Paperwork, paperwork and more paperwork!

Friday, June 12th

Hello All! This is Ann again. Alex has become addicted to my blog and checks several times during the day to see if anybody has left comments (Thanks, Wendy, for your comments!). I told him that he should start his own blog, since he seems to want be the one that writes on mine :) and I told him that I wanted to write my own stuff, instead of him writing this big long report of what happened and me having to edit it. So, I will probably regret this when I really want him to write something again, but for now he is cut off!

Today we had to do more paperwork stuff in Nikpol. Oleg had to go to the train station at 2 am to get some papers that Irena had sent from Kiev and Oksana had to get up early to go and get the paper that Katya’s brother wrote. We then had to take the papers to Katya’s birth place (I don’t remember the name, except that it started with an “A”) and get social services there to OK the split. When we got to the social services building, there were two ladies there: a blonde-haired one and an artificially red-haired one. The blonde-haired one told us that Katya’s mother had been there recently crying because she had found out that Katya was going to be adopted and she wanted the lady’s help to get Katya back. What is the saying, "You always want what you can't have?" We weren't entirely surprised by this news since Katya had told us that she gave her sunglasses to her mom, who had visited recently. The lady told the mom that she wouldn’t help her, since nothing in her situation was any better than it was when Katya was taken away from her and that she thought that Katya would be better off being adopted. She kept saying that Katya had really “suffered” and I wanted to know what that meant but that was all Elena told us. The ladies seemed very interested in looking at pictures of us and Katya and Tony and seemed very pleasant. I guess that is how it goes when you don’t understand a word of what is going on. After we left, in the car Oksana told us how it really went. She said that the ladies did not want to take responsibility for this decision and had told her that they wanted to sit both kids down together and talk to them. Oksana had said, “How will you do this? Will you go to Dnipro?” Then the ladies, realizing that this was not realistic said that they would let Oksana know “someday” what their decision was. Oksana asked, “When? These people cannot wait forever!” and the ladies would not give her an answer. Then Oksana said that she needed to talk to the mayor, who was at lunch until 1 pm. So we found a café to go eat at while we waited.

The café was nice, decorated with Asian type stuff. It had no menu. I guess you were supposed to just tell the waitress what you wanted and she would tell you if they had it. Alex and I ordered French fries and Oksana, Oleg, and Elena kept listing stuff they wanted and the waitress kept saying that they didn’t have it. At one point, I heard from a frustrated Oleg “blah, blah, blah sushi?” and the waitress shook her head and Oleg gestured at the Asian decorations (to say – then why is this place decorated like you would have sushi?) The three of them finally found something they wanted that the café had and we ate.

On the way back to the office, Oksana told us that today was Friday and that these ladies do not really want to work today. She said that because it is Friday, they are just “dreaming of other stuff that they could be doing”. She told us that we should show all our pictures to the mayor, make sure that we are very charming and that we should cry! She said that crying would help and I was all set to cry and it would only partly have been an act, since Tony was at home with my mom and we had never left him overnight and I had just talked to my mom and Tony was coughing and the thought of spending the weekend in this town really did make me want to cry! Luckily, when we got back to the office the ladies were now willing to help us because they had probably called another office to see what the papers should look like and had started drawing up the papers that we needed (per Oksana, “Food must have done them good!”) and I didn’t have to exercise my wonderful crying skills.

Alex just reminded me of a conversation we had with Elena in which I put my foot in my mouth. When Alex and I were looking at the souvenirs outside the SDA building, they had a bunch of Dr. House stuff – coffee mugs, T-shirts, etc. I had commented to Alex that the reason they like House over here is because he is ornery. Well, we were having a conversation with Elena about TV shows and we asked if they like “House” over here – because of all the stuff we had seen. Elena said she didn’t like House – that he was boring – and I commented that I thought they liked him because he was ornery. She didn’t know what ornery was but after we explained it, she got defensive and said that people here are not ornery – they are just reserved. OK! If that is what you want to call it….

I also have to tell you about the joke that Alex played on Oleg. While we were getting the paperwork, Oleg was outside waiting in the car. Since he had been there when Oksana was talking about how “wishy-washy” the ladies were he knew there was a chance that we would not get the papers we needed today. Alex thought it would be funny to tell him that we had to come back on Monday to get them. So with a totally straight face, Oksana told Oleg that it is only him that has to come back on Monday and that the rest of us get to go home right now. Cute little Oleg actually took it quite well – he seemed disappointed but resigned to do it if that is what he had to do. Then we all burst out laughing. Oksana, of course, told him it was Alex’s idea (so that she didn’t get in trouble) and he said “Cool joke!”

So back to Dnipro we went with our papers and on the way, Oksana stopped at the courthouse to make sure the judge was going to be there to get the papers from her on Monday. If all goes well, Oksana will submit the papers on Monday and we will get our court date!

When we were in the office with the ladies, one of the questions they asked was how we communicated with Katya while we were here. We explained that there is a lady in our neighborhood, Yulia, that actually grew up in an orphanage in Ukraine and helped us talk to Katya. They followed up by asking if Yulia spoke Russian and Oksana responded, "paruski". With my limited Russian knowledge, I knew that meant "in Russian" and I said that Yulia also spoke Ukrainian. Oksana got a kick out of the fact that I understood what she had said and her and Oleg later thought it was a fun trick to get me to read Russian signs. I told them I could read them but I had no idea what they said!