Where do we go from here?

I am speechless right now so I am going to copy the email we received from Commonwealth:

"With a deep sadness and concern, we are writing to tell you that Commonwealth Adoptions International Inc. has made a very difficult decision to cease providing adoption services. The Board of Directors met Thursday, July 31st to review the status of the company and all options. The Board concluded that it was necessary to seize operation and begin to transition families to other adoption providers. That said, please know that we will do everything possible to transition your adoption into another adoption agency. We have informed our licensing authorities and believe that we will have guidance, support and cooperation from them. We are still a licensed agency, have not closed our doors and will do our very best to assist all families in their process to the best of our ability."

"In order to insure uninterrupted adoptions we are talking with several other tax-exempt adoption agencies so they may take over certain programs and see these adoptions to completions. We will communicate with each family individually regarding your specific adoption, including the agency we are recommending to work with."

"Difficult economic times and the failure of obtaining Hague certification (which we very strongly believe was unjustified) was devastating to CAII and its programs. This denial immediately affected almost one third of our families and several programs. Established programs have longer waiting times from matching to placement or travel, which is prohibitive to most adoptive parents and costly. Other programs have simply closed down. A few promising new programs are small and cannot yet reliably serve the number of families willing to risk starting over again, as our contract spelled out, we have no control over the foreign agencies and how they handle their adoption programs. International adoptions in general have recently been subject to dramatic changes."

"Our situation is not unique. In the past few months we became aware of other agencies that had closed their doors and there are many, if not all, experiencing difficulties to some degree where they have to lay off staff and generally downsize their operations. Please know that we will do all we can to stand by you and work with you so not to disrupt your adoption process or at least minimize the disruption."

"This is very disappointing to us since we felt that we successfully addressed the economic situation. However, the denial of Hague certification a month ago and failure for us to complete an affiliation with another tax-exempt organizations that we have been in discussion with for some time brought us to a place where we have to begin to transition families to other agencies."

"Please be gentle with us. Know that we will do whatever we can to make this process as painless as possible for you. There is going to be a subsequent letter sent to you regarding your specific program arrangement."

At this point we don't see any reason to continue with an international adoption. We are so confused right now. We were also informed: "With the arrangement we are working out you will not be losing any of your monies - you will pick up where you left off with us. Please be patient - we will be sending information out to you about this in the next few days." I don't know...right now our thoughts are that if Commonwealth is not able to come through for us on an international adoption, what makes us think another agency can?

Right now we are waiting to see what our options are...we'll keep you posted.