North Macedonia is still considered a pilot program for Lifeline as Lifeline has not yet seen a child come home from this country. Recent changes in 2022-2023 have led Lifeline to re-launch this program! We are hopeful these changes will lead to more openness from North Macedonia to match waiting children with American families.

Due to the recent changes that occurred in 2022-2023, we feel we have a better grasp on how the matching process works in North Macedonia. We have also been given explicit instructions on how to list things in the home study for a family to be matched. The matching comes from a computer system in North Macedonia and will match the family with the child based on the criteria from the home study. This includes: age, gender, special needs, and openness to nationalities in North Macedonia.

This is unknown currently as the program is still a pilot program. We are hopeful it will be a 2-4 year process depending on the families openness.

The family will travel to North Macedonia for an allotted bonding period where half of the bonding will be spent in North Macedonia and the remainder will be spent in the US. We expect this to be a total of 8 weeks (or 2-months) and 4 weeks will be spent in North Macedonia and 4 weeks will be spent in the US. After the bonding time is complete, the family will travel back to North Macedonia for approximately 2 weeks to finalize paperwork at the US Embassy and receive the child’s US Visa to travel home.