March 21 - 25

The girls should be over the pond about now.  

I don't have answers, only questions:

Is Milana gazing out the window of her first flight, or watching back-to-back movies, or showing her roller skating blisters to whomever is sitting next to her?  

In retrospect, how did Pam manage after she had to turn her cell phone off at the embassy, but couldn't turn it back on because I had the PIN with me, and she had to get to the medical clinic across town but the facilitator was off running errands and said "Call me when you are ready" and the sun wasn't shining?

Are Jonathan and Sasha excited to see their sister again?  Do boys often get gushy?

Did I get the dog cleaned and the house fed and buy the kids to bed on time and practice grocery lessons?

Should I start a new blog: 

http://www.siblingsettakethreeandcallmeinthemorning.blahspot.com/

I just read the last several days of the Peck's blog.  They flew home yesterday.  If you are looking for wise and faith-building words about adopting a teen from Ukraine, try that site J.

March 12 – 20

This is the part of a typical adoption journey that generally lacks drama, so let's add some:

1.     There is a boyfriend.

2.    In order to get a new birth certificate, Pam and Milana had to go right through Kramatorsk, where Milana, Sasha, and Jonathan had lived prior to being put in foster care, then later two/then three different orphanages in three cities hundreds of miles apart.  Milana naturally wanted a chance to say goodbye to remaining family.   No matter how risky this is, even if you could speak Russian, could you say 'nyet' to such a request?  So, with much prayer, there was a meeting at a restaurant.  Sharing pictures, addresses, and tears--just the kind of thing you'd expect.

3.    Stas is being adopted!

Details:

1.     Milana: "He is not my boyfriend.  He is a friend who is a boy."  Pam: "Honey, honey, honey.  Very handy.  That word play only works in English and some forms of German.  In French you could get arrested for it.  In Russian and Roman you are just setting yourself up for heartache."

2.    Milana: "Why are the adults crying?" Pam: "Some day you'll be a mother and you'll understand."

3.    Reader's Digest Summary (read http://claypeck.com/adoption-journey/ for more):  Clay and Selene Peck of CO were in the midst of adopting a 15-year-old (they all thought) when a typo about her birthday was uncovered.  She had turned 16, and according to U.S. law, the time for adopting had expired.  After much heartache, friends we knew from Kiev Christian Academy, where Adrienne attended in 2005, convinced Clay and Selene to start a prayer campaign and write to Congress and other government officials.   In a matter of days an amendment was passed which allowed them to continue!  It is flying around the Internet as the "Julia Peck Provision."  In this next part, please interpret our role as just being in the midst of a special compressed week where it is really clear and amazing how much God loves.  Anyway, this new amendment could help Stas, who is turning 16 in May, if somehow a couple could learn of him and respond quickly, and rapidly move through the first steps of this rather complicated process.  After much prayer on our part (although Stas has been praying about this for much longer) and asking quite a number of couples to consider this, Pam thought of friends from college who have all girls.  Miracle of miracles, they said, "Yes!"  They are now Facebooking (or VKing, the Russian equivalent), and everyone is so excited!  God is SOOO good!

Other less dramatic stuff:

Pam and Milana spent a chunk of their last day in Donetsk at the Dolphinarium.  Pam is the one NOT wearing black leather.

They then took the slow train back to Kyiv, and rode first class.   That means the fish 'n chips vendors come around twice as often.

In Kyiv the first two nights they are staying with Karen Springs, another key support person for the Pecks.  The Pecks will be staying with Karen Sunday – Wednesday, and Pam and Milana will move over to Sergei and Irina's.  Moreover and more cooler, Pam and Milana had dinner with Clay, Selene, and Julia just a few hours ago.  I haven't heard, but I'm guessing they had about 800 hours of stuff in common to talk about.  

If the passport is finished early Monday, Masha will bring it up and they could be coming home Thursday. 

Meanwhile, back in the States, Adrienne and I have been working to get ready.  Adrienne had volunteered last September to move downstairs, and we had completely gutted that room, built a closet, added wiring, finished off the ceiling, added carpet, etc.  Then in the last week we had Adrienne's old room (Milana's new room), clean and painted, and had a dresser, chair, bookshelf, and lamp.   I thought we were close.  Then Bethtastic came over on Friday to inspect.  She took a mental picture and came back today to decorate.  Wow!  Even Sasha, who cares little about such stuff, said, "Nice room." 

Klas!

March 7 - 11

Milana and her friend Edik performed this scene during a Valentine's Day program for their peers and staff at the Internat.  Sadly, we didn't meet Milana until February 17th, and staff and friends were still talking about it. So we asked them to play it again, sans the fancy costumes, in early March.  If you have a couple of minutes, check out the following, my first (unlisted) YouTube upload:

This was a 1961 hit Ukrainian play and movie, За Двумя Зайцами (Chasing Two Hares), by Михаила Старицкого (Mikhaila Staritskoho).

Here is a movie viewer's summary of the plot: In the Ukrainian town of Kiev, at the beginning of the 20th century, a young loser named Svirid Golokhvasty owned a barbershop, which was in a lamentable state, because most of his time the owner spent drinking, gambling, and chasing girls with his equally no-good friends. After losing a really big sum of money and becoming a bankrupt, Golokhvasty decided to solve his financial problems by marrying an ugly but rich Pronya who falls for his "educated" speeches and snazzy outfits and use her money to pay his debts and to attract a beautiful and virtuous Galya (the short for Galina) who despises him and doesn't want to even look at him. Thus the chase for two hares begins, and as you may guess, it is more than difficult to chase two hares in the same time.

By remarkable coincidence, the statue in front of the Ministry of Family in Kyiv illustrates one of the moments in Milana and Edik's performance.  Does this look familiar?  See the February 15th post.

Pam went skating with Milana, Edik, Stas, and Anya.  It was Milana's fourth time, but two people's first.  Pam loves to skate.  Over the years she has often tried to encourage me to live up to her dad, who was a rink rat back in college, but I can only make ruts in the rink from traveling in carefully controlled circles.  Anyway, this must have been fun.  In Pam's words, "It was a great day!"

Pam's computer died.  It was a hand-me-down from Kjersten -> Adrienne -> virus ward -> Andy's detox center -> Adrienne -> scrapheap with a burned-out monitor -> Andy & Sasha's fixit shop, replacing the CCFL (see http://www.clearchain.com/blog/posts/fixing-my-dell-inspiron-8000-backlight, a non-adoption blog, for details) -> Adrienne -> this trip -> computer hell.   SO … I am really limited as far as truthful information goes. SO … I have no choice but to make stuff up.

·       Milana found some jeans that she likes.

·       It is warmer now in Ukraine.

·       We are past the last hurdle.

March 5 - 6

Here is a puzzlement:

Plus 1) We wanted to make chocolate eggs in the Internat kitchen.  Milana asked Natasha, the home ec teacher, if this is possible.  Natasha, a very nice woman who is likely a wonderful mother, lets us use the Rachael Ray Room.  No television cameras, but 900 square feet of modern cupboards, appliances, and countertops, and everything perfectly in order.  Our U.S. home ec teachers would drool over such a classroom (except that they have to watch their manners.)

Plus 2) The Internat has installed air conditioning in every classroom and the auditorium.  I can hardly wait to need it.

Plus 3) Expressed in simplest form, three sevenths of the teachers here genuinely care about encouraging the students to flourish.  Edik (Edward), an 18-year-old who has been a leader at the Internat in drama and in teaching and in just plain smoothing things over for others, has a remarkable talent for artistic design.  The teachers have encouraged him, and have supplied him with books and materials, as well as a room of his own (they give him the key) to work in.  He made all the paper sculptures seen below, plus many more, and teaches the younger kids how to make them.  A duplicate of his Donbass Arena paper sculpture sits in a glass showcase at the McDonald's downtown.  He is a genuinely nice guy, and agreed to help Milana and us shop for 4 hours on Saturday (I liked the idea of bringing a calm spirit along, and we actually bagged some items J).  We hope Edik is one of the statistically few who makes it into a university and beyond.

Negative 10)  Bedrooms are locked from 8:00 am – 8:00 pm.  Boys and girls share the same smelly group bathrooms with no doors or toilet paper (and don't kid yourself—these are the squatty potty kind), as well as rooms where they change after showering, etc.

Summary:  We have never seen anything like plus points 1-3 at any other orphanage.  Negative 10 seems to be the norm.  Now, how can one explain the track lighting in some showroom spaces and yuck blighting in others?  Akhmetov.  He has a track-lit philanthropic side, to complement his how-did-he-come-by-his-billions besmirched side, and has donated directly to this orphanage. 

On a beautiful Saturday morning, in an outdoor program that we recommend should become part of National Lutheran Schools Week, we said goodbye to winter and hello to spring—we celebrated Maslenitsa!  We're talking costumes, music, dancing, relays and games, burning the winter scarecrow, and special sweet pancakes covered in sweetened condensed milk and tea for all.  And Milana knows how to make these J.  I'm thinking you'll be inviting yourself over.  That's okay by me!

On Sunday Milana, Anya and we attended another church that some of Anya's friends attend.  Jaclyn, a mom from Kyrghistan and Pam's conversation buddy at DCU, and her family also attend here.  There were 4 sermons, but this church had heat.  Anya sits behind us and translates.  It works very well!

We had Milana and Anya over for lunch.  She helped make another feast and offered the prayer.  Afterwards we older folks kept chatting and playing games in the common kitchen, and Milana got to do something she is never allowed to do at the Internat because the bedrooms are locked—take a nap.  She has a bit of a deep cough, so I hope it did some good. 

We told her that Anya has many friends in the U.S., and as a gift we invited her to come to the U.S. with us.  "Klas!" or "Cool!"  She was so happy.  She said that not only is this a nice gift for Anya, but it is a nice gift for her!  She warms my heart.

I am now on the train to Kyiv, and afterwards home, so I won't be able to make first-hand observations for about 3 weeks.  Thus I may have to make up some of the rest of the story.

March 3 - 4

Good news, bad news.

Good news:  The judge approved our adoption!

Bad news:    Pam accidentally purchased pelmeni filled with liver.  She is sick.

Mom, I know you are reading this.  Pam did not give it to the dog.  Maybe that is why she is sick.

Back to the legal stuff.  It took more … time than we thought it should take to get our court date.  Masha handled it well.  On Thursday morning they were still negotiating about when court date would be, and I am so glad it worked out for Friday, as next week there are two days off for the huge women's day holiday.  If Masha had not been successful, I would not have been able to 1) get back to teach a 4-hour night class that had already been postponed, 2) take the Sasha/Jonathan-but-not-Adrienne-who-is-independent-now relay handoff from Johnsons to Mom and Dad Menge to Mom Langewisch, as my mother needs to get back to her real work, which is debating with my father, and 3) avoid more shopping with our new daughter.

At the last minute the director told Milana to come to court.  She is a brave girl.  She was not in the least bit frightened or troubled, as far as we could tell, by hearing all this talk of erasing her old name, altering her birth certificate, and being reminded of the termination of her birth parents' rights.

Now there is a 10-day waiting period for potential appeals.  On March 15^th Masha will come back to Donetsk and we can begin the process of getting a new birth certificate (We could have changed her birthday--how bizarre!), shredding her old passport, getting a new one, and forcing a conclusion to which jeans she will buy.

Odd note:  Our taxi on the way to court was a Soviet-era Lada, souped up with premium black widow spider door lock knobs.  On the way he stopped for a cup of gas.  No joke.

February 28 - March 2

As long as we were within 2 hours and 22 bone-cracking potholes of Mariupol, where Sasha had lived from 2007-2009, we really wanted to say "Wuz 'up" to his caregiver, Valentina Mikhailovna Shepelova, his classmates, and especially his best friend Kolya.  We had Masha call ahead to make sure it was okay to come visit.  The director said finesky, but she wouldn't be around Monday afternoon.  That was fine with all of us, as she was typically on the gruffsky side.

The visit could not have worked out any better!  We stayed for 2 hours.  Valentina was SO HAPPY to see us and hear news of Sasha.  We had sent a Photostory CD a while back and they had watched it many times, "memorizing every picture."  On this visit we showed some more pictures and videos of the boys.  Valentina then had students sing for us, play piano, and recite poems.  So many smiles!

Kolya gave us a gift.  In return he would like more funny videos of Sasha.

Afterwards Anya took us to Jeremiah's Hope transitional living house, a church/house for 16-18 year old grad orphans and 50-year-old goofballs.  The students are in trade schools during the day, learning to be welders, electricians, and most importantly, unemployed.  They live and eat at the house.  This is a much better situation than the government-subsidized apartments that most older orphans use.  There the nefarious elements prey on the vulnerable kids.  These 10 young people prayed together.  The mealtime was remarkably quick—maybe 3 minutes of no talking while they shoveled down their food, then each asked to be excused and disappeared (probably to go watch a soccer game on TV).  Five stayed to play SkipBo and one played Phase 10 with us.  Physically they are like young adults—after eating and playing with them you feel like any one of them could be part of your family.  But the years apart from a supportive family will have taken a toll.  There will be issues of trust, communication skills will be lacking, …

Tuesday morning we bought a few gifts for Sasha's class, but we were not allowed to interrupt their routine to see the children open them.  So we left the gifts with Valentina, who apologized profusely and said—in translation—she's only a slave here.  Then we caught a bus back to Donetsk.

We went directly to the Internat about 3:00.  We got permission from the Director to take Milana back to DCU for dinner.  I think she asked us if Milana was going to stay overnight.  Nice idea, but we want to stay in her good graces. 

I asked Milana if she wanted to email her brothers.  "No, let them wait until they see me.   Let's set up a vKontakte (Ukrainian Facebook) page for me instead!"  These social networking tools are not helping us develop our most important social network—our family!

While fixing dinner, we played Oompa Loompa—we blew out  our brains through small holes in eggs in preparation for filling them with chocolate, and making chocolate chickens eggs (I can't remember which came first). 

The shower in our room at DCU happens to be a massage shower, with jet streams coming from 7 different sources (the Carpathian mountains, an Artesian well drilled 2 miles under the coal mines of Donetsk, mixed with some warmer water from Chernobyl, …).  Big smiles. 

Morozheno, yummy Ukrainian ice cream, & left-over chocolate

We wrapped up with an exercise I wrote on communication skills, using "I messages" and other tips I remember from Herm Glaess's classes I took back in 1918.  It was basically a scripted dialog between father and daughter with analysis and restarts.  The topic was silly and not charged—where the father asks his daughter to cut his hair.  No one got hurt.

On Wednesday Pam filled in for Anya teaching English at the Internat.  Word got out that we were teaching about FEELINGS, so people stayed away in droves.

After dinner we joined Jim and Margaret and Angela, a missionary mom from Australia, for outrageous stories.  We are NOT making these up:

·       The billionaire Akhmetov has a palace next to DCU.  When he is around, it is guarded by men carrying uzis.  Although he was "elected" to parliament, he has never been to a single session—he just likes the immunity from prosecution.

·       Jim's southern-style chatter with the woman next door (who speaks no English) about the missing cat that he liked to feed, was rewarded with what she thought was the desire of his heart.  "Knock, knock.  I found Jim kot."  It was a flea-ridden, ringwormed, aggressive little kitten that Margaret dutifully took to a vet.  "Why do you want this thing?  Here, I'll give you a healthy one."  "No, it has to be this cat.  Just give me all the medicines you own."  Later, the cat was being too aggressive, so they decided to have it neutered.  The vet made housecalls.  He showed up and pulled out a chain saw and fire axe, and made the neighbor who doesn't like cats hold the legs.  He tied on a string to certain body parts, gave the ends to Jim and said,  "Ok, hold the ends of this string.  The cat will follow you anywhere."

·       Jim got arrested for looking too much like a street bum.

·       Jim and Margaret's Dutch friend was so anti-Ukrainian in matters of style that once while waiting next to McDonalds, someone thought she was a gypsy and threw a coin in her empty coffee cup.

·       Westerners do not always do their homework when sharing gifts with orphanages.  They sometimes send shipping containers of clothes, but it would cost someone here $1000 to receive it at the dock, hire a driver to take it to a warehouse where it could be sorted, etc.  Most often such gifts are sold for a small amount to dealers right at the dock.

·       The kids at some orphanages are not too excited to get gifts.  One mission team member somehow followed them after handing some out.  In the next room the gifts were immediately collected by one of the teachers, who sold them down at the market.  :(

·       The siblings of Jim and Margaret's 5-foot-tall eighth child should be glad she was eighth, otherwise they would not have been.  She married a Harlem Globetrotter evangelist (google Seth Franco Globetrotter) and she cuts him down to size.  Margaret: "Seth, in the interest of full disclosure, I need to tell you something before you get married . . . " "Yes, Mom, I know she's strong, and I love that about her."  "I'll remind you of that."