Sasha on the phone. Lauren playing with Sash the night we had to leave him behind.
Tuesday
We woke up at 5:30 on Tuesday. Only 4 ½ hours sleep. Nastia was dead to the world. We shook her and kissed her and lifted her arms. Like a rock. But we had a bus to catch and a brother to rescue, so we persevered.
When she finally came around, she was happy to see us. She pulled on her clothes and we had a nice breakfast. Then we bundled up and headed out into the cold. We met Svieta and Luda at the minibus for the ride to Zhitomer.
Luda is a senior translator/facilitator who’s handled dozens of cases. We think Greg put her on our case because he knew that it was going to take some finesse to accomplish our mission today. We already knew that the ZAKS office (the ministry of justice office that handles the birth certificates) was not accepting documents until tomorrow. But we needed to get our ceritifcates “legalized” today in order to apply for the passports.
Thank God for this, because Svieta was simply incapable of working the system. Maybe Greg had taken my complaints about her to heart. Maybe he already knew that Svieta just wasn’t working out. Anyway, we had to get this done as a top priority before going to Rado to pick up Sasha. (And on that front, they had spoken to Mrs. Pretko and arranged to meet her in Rado at 3 PM after she returned from Zhitomer. It had been agreed that we would get Sasha in the afternoon!)
Ivan met us in Zhitomer and took us to the ZAKS office at 9 AM. Luda went in to “talk” to the official, and Lauren, Svieta, Nastia and I went to the notary across the street to make a Zayaba (request) that we would need to present at the passport office to start the application process there.
Unfortunately, the notary was out, so we all went to wait in the lobby of the Ukraine Hotel (where we had stayed for the first two weeks of our residence in Zhitomer) to drink coffee and wait for Luda.
By ten, she had gotten our documents legalized! We could feel the damn beginning to break open. We had someone working for us who could get things done.
We went to the notary together and this took much longer than expected. The notary was painfully slow with everything. Documents, stamps, signatures, photographs, zayabas. Nastia was amazing. She never complained.
We headed for the passport office. I showed Luda the door where the official was located and she disappeared. Twenty minutes later she came out with one of the officials who looked Lauren and I over. We figured she was sizing us up. We needed a favor which was the immediate issuance of the passports. Normally it takes 10 days.
Then Luda sent Svieta back to Radomischle to pick up some documents that we hadn’t known we would need. Luda and we took a car back toward the notary because of a problem with one of the notary’s documents. It seemed that our zayaba simply stated that the purpose of the passports was for permanent residence abroad, but the people at the passport office wanted it to say “for permanent residence in the USA.”
We spend another hour getting this fixed, then Luda went back to the passport office while Lauren, Nastia and I had a lunch of pizza at Julius Meinl, our favorite coffee house in Zhitomer.
The rest of the party showed up a little later, including Ivan and Svieta. Everyone ate something.
Lauren and I went with Ivan and Svieta to the market to start buying clothes for Nastia. We found some cute mittens, underwear, a couple of great shirts, some jeans. Then we got a call from Luda. Problem. It seems that there is a new official in charge of this passport office and he’d never dealt with a foreign adoption case before. First of all he wanted to use his 10 days to handle the case correctly. Secondly, he had a problem with the wording of the court decree. Apparently, the decree did not specifically state the day that the 10 day period following our hearing came to an end. Duh. Still, bureaucrats have nightmares over this stuff.
He would not have answers to this stuff till he met with his supervisor. I was mentally beginning to prepare myself for 10 more days.
By the time we started for Radomischle and Sasha it was already 5:30. We had called Pretko and she was also delayed in Zhitomer, so this didn’t seem like a problem (yet). We arrived at the orphanage around quarter to 7 and called her again. She would be there in 20 minutes. Luda and Svieta waited in the dark hallway by her office. Lauren, Nastia and I went to play with Sasha. He was in a great mood seeing his sister. This was it. He was going home with us.
Then Svieta appeared. Pretko had called back. Since the workday was over, and the lawyer was gone, we would not be getting Sasha today. Come back tomorrow. No! But yes. And that was that. I broke the news to Lauren who was heartbroken. I was prepared for this in my mind already and controlled my anger and frustration. One more day. Just one more day.
I left with Svieta to go to the store. We wanted to buy a plastic tree that one of Sasha’s teachers had repeatedly asked for. We found a lovely sunflower plant and also a bag of candy for the kids and went back. The kids were fascinated by the tree and we took lots of pictures of everyone posing with it.
Sasha and Nastia were playing and laughing, but we had to break the news to them. He looked devastated. She took it a little better than that. But once more our hearts had been broken.
We got home late again. Nastia, still so happy to be home with us, helped to ease to disappointment. We all stayed up till after midnight. Who knew what tomorrow would bring?