Trip Report- Part 3

Trip to Skola InternatSo we get to XXX detsky dom early in the morning - like 7am - and the kids are all ready to go! The teachers told us that SW was up and dressed for hours since she got to leave the orphanage with her Mama and Papa. The orphanage workers also try to hype up the kids about starting school - to lessen the kids fears of moving I guess. Sad thing is, the internats are far worse than the detsky doms - often no hot water, poorly maintained buildings, dirty ripped clothing....After this morning, all three of our girls would be in Skola Internats - most Americans want to adopt "babies"- ie under the age of 5 - so they never see these internats and therefore the internats never get donations or sponsors let alone money from their own government. The older kids are seen as worthless and undesirable - and if the government can't exploit them (through adoption, hosting programs, and sadly prostitution) they don't bother to fund them or their boarding schools. The younger kids a valuable and desirable - so they are well funded and maintained. Anyways, back to the trip. We go to the nurse's office/medical cabinet as she has questions about the medical supplies we donated - specifically the digital thermometers. They use Celcius and we use Farenheight, so she needed to know what temperature reading would be considered "sick" on these American thermometers. We also used this time to find out about SW's health and orphanage healthcare in general. She said SW was NOT part gypsy, but was actually of Moldavian descent, which is far better in Ukrainian eyes - gypsies are treated as lesser humans, much like African Americans were treated here in the states. Then,into the room comes none other than little Miss Z! This is the little girl who my friend C wanted me to check in on as she is good friends with the little boy C is adopting. I didn't think I'd get the chance to see her since she was in a different groupa than SW and from what C had told me, Z was most likely not going to be "graduating" to the internats that year despite her age. But I guess the regional authorities overruled the director's recommendations since Z was one of the 5 kids we were going to be transporting to the internats! I was so glad I was going to have a chance to take photos of her and give her a hug on behalf of my friend. We get all the kiddos together and out to the yard we go, suitcases in tow. The representative from SW's new internat had not shown up, so the staff scurried about to make arrangements for one of their own caretakers to accompany us on the trip - which was awsome of them since they weren't required to do so - but I guess it was there way of saying thank you to us for renting this private bus for the day to transport all these kids (we paid out of our pocket). We get all the kids settled and their luggage packed in and off we went. It was going to be a long trip - 5 hours or so - so I had bought coloring books, toys, and snacks for the kids. The director had said she was going to send "bread and water" for the kids, so taking her on her word, I assumed they wouldn't have more than that which is why I bought this stuff...well the caretaker gets on the bus with a huge box of goodies! I felt like I was insulting her a bit by bringing my own stuff, but G explained my misunderstanding. Not only had she brought water, but she had butter cheese sandwiches, cookies, juice, candy and coloring books. The three kids going to Cherry internat were sweet - Z was one, and the other two were sisters. The younger sister was only 5 years old, but they wanted to keep her with her older sister so they sent her even though she wasn't the traditional age for an internat. The kids made a mess with the pens I bought for them - they were stamp, bubble, light-up pen combo things. The kids were stamping everything, so the ink was everywhere and I had to keep doing the mom spit-on-the-napkin thing to clean them up. We asked directions a few times, and stopped for bathroom breaks a few times. A few times the van stalled out and G , Andrew and the driver had to get behind the van and push to get it jump-started! LOL I wish I could have gotten a photo of that. We also stopped along side a forest for a pee break - no way was I pulling up a pine tree to pee haha. They all did their thing and then decided to go mushroom picking...which I guess is a pretty common Ukrainian pasttime. We finally get on our way, ask more directions and then stop to drop off the Cherry internat kids at a cross roads. The representatives from Cherry transfered their luggage, signed the papers and off they went. Z was crying the whole time. It was also at this point that SW's mood plummeted. She became grouchy, distant and sad. After fighting with herds of sheep for access to the road, we finally get to SW's new internat - her and one other little girl from XXX detsky dom will now be living in this place. Its in the middle of NOWHERE - and I mean nowhere. Like BFE, cows-outnumber-the-people, nowhere. There were 4 or 5 houses and the internat. That's it. No stores, no gas stations, not even a beer tent! The staff were nice though - very willing to help us adopt SW and not at all shy talking about helping us. They even gave us a banquet to thank us for transporting the kids. We were served "sour grass" soup, sausage, smoked pork fat, fresh raw tomatoes, apple juice, bread, and buckwheat porridge. yum yum LOL Through all this SW is being very cold and distant - refusing any type of reassurance from us. I keep breaking down in tears at the thought of leaving her in this rural farm town- she is such a prissy girl, totally not suited to raising pigs or bees (which they do there - the smoked fat was from pigs they raised, the woman beamed!). I insisted on seeing where she would be sleeping - it was a small dirty room with thin stained mattresses and a hard bare floor. Half the mattresses were torn and falling off the beds. Lovely. So it was time to say goodbye and I just lost it. I told SW that I loved her and we would be back soon to get her and then I darted into the van and broke down. Even Andrew started crying, and as we started to pull away, SW started crying. Eventually we were dropped off at the train station in Nizhn (just Andrew, G and I - the driver and caretaker were returning to XXX) and we waited in the rain for our train to arrive. A stray dog started folowing us, so I gave him some cookies....then some sausage...so he started following us more. This is a dead give-away that you are American BTW - feeding stray animals. Ukrainians just don't do it. I don't think they even see these animals - they totally ignore them. The train ride to Kyiv is only 2 hours long, and we went directly back to the Kyiv flat, changed out of our wet clothes and went to bed. The next day we were going to catch up on rest and laundry and do some shopping in Kyiv.

Trip Report-Part 2

Visit with SnowWhite. So we wake up, get all of our stuff together (we can't leave anything in the Kyiv flat) and get on a mini-bus to XXX early in the morning. Its a 2 hour drive, but its comfortable enough. Thankfully the bus had a little place in the "trunk" to put our bags. We get to the city center and take a shabby little "local" bus towards the detsky dom. All the old babushkas are looking at us all weird - we stand out as Americans in the smaller towns because of our straight white teeth, my glasses, and I guess our clothes. We tried to dress like Ukrainians....and we were mistaken as Ukrainians in Kyiv more than once....and we are NOT typical fat older Americans like most of the Americans they are used to seeing at the detsky doms...but still they KNEW somehow. We get off the local bus and start walking with all our bags. It was a long dirt road, but it looked familiar to me from my trip in January. When we got the the little green shed at the branch in the road, I knew which way to go. I even remembered where the directors office was. We go in, hug the director, she invites us in to her office and tells us to sit down and put our bags down while she has someone get SnowWhite for us. G talks to her in Russian about our visit, plans, and the status of SnowWhite's paperwork - when suddenly in runs this little elf of a girl screaming "Mayleesa" and jumps into my arms. G introduces her to Andrew, whom she has seen photos of but never met, and she immediately hugs him. We give her her gifts - some we brought with us and some were left at the orphanage over the summer a charity group. As before she is fixated on the cameras and photos. We go back to her groupa, play with her and her friends, she shows off her gifts etc. We were even allowed to have "alone" time with her - with no caretaker supervising us. She flat-out refused to draw pictures for us with paper and crayons....but she loved Papa's laptop! LOL She draw us a few pictures there and even wrote our names over and over in Cyrillic and her own name in English. She really bonded with Andrew - drawing pictures of him and her together and "forgetting" to include me! haha Then it was time for the kids to have lunch and nap, so we went to the market to get fruits and juices for a birthday party/graduation party for SnowWhite. Her birthday was earlier in that month. G had arranged for a driver, Vladimir, and he drove us to the local Rynok to buy fruit - we got plums, tangerines, and bananas. The kids get fruit fairly often, but nothing exotic like plums, so this would be a treat for them. We also went to a indoor market and bought juice, cookies and lollipops. When we got back to the detsky dom (which translates as "Children's Home"), SnowWhite is waiting by the door for us and comes running. We have the little party and the kids make a mess with the plums! None of them could unwrap the lollipops, so Andrew and I became the official lollipop unwrappers. SnowWhite went through her gifts and pulled out the toys she didn't like to give to her classmates. She was very possessive and didn't want to give anything up, but we finally convinced her to share. She also had tons of fun with the polaroid camera we brought - telling her classmates to get together for group shots, assigning her friends to "shake" the pictures as they came out of the camera. The kids just LOVED seeing the photos instantly - so it was worth the expense of the polaroid film. When she ran out of polaroid film she commandeered my digital camera. After the party we left the orphanage and Vladimir took us to dinner at a local cafe he recommended. It was empty, but very nice and the food was good. The staff had issues giving us back change when we paid the bill though - and we paid with a $40 bill (200 grivna bill), so that tells you about their economy there - don't ever pay for anything with a bill bigger than a $20 (100 grivna) as they likely won't have change. That night we stayed at Vladimir's mother in laws home/flat. Ludmilla and her grandson (Vladimir's stepson) lived in the flat - we slept in Ludmilla's bedroom, George slept in Dennnis's bedroom, and they slept on the fold out couch. That was the coolest part of our trip I think - staying with an actual Ukrainian family. Ludmilla is a caretaker at SnowWhite's orphanage - though not for her groupa. She knew SW by reputation though LOL. She told us alot about how the orphanage is run, how the caretakers get paid and just the orphanage culture in general. It was eye-opening. The caretakers actually get paid more than the average Ukrainian - they consider being an orphanage caretaker to be hazard pay type of work - like police or firefighters here inthe US - because these kids are "disturbed" "defective" and "genetically inferior." Dennis was a hoot. He is 7 years old - same as SW- as was starting his first day at school the next day. They REALLY dress up kids for the first day of school - this boy had a tuxedo hanging on the door ready to go! He spoke no English, but knew the English alphabet very well- and when he tried to talk to us, we'd tell him in Russian "We don't speak Russian"...so he'd say whatever he was saying again, slower and louder. LOL It was the same thing with the kids in SW's groupa. No matter how many times you tell them you don't speak Russian, they continue to try. SW was smarter than that though - she was very adept at sign language and a few English words. Andrew wow'd Dennis with the laptop, showing him how to draw like SW did, how to play pinball on it and such. These kids picked up computers very well - Ludmilla told us that at the orphanage the kids actually have 2 computers and they get classes on how to use them. Ludmilla herself was a very warm and gracious host. They had no hot water in the building, but she boiled two HUGE pots of hot water on the stove and poured them into the bath tub for Andrew - without us asking BTW. We were fine without hot water, but once she had done it we couldn't turn her down and be rude. Though she worked at the detsky dom, her father and husband (not sure if she was divorced or he was dead? but he wasnt there)were bee keepers. They made honey...so she breaks out this huge honey comb from the cabinet and slices us off some pieces....I really didn't want to eat it as I am really not a honey fan to begin with, but again, not to be rude, I ate it. I almost puked, but I ate it. Andrew was laughing at me. You chew the honey while its still in the comb - suck all the honey out and spit out the waxy comb. Lovely. Next morning we go to the detsky dom again and visit SW- she runs into the little locker room yelling "Mayleesa" again and jumps into my arms. We play with the kids again, and even got to go outside with SW- totally unsupervised, just the 4 of us. We played a bit on what little playground equipment they had and then sat on a bench. G explained to SW everything -and I mean EVERYTHING. That we wanted to adopt her, was that ok with her, yes, when could she go home with us, why was it taking so long, about the change in ministries, about her birth mom, everything! She even asked some very mature and thoughtful questions, which G then answered to her satisfaction. We finally got our cell phone working too and make two short phone calls to our parents in the states so they could hear SW's voice - she spoke in English, but she was just repeating what G was saying haha.Then we started making plans to transport SW and some of her friends to their new internats. The kids needed to be moved the next morning, but neither orphanage had the transportation to do it. If we didn't arrange something the kids would end up on the local city buses with their bags- how scary and traumatic would that be? So we found a guy with an older mini-bus who would drive us. We rented him and his bus for the day and he only charged us 1 grivna per mile - what a deal! It was plenty big enough for us, G, the 5 kids and their caretaker/chaperone.

Trip Report- Part 1

Well we got to Ukraine in one piece with no issues - no delays, no missed flights, and our luggage even got there ok. At Newark we took the little bus thingie to JFK and hung out until our flight left. The sleep treatment Dr. Epstein (Andrew's coworker and mentor) gave us worked wonders - we had no jetlag when we arrived. Did some shopping in the Zurich airport, then finally arrived in Kyiv. The passport control in Kyiv was a royal pain in the arse - huge queues with like 2 people working at the passport counters - it took over an hour. Customs was easier- they just trust you to let them know if you packed anything valuable - Andrew was unsure about our laptop, but when he asked a guard he said, no we didn't have to declare that since it was for personal use. Get out of the secure area and find G easily and then we go outside to find a bus to the city center. After about 45 minutes we are at our flat, our host Ramon gives us a tour of the flat - he is very proud of the recent renovations he has made and his English book collection for his guests. Ramon lived on the first floor, just below our rented flat. He even shows us around the neighborhood and introduces us to his favorite 24 hour shop - Baloo Market. I think we settled in for the night at that point - some of the days blend together in my memory. The next morning we met with Dr. Andrey and his associate Irena - they are from a baby house in Kharkiv and my Andrew and I have been helping them through a charity group we know. We tried to arrange to bring an EEG machine for them (to diagnose epilepsy in the orphans), but could not get the proper papers in time for the trip. So instead we just hung out in the flat with them, drinking coffee, answering their questions about neurology and epilepsy, and making plans for Andrey to come to the US for training.Then G shows up and we head to downtown Kyiv for some sightseeing and shopping. Shopping in Ukraine is very different from shopping in the US- in the US you just hop over to Target of the local mall. Not so in Ukraine - most of their shopping is done in open air flea markets, or indoor mazes of little shops - the exception to this are the few new western-type chain stores that have opened up in Ukraine. So, we went to this market that was a collection of kids shops, went to the Ukrainian version of Office-Depot and bought school supplies for the kids, and walked around the main area around Maidan in Kyiv. That night we walked to G's island (not really an island, but a neighborhood surrounded by man-made channels, like a Ukrainian Venice) and met his wife, his dog, and his crazy neighbor. His neighbor used to be doctor in Soviet times - now he is an artist...His flat was filled with tons of paintings - mostly of sunflowers and melons. Its just amazing to see the enthusiasm in this man for his freedom to express himself, to enjoy himself, and his pride in his work. He's not painting this stuff with top of the line tools either - he paints on pieces of cardboard. I want to put together a little gift of paints and supplies for him and send it to George. We loved the area of Kyiv we stayed in - Livoberezhna. Just on the other side of the Dnieper river from downtown, away from the tourist area. We had 3 or 4 markets, a McDonalds (for coffee, not food - we loved Ukrainian food), plenty of beer tents, a cafe, an internet center and a metro station. We went to bed early that night since we would be heading to XXX to visit SnowWhite the following morning.