[marina72]

Hi!

I´m not a computer expert so I hope you could give me some advice. I was wondering about this:
When we go to Russia and have the information about the child (medicals) and dvd material etc. how did you send it to your IA doctor. By e-mail or what? Did you send it from Russia?
I think the time we have, before we deside will we accept the child or not, is a few days, so how did You managed to do all this???

[cathvash]

I am also not very techno-saavy, and did things a bit differently, by waiting until AFTER Trip 1 to have the pictures, video, and in-depth medical reports from the baby home evaluated. I visited the child, took video while she interacted with us and did some developmental tasks like walking, talking, eating, playing etc. I had a good feeling about the child and petitioned to adopt her (the adoption is not legal and final until trip 2).

After returning home, I took the video and reports to the IA service. A great benefit of this was that I could relax a little more during the trip to focus on the child and my feelings and perceptions.They were also able to get MUCH more information from the video than they would have been able to do from still photos or short clips. -And they did not have the time pressure of having to be available 24/7 and turn around a report immediately. I received a complete report, and met with the docs face to face to discuss the child.

The potential downside of doing this is that there is a chance they could see something very concerning, and you would then have to refuse the referral and wait for a new referral and make a second Trip 1... You can do this (wait for the consult) if you have a pretty good gut feeling and are fairly certain the child is meant for you. The consult then is more of a validation that you have made a good decision. It eases your fears and serves as a safety net before you finalize the adoption.

[Ktates]

I didn't actually use an IA doc but we had originally planned to - Most of them are very familiar with the timeline and get the info back to you quickly - usually you give them a headsup right before you travel so they can look for your email. Don't forget the time difference works in your favor too so you can usually get info the next day.

But you definitely want to have some sort of email access and perhaps way to send pictures...we had no problem with that in our hotel but some people bring laptops etc...

[Jim_in_PA]

Email is easily accessable for transporting text based information and still photos. Video is nearly impossible to send electronically, even with high-speed access due to the sheer size of the files.

[Amysue1112]

We took our laptop (bought one for the trip) and it was just GREAT! We lost a referral in country so were sooo happy we had it to send info on our new referral (now our dear Hannah) to the IA doc. We bought one that we could use our digital camera chip....the camera can also take short video so we took like 10 second videos with it and were able to send all of it to our IA doc. And btw, our region was in the middle of nowhere, so if you can get internet (and wireless too) I suspect you can get it most anywhere. HOPEFULLY when you accept a referral it will be at home...but if you have what happened to us, it would have been a NIGHTMARE trying to get info to our doc from our region as they had no internet cafes or anything like that.
If you are not computer savy, practice before you go, shrinking pics, downloading short videos etc etc. Remember you will need a phone card for minutes for internet in Russia (get them in Russia...and also ours were region specific so the one we used in region did not work in Moscow). Moscow, however, is much easier as most of the hotels have internet. And our apt we stayed in had a computer AND free internet, AND free calls the the US btw...LOVED IT!

[marina72]

Thank you all! I think I´m going to do the same as amysue, take clips with digicamera and send them by e-mail to IA doc. I hope I am able to do that, it doesn´t sound that hard. So I must practise hard! Thanks again!!!!!!
Marina