Ukraine Adoption Journey #2 Trip #2 day #2 (that is for you Scott!)
International travel is not pleasant, whoever decided on putting regular seats in an international aircraft apparently never took an international flight. Who can sleep sitting up? If you actually do nod off you are quickly awakened when your head flops forward. They should put bunks in those planes, yes bunks with harnesses in them so you don't fall out during turbulence. Oh, that reminds me.... on flight no 2 (out of 4 that it took me to get back to Odessa) there was so much turbulence that people were filling their airsick backs left and right. You would be impressed with me-yes me, the queen of motion sickness- didn't get sick. I almost did though.
I haven't seen the boys yet, but I will tomorrow. We spent today chasing new birth certificates, we got Jack's. The women who work at these offices should be editors for book publishing companies. They seem to search out mistakes on documents so that they don't have to make the birth certificates. Yesterday they decided that they didn't like that the court decree stated that the mother's parental right had been terminated before she died. Apparently the birth certificate should have been updated with "parental rights terminated" sometime after the rights were terminated. But this being Odessa it was never done. So we had two choices. 1. Get the court decree from when the mother's rights were terminated. or 2. Get the judge to delete the part about termination of rights. (oh by the way our adoption decree is 5 pages long, Matthew's was 1.5 pages long). So fortunatly Vanya was able to get the judge to fix the decree. He picked it up today and brought it to the first birth certificate office. They then found a mistake on the translation of our marriage license-I have no idea why they needed our marriage license. But no one is Odessa would notarize a correction on the translation because it was on a photocopied version of the license. Fortunately I had a new Apostilled marriage license in my suitcase. I was told to bring a complete extra dossier when we adopted Matthew so I did this time as well. Vanya translated it, but in Odessa they will only accept translations from translations agencies(sounds like a monopoly). I also remembered this from Matthew's adoption, we had to hire a seperate translator even though we had another with us. Then we took the translation to the notary next door who does her job. Then we take it back to the certificate place where we sit for a long time while pondering the upcoming presidental election-the United States one not the Ukrainian one. Vanya agrees with my theory that political parties are only hurting the nation and we should get rid of them so that people will vote for what they think is right instead of who belongs to their party. We get the certificate which of course I can't read since it is in Russian. By now it is 5:50 but we race off to see if the other certificate office is open so we can at least check if Sasha's is ready. But they were closed like we suspected. So we took a very crowded and hot machutka (bus) back to General Petrova (the street were the apartment is). Today is Vera's birthday. I don't remember if I mentioned her before, she is a very sweet 17 year old who is patiently waiting for her new family to arrive from near Omaha. She has graduated no.4 and is somewhat homeless. She is in sewing school so she has acess to the dorms there. She said they are not very nice and crowded- one toilet for 200 kids if I remember right. She spends most nights at her sister's apartment. Vera has been in the hospital since sunday with pneumonia, sinus infection and kidney infection. She got sick the same day as I did, but hers got worse until she had to go to the hospital. She was with us the day with left on the train to go home. She is a sweet heart.
Michelle had a wonderfull little party for her tonight, Vera's sister, cousin and brother came for michelle's delicious homemade pizza. Vera's sister is 18 and just as sweet and adorable as Vera. She speaks english well, anybody out there looking to host a great girl on a student visa?????? I would but I think I will have my hands full for a while.
Tomorrow we will go get Sasha's birth certificate and hopefully I will get a chance to visit the boys, they know I am here. I was headed to no.4 today when Vanya called about bringing him the marriage license.
The grivna (not spelled right, but that is how is sounds) has dropped so we get more for our dollar. When we arrived in August it was 4.65 grivna for every dollar now it is 6.5 grivna for every dollar. I heard it may go up to 8 or 10, so our dollar is worth something here even though it doesn't seem to be anywhere else.
I will post some pictures tomorrow!