Birth Certificate

Well, we have Katya's new birth certificate. Whew! I had my doubts, though, as to whether or not we were going to get it. We were supposed to leave at 5:30 am, then Elena called last night and said they would be here to pick us up between 6:30 and 7:00 am. Tony decided this morning that 4:30 am was an excellent time to wake up and would not go back to sleep. It gets light here at about 4:00 am and the birds decide that they need to sing. It is also so hot that we have to have the windows open and since the apartment faces main street we hear cars passing by all night. On top of that, people around here don't seem to have the concept that people may be sleeping and they will yell, sing, throw beer bottles, etc. at any hour of the night. In other words, it is very noisy around here and almost impossible to get a good night's sleep. So, I was up well before 6:30 am but woke Katya up at 6:15 am. She got dressed, had breakfast, and then we waited and waited and waited...Katya kept coming up to me saying, "Mom?" and "sleep?". Finally, Elena called at about 7:15 and said that they were on their way but that they wouldn't be here for another 45 minutes. This would have been nice to know an hour earlier!

Oleg, Oksana, and Elena finally arrived and we were off for the city of A (I don't know the name of it, so once I find out I will fill it in). It took about 2 1/2 hours to get there. The drive was actually very pretty. Alex and I had been to this town once before, in connection with our visit to Katya's brother, but we both slept on the way there and the way back. I was awake most of the time and looked at the scenery. There was mostly farmland with small houses. On the side of the road there occasionally were these cement stands that I think are bus stops. They had those in Guatemala, too, to give you a place to stand in the heat to wait for the bus - the only difference was that here they didn't all have big Pepsi advertisements. The farmland looked to be corn, hay, and sunflowers. At first I wondered why they would want to grow big fields of sunflowers but then I remembered what Katya's favorite snack is - sunflower seeds! Those come from sunflowers, don't they? On the sides of the roads, they would occasionally have the name of a city with a red diagonal line through it. I realized that this was meant to tell you that if you were looking for that city, you were going the wrong way. Funny! On the outskirts of town, there were houses with fairly big yards that had tons of greenery in the back. In one of the yards, I saw a man walking around in his underwear (yes, his boxer briefs!) This was not a good sight!

Once we arrived, we had a hard time finding the birth certificate office and Oleg and Oksana had to ask for directions, at one point was directed to follow a path that turned into a "walk only" path (I seriously thought Oleg was going to drive on it anyway!), turned around and finally made it to our destination at about 10:30 am. We met with the lady that was going to help us get the birth certificate. I think I posted in a previous blog that the person that normally handles the birth certificates was out of town and that this lady didn't know how to use a computer (according to Oksana) and so the confidence that she was going to be able to get us what we needed wasn't really great. The lady looked at the paperwork for quite a while and then told us that the birth certificate wouldn't be ready until 4 pm. Ugh! What did she have to do? Wasn't it as easy as typing up a new one? The lady told us that we should go sight seeing and come back, after we made copies of several documents that she needed (apparently, this office does not have a copy machine and we were going to have to go and hunt one down). If you saw this town, you would understand why the suggestion to go sight seeing was absurd. This town had even less to do than Dniprodzerzinsky (the town we are staying in) so the thought of sight seeing did not sound appealing. But no worries, we found something else to occupy our time because after making the requested copies and dropping them off, the lady informed Oksana that the dates on our translated document for our marriage license were incorrect (the translated document had 1996 instead of 1998) and that she couldn't give us the birth certificate until it was corrected. The court didn't look at our stuff close enough to notice this and yet this lady who is preparing a document that has absolutely nothing to do with the date we were married is insisting on this correction. Give me a break! This is where Oksana's ingenuity is demonstrated. Oksana assured her that they would give her a corrected document and in the meantime convinced the lady to keep working on the birth certificate.

We had prepared two dossiers, one for Katya and one for Sasha. Since we hadn't used the dossier for Sasha, Oksana still had it with her and in it was an original marriage license and all we had to do was prepare a new translation document, have Elena sign it and get it notarized. So, for the next two hours, this is what we did.

We first stopped at a bank to exchange money since I had tried to exchange money the day before and apparently it was a holiday (Constitution Day). I have never seen a country with so many holidays. We lucked out in June, only having two holidays. But I think in May there were at least five. They took FOREVER at the bank. I think they had to print the money :) While we were waiting, Katya listened to her iPod and sang along to Hannah Montana - but the singing sounds more like moaning with some occasional pitch changes. She was not really very quiet, to say the least, and I think she was annoying the other bank customers but I didn't care. I could catch a couple of English words ("You said", although I think it was supposed to be "Who said") and I thought her singing was very cute. Who says you can't learn English by listening to Hannah Montana!

After the bank, we found an internet cafe that charges 3 gryvnas (about $.50) for an hour of computer time. This inexpensive computer time would explain why all the computers were occupied with little boys playing video games. But no worries! Oksansa somehow sweet-talked the guy into letting us use his personal office computer. You gotta love Oksana - she really knows how to get things done! So, we prepared the document, Oleg had found a notary, had lunch, and then we delivered the corrected document to the birth certificate lady. We then waited out in front of the birth certificate office for our birth certificate to be done. Oksana played badminton with Katya to entertain her. Although Oksana wasn't wearing high-heels today, she still was quite a sight playing in her dress. They got the birdie caught in a tree and Oleg tried to help get it out with no success (I will try and post pictures tomorrow) and luckily they had another birdie in the car. After Oksana broke a nail and quit, I tried to play and Katya decided that I really sucked and didn't want to play anymore.

Finally, our birth certificate was ready. It was about 3:30 pm. When we went inside to pick up the certificate, the lady was like an entirely new person. She was nice and cordial and accomidating. It was very strange. She wished that I never regret my decision because she said that every child needs to have parents. She was surprised that Katya was my adopted daughter because she said that she looked so much like me.

So, tomorrow we are off to Dnipropetrosk to get the registration card and apply for the passport. Wish us luck!