Welcome Dave Basener, Director of China Adoptions

Dave, Emma & Jan Basener

We'd like to warmly welcome Dave Basener to the AsianBridge staff. While Dave has been a committed volunteer with our foundation, he has officially agreed to sign on as our Director of China Adoptions. I'll let Dave introduce himself...........

My name is Dave Basener. My wife, Jan, and I married in 1988 and our daughter, Emma, was born into our family in 2003, in China.We brought her home in January of 2005. Our daughter is now a 'big girl' of 5 and has always been a very happy child. She loves princesses, being one herself. She is a dancer and a singer. She plans to be a ballerina, a firefighter and a waiter in addition to continuing her career as a princess. I cannot imagine loving a child more than I love her. Adoption was not our first choice when we decided to have children, but when it became clear that we were going to have difficulty conceiving, we began to consider it. We started tentatively by attending some of the informational sessions that adoption agencies have, not leaving our names at first. We considered domestic adoption, but didn't feel comfortable with the process. When we looked into international adoption China was first on our list because of its prominence. However, we also looked into European countries because, as European-Americans, we figured we would not stand out as much. But, we were worried about the social and child-health circumstances surrounding adoption in the European countries open to us. Eventually we decided on China and an on agency, World Child. However, the ride was just beginning. Having started preparing our paperwork for China, the wait-times suddenly climbed into the 24 month range. So, since World Child had other country programs, we switched to Cambodia and continued preparing. The US INS shutdown Cambodian adoptions. So we switched our paperwork to Guatemala. The Guatemalan Supreme Court shut down international adoptions. By this time, the waiting time for China had dropped back down to about 1 year, so we switched back to China, just in time to adopt the little girl who was born to us. Today Emma is a healthy, happy little girl. We are fortunate to live in an area with a lot of adoptive families and she has many friends who were adopted. As for standing out as an obvious adoptive family ourselves, we now see it as a very positive aspect. We would not have met the many other adoptive families that we now know, nor been able to give advice and encouragement to the people who approach us everywhere to tell us that they are considering, or in the process of, adopting from Asia.

We are happy to talk about our adoption experiences. If you have any questions or would just like a bit of encouragement, please call or email: 630-690-1743 or basener@asianbridgestaff.org