The early stages of your adoption journey are going to be filled with lots of paperwork--for your agency, for a social worker, for the U.S. government, for the Russian government. It's all leading up to the first big milestone: Getting your referral.

The referral is, in basic terms, adoption matchmaking: An agency looks at all the information about prospective parents and all the information about adoptable children, and puts two and two together. Some agencies start with the parents--they look at the parents and see which child meets their desires. Some agencies start with the child, and look among their applicants for the parents for that child's needs.

Back in 1999, when I was working on my first adoption, a referral was a big, fat packet of information. I got pictures, medical history, photos and a video. Now, you may get nothing beyond a curt sentence: There's an 18-month-old boy in Omsk. That's called a "blind referral".

The change stems from a Russian law about keeping information on orphanage children confidential. The law, as it has been explained to me, is short on specifics, and, as a result, some officials in some regions have decided that sending out the big referral packages of the past violate the law. They won't send the information to you or your agency--you have to travel to Russia to get it. And once you get there, you may have very little time to evaluate the referral before you must accept or reject it.

Last week, one of the forum members reached out to the community after traveling to the Russian Far East on a blind referral. What she found there was troubling. But it was Saturday evening, she couldn't reach an adoption medicine doctor and she needed to decide by Monday morning. She turned to the forum, and got five pages of advice. She declined that referral, but shortly thereafter reported happily that she had been given another that seemed like the right match. We'll keep our fingers crossed that she gets a court date soon.

Not every region believes in blind referrals, though. Some will give information on a child to an agency if the prospective parents have given it power of attorney. It might not be much though: Some regions confine themselves to the information that is officially in the child’s file, like the Ministry of Education database photograph and a brief medical history. Some might give a bit more, but you are highly unlikely to get a video these days. Families that get this kind of referral can review it at home, submit it to their pediatrician or adoption doctor, and they can ask more questions of Ministry officials before they decide to make their first trip to meet the child and accept the referral. They can also decline it without ever leaving the United States.

So when you are deciding on which agency to work with, one of the questions to ask is what kind of referrals they will give you. Some may work with only "blind" regions; some may work with a mix. Evaluate the agency's answer and decide which one is right for you.