B.C. family waiting for their daughter

On Aug. 3, 2006 Lena Sin of The Province (Vancouver BC), in the article "B.C. family waiting for their daughter", told the story of the Gardiner family of British Columbia, who adopted an abandoned girl from an orphanage in Monrovia but Canadian officials refused to let her into Canada. The Canadian High Commission in Ghana (the nearest country to Liberia in which a visa can be issued) refused to issue the girl a visa because officials see "red flags" and the possibility of child-trafficking. Lorne Welwood of Hope Adoption Services in Abbotsford, B.C., said that since November he's tried to help half a dozen families adopt from Liberia, and all have had problems getting visas. "I've sent e-mails (to the high commission) about another case and they say, `don't call us, we'll call you, we don't know when we'll process it,"' he said. Author Lena Sin wrote, "The Canadian High Commission in Accra, Ghana, has one of the slowest visa-processing times of all the Canadian posts in Africa and the Middle East. It takes an average of 24 months to process 80 per cent of cases, compared with 12 months in Damascus, Syria, or 10 months in Tel Aviv, Israel."