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At the Baker University Forum held Tuesday, Assistant Professor of Mass Media Joe Watson shared his family story with the presentation of “Meeting Sydney: A Father’s Journey Through International Adoption.”

Watson walked the audience through a power point presentation about his experience with the adoption process him and his wife began in 2003 and their reasons for adopting now 2-year-old daughter, Sydney, from China in 2005.

The couple were living in suburban Cleveland, and Watson was a second-year doctoral student concluding his dissertation at Kent State University when they started the adoption process.

“Like many other couples, we were in our late 30s; we had tried to have children and had not had any luck, and so we started to discuss the possibility of adoption,” Watson said. “We went ahead and went to an informational seminar, which is the first required step from the agency we used.”

Watson said he and his wife went to the seminar with the general idea they would adopt an international child, but they left knowing their child would be a girl from China for two reasons.

“First of all, the nation has a one-child law, so families who have more than one child face significant fines, and secondly, the culture just values boys more than girls, and so the vast majority of children available from China are female,” he said.

Watson said their first step in the paperwork process was filling out a dossier, or an application for adoption. He said it required duplicates of notarized and certified documents.

“That was fine, but some of the things were very frustrating,” he said.

“The fire inspection report – I always joke with my wife when I see a 16-year-old pushing a stroller, I’ll wonder if she passed her fire inspection – we failed the first time,” he said. “We had an all electric home, and … even though there was no source of carbon monoxide in our house, (we failed because) we didn’t have a carbon monoxide detector.”

Once all the requirements for the adoption were met, the paperwork was ready to be processed. The Watsons’ dossier was logged into China in March 2005.

“Once you are logged in you are officially in the cue, and you’re just waiting for a referral,” he said

They received their referral Oct. 4, 2005, and left for Beijing, China, about one month later.. Watson began his position at Baker in spring 2006 rather than fall 2005 so he could travel to China with his wife to meet their 7-month-old daughter together.

After two days sightseeing and getting over jetlag in Beijing, Watson and his wife flew to Guan Gzhou to complete their paperwork at the consulate. Watson said the outcome was worth the wait the day they held their daughter in their arms.

“They started bringing in the babies, and finally we saw Sydney for the first time,” he said. “Suddenly it was real, she was there, and we finally have her after all this planning and waiting.”

On their last day in China, he, his wife and about 250 other adopting families took an oath on behalf of their children, making them citizens of the United States.

“Sydney traveled back on a Chinese passport that made her a citizen as soon as we touched down in the (United States),” he said. “We finally had Sydney home in her own crib, and our dream was complete.”

Alumna Nikki De Simone, a social worker with Children’s Hope International, an international adoption agency, added to Watson’s presentation and said the wait has increased over the last three years for families wanting to adopt from China.

“It’s not that there’s less families interested, it’s that there’s less completed adoptions because there are 25,000 dossiers (on file) for families wanting to adopt that there is such a back log now,” she said. “Whereas when Joe and some other families went through the process, it was about six to eight months, but now it’s up to 18 months.”

Susan w, director of the Artist & Lecture Series, said the forum was touching.

“The humanity involved here and the generosity of spirit is just wonderful.”

Facts about U.S. adoptions from ChinaAdoptions from China account for one-third of all international adoptions to the U.S.In 2005, 7,906 children were adopted.In 2006, 6,493 children were adopted. In 2006, 95 percent of adopted children were female; 35 percent were younger than 1 year old.–U.S. State Department