April 2, 2003 - An apple a day...keeps the tears away

Wednesday April 2, 2003

An apple a day....keeps the tears away

Clarke:

Live entertainment at Lugansk’s only Chinese restaurant.  The band played for us like we were the most important customers of the night.  Actually, we were the only customers!  This restaurant is an old renovated movie theatre.  (There are currently no movie theatres in this city of ½ million now)  Including our car, there were two cars in the iron-fenced lot next to the prison of 1,000 beds.  If the neighborhood wasn’t scary enough, ordering the food was.  Except for all the fat and grease, it actually wasn’t bad.  Local customs did not allow for leaving any food on the table, so for the first time in my life, we finished everything at a Chinese restaurant.  I was about to explode.

We have visited the orphanage 14 times and Natalie 13 times in the past 7 days.  We are hanging in there, but are looking forward to taking her out of there for good.  Both in the morning and afternoon visit, Natalie had been crying terribly before our arrival.  It touches our heart and saddens us that we have so little control of the visitations times, location and so on.  We are trying to make plans for our return to Kyiv by airplane, but George is always finding a reason to discourage.  We will receive our NAC document by train in the morning and proceed with Regional and District immigration, court finalization and Natalie’s passport.  We are saying our prayers that we will soon be complete with the adoption process in Lugansk.

Kris:

I have not written in here for days!  We are now visiting Natalie in the upstairs room again.  It is getting very old in this room.  We are ready to get out of here!

Yesterday we had our Court hearing!  It was very bazaar!  The room that we met the judge in felt like it was going to fall off the building.  In attendance to our “trial” were George, Marina, Clarke, the Inspector and I, and of course the Judge, Yuri.  He asked us very basic questions.  He wanted to know how much money we make, what do we do; he wanted to know about our house and the addition.  Yuri also wanted to know what Amanda and Alex thought about adoptions. 

Today when we arrived at the orphanage, we handed out thank you cards to the nurses with a picture and a small token of our appreciation.  We also donated some money to the orphanage. 

Our meeting with Natalie went well.  When she showed up for our meeting time, you could tell she had been crying.  The tears were gone but her eyes were red and had blotches of red on her cheeks.  

She had been given an apple, maybe to stop her from crying.  

She sat down and ate the whole apple, every last bite.  Clarke and I couldn’t believe how much she liked it!  Her eyes glistened with happiness.  We played until noon.  

Then we went downstairs to meet Inna and presented our donation to the orphanage.  The bankers were there to accept the gift and give us a receipt.  Inna offered us lunch again.  Uggh…. The first time we ate at the orphanage was an experience that I did not want to have to do again.   But, because it is tradition to accept this invitation, we did it again.  More fruit compote (that tasted like gas) chicken skin, porridge and beet soup. 

The only thing left was the stem and a seed

Our afternoon meeting made up for the awful lunch we had just eaten.  We picked her up from her room, and again it looked like she had been crying.  The nurse said she had been crying since 3:00 (our daily afternoon meeting went from 4-6)

She ran into my arms and started to settle down when I picked her up and held her. 

She quickly calmed down.  We played the same games today.  Take out stuff and then put it back away. We brought some fruit juice in a small water bottle.  She latched right on to it.  She kept drinking and drinking.  Finally we told her the rest is for tomorrow.  She tried to test us to see if we really meant it.  When she realizes that we mean it, she moves on to the next thing.  We watched a little of “Chicken Run” in Russian.  She was not interested.  It makes me laugh how when they dub in the Russian voice that is it the same voices for all the characters.  It is a man with a monotone voice with no fluctuations.