July 14th

Today we spent most of the day waiting for our translator to come back.  She was running papers around and trying to get our approval signed.  She though she would only be gone for an hour or two but when 2:30pm rolled around she still wasn’t back.  She returned to our apartment around 2:45pm with Vika.  She told us the man who has been giving us so much trouble in the past wanted to talk to us before he signed anything.  The problem was that the van we have been using broke down and Valdimir our driver couldn’t get it started again.  We wanted for about an hour add our driver was able to get the van started but the engine sounded terrible.  It sounded like someone was hitting it with a  hammer ever few seconds.

 

Anyway we headed out and took some paper work back to the Internat, stopped at a mechanics shop to let him listen to the vans engine (after which he said it need to be totally rebuilt), and headed to the administration offices to talk to the stubborn man who won’t sign our papers.

 

 When we got there both Jaynie and I were furiously thinking of what we were going to say.  But it was all for naught.  We basically sat in a chair outside the offices and watched people walk back and forth and talk very quickly to each other.  Evidently the stubborn man has found another thing he’s not happy with.  Vika only has a brother listed in her paper work, but the brother has two sisters listed in his paper work.  So the man says we must find the two sisters (who are in their twenties) and make sure they don’t want to adopt Vika.  These sisters are half sisters to Vika and Ukrainian law says only full blooded siblings can adopt their follow siblings.  The law also states that if they didn’t visit Vika for 12 or 14 months while she was at the Internat their rights are terminated.  But we are going through all of the hoops this guy is throwing at us.  I don’t know what will happen but we are believing it will turn out ok.  

 

 Evidently the ‘stubborn’ man made one of the ladies who works for him and who had been helping us cry by telling her she was selling children and showing her the story about the Ukrainian child who was killed in the U.S. by adoptive parents.  That is a very sad thing that happened but if you look at the statistics of how many kids die here in Ukraine verses how many die after being adopted I think adoption is showing a much, much, much higher survival rate than just letting the kids sit in a orphanage.  If this ‘stubborn’ guy was really interested in helping these kids he would spend his energy trying to get funding to give these kids a place to go after they are too old to be in the orphanage.  

 

 Anyway after an hour or two of listening to a language I don’t really understand and only catching a word or two here and there we left, got some dinner, and took Vika back to the summer camp she is staying at.  We gave her a hug and told her good bye for the night.  Tomorrow our translator is going to try and find the two sisters and I need to work on some projects from work so we are probably going to postpone our sight seeing trip with Vika until Saturday.

 

 Tonight we are going to watch the Bourne Supremacy.  We don’t get to watch movies that often and in the last week and a half since we left we haven’t watched anything we brought.  Although we’ve done a lot of reading because we’ve had to wait for long periods of time either in the van or sitting in an office somewhere.

 

That’s all for now.

 

Kyle