With our home study complete and our profile almost done, our home study social worker from the private agency (we'll call her Private Worker- PW) suggested that we follow up on a sibling group that we saw on the on-line adoption bulletin (a website with profiles of "waiting kids"). With an understanding that the on-line bulletin is often very out of date, we tried to email our adoption social worker (we'll call her Ministry Worker- MW- because she works for the government ministry*). Now I will share with you what it is like communicating with an over-worked, under-funded system.
May 12- Send an email to MW. Email gets bounced back (twice) as the email address I was given for this worker is wrong. Try calling the number I was given to reach her. She now works "upstairs". Am given a new number. By some fluke I actually get through. I explain that we wanted to know if certain sibling group was still available and that the email address I had wasn't working. She says that the wrong email was given out to everyone, gives me current address and tells me to email then hangs up. I resend the email.
May 13- Never received confirmation that new email address worked. I send another email asking for confirmation of receipt.
May 15- Receive an email saying, "Are you First Nations?". I email back saying that we are not but explaining that I've completed the course required to potentially adopt First Nations children. We receive a reply saying that she will ask about these children.
May 22- I email to ask if there is any more information.
June 4- Still no reply. I write this because I don't know whether to keep badgering this woman or not and I feel like venting about the whole communication issue.
For contrast, when I email PW I usually get a detailed reply within an hour (sometimes within minutes). If she can't answer a question right away, she emails and tells me that she's looking into it. Sometimes she even calls me on the phone to clarify!
Can we get some money put into the Ministry of Children and Families please? I know that it is important to pay for fancy government ads about how awesome natural gas is and how I should be training to work in the trades but maybe we could also hire an extra social worker or two and get some permanency plans in place for a few kids.
*To my lovely, American readers- a government ministry has nothing to do with religion. It's just our fancy Canadian (British) term for a government department. I just wanted to clear that up for ya'll :)
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