than the agencies estimate.
She should take notes on what each agency says, as well as on how it responds to her.
If she does not get a call about an opening within the first one to two months, she should be prepared to contact most of the agencies again. (She can decide not to contact certain agencies that behaved unpleasantly the first time; she can also decide to skip agencies about which she heard negative information.) She can check whether the waiting lists are moving faster than expected, and see if there have been any unexpected openings.
She should keep doing this about every six weeks. My guess is that, if she is diligent, she will find a slot within six months.
For one thing, many people get onto multiple lists. Once they get a slot, they free up wait list positions with several agencies. So the lists often are exhausted early.
For another, agencies admire people who are persistent and seem truly motivated to work with them and adopt from China. There may well be a program coordinator who, faced with a new singles slot, isn't going to want to call all the names on the waiting list; it may, instead, decide to make a single phone call to your friend, because of her obvious sincerity.
Do be aware that agencies are likely to give preference to singles who are "paper ready" -- that is, who have already gotten an approved homestudy and begun the USCIS process. So while it is a risky strategy, your friend COULD decide to go ahead and start her homestudy and I-600A. It's risky because documents have expiration dates, and if she doesn't get a space quickly, she could wind up having to take time and pay money to update these items. However, many people find it a risk worth taking.
I hope this helps.
Sharon