Blessings - Full Circle

Blessings

In the morning, after breakfast, I was busy cleaning the hotel room. The staff NEVER enters your room, so you are in charge of changing towels when you feel like you need new ones, changing the sheets, scrubbing the tub and sink, and refilling toilet paper. John is happy with this arrangement as he feels his laptop is more secure. Trash can be left outside your door in the morning – but we usually run it downstairs on our way to breakfast.

As I poked my head into the café kitchen to exchange towels, I noticed that the cook and the bartender girl and the waitress were busy at a stainless steel table. The cook had rolled out dough and cut circles with a shot glass. A large bowl of uncooked ground pork was nearby with the tiny spoons that we use for tea in it. The ladies were busy, laughing, and making pelmeni. I had never set foot in the kitchen, but after I realized what they were doing, I wanted a closer look! Pelmeni are little pockets of dough filled with ground pork and then boiled. They are traditionally served with butter or in a soup with bits of mushroom here. We have discovered that they taste a lot like ravioli when you leave off the butter and top them with Barilla spaghetti sauce. Only buy Barilla – the other brands taste like cocktail sauce.

Rather than asking if I could help, I washed my hands really well, dried them and came over and grabbed a chuck of dough and a spoon. They showed me how much pork to put on the dough disk, and then you fold in half like a small turnover and seal the edges. You then lightly pull the ends of the flat side of the turnover about an inch on each side, touch them together, squeeze to join them and tuck the joined area under (like arms coming around you in a hug). Then you put them on a floured cookie sheet, making sure they do not touch each other, and pop in the freezer. Once they are frozen solid, you can transfer them to a bag.

I had a great time the short time that I helped. I think I was making them nervous as they probably worried the owner would drop by and I would be found in the kitchen. I can see that this would be a great female bonding time and a lot of fun –especially if you understood what everyone was saying! John came down to see where I was, saw what we were doing, went up for the camera and got a few pictures. Hopefully I will be able to make pelmeni for the kids when we get home!

We were having a rather down day, other than the Pelmeni Lesson, as we read some of our paperwork from the Facilitator’s company. I know that some people come over without a Facilitator to help with adoption. I am not sure how they can handle everything, unless they are fluent in Ukrainian or Russian (depending on the region they are adopting from). The trick is to shop around to find a Facilitator that someone else highly recommends. After paying a rather hefty sum in the US for the adoption (Dossier translation and submission), which increased when we added a second child (why when the child is a sibling and residing in the same orphanage is unknown), we paid another even more hefty sum in the Ukraine when we arrived.

We received a $50 credit for our lodging per night during the period before the court hearing. After the court hearing, we were on our own dime (well actually everything is our dimes – only they hold them) for the 10 day wait. We thought that once the hearing was over, we would be back to using the funds given over to pay for the lodging until we went home. Our hotel, the only one in Gorodnya and an hour radius, was $50 per night (outrageous when the average UA blue collar worker makes a hundred to a few hundred a month in salary). This is when we read the paperwork, that we had read at home but didn’t read-read, that said during the wait after the request for passport (up to 20 days per the woman that runs the passport office in Chernihiv had threatened the previous American couple when the US Embassy says the wait should be less than 10) we would also be on our own dime. So basically we pay for the Facilitator and Driver’s lodging when we are not paying for our own lodging. All food is on us. Although Gorodnya was $50 per night, Kyiv is very expensive and we figured it would be over $100 to rent an apartment with two rooms so that the kids would have their own room. Food in Kyiv is also outrageous – TGI Fridays is more expensive here than at home for example. It was in this depressed and broken spirit that we headed over to the Internot to see the kids.

When we arrived, after stopping at the market for the afternoon snack, we couldn’t find Mari. Her entire building was vacant. Unusual on a Saturday. There were also 4-5 cars parked out front, also unusual. We headed over to Misha’s building and started on our normal routine (help the kids get dressed after nap in their multiple layers, prepare snack, clean up after snack, and play for a while). We never have visitors at the building and the doors are kept locked. We were busy with snack preparation when we heard a knock on the door. A local villager and her children were dropping off some cookies, candy, and large bags of fried pork puffs (kind of like cheetohs, but not orange and made from pig fat). Jonna said the kids loved them! Yum! Jonna said this happened every so often. How sweet of the villagers. Then we heard another knock and outside was a large group of people carrying small boxes for the children. They had just come from a program in the school building, for Teacher’s Day, which was the previous day.

The group entered and started speaking Ukrainian to me, I mentioned that I was not their caregiver, that Jonna was. John welcomed them in also. The kids swarmed on the visitors and the boxes. Someone, I don’t remember who, started speaking English and we discovered that one of the visitors was American! She is a Missionary, from North Carolina, named Allyson who currently lives in Kyiv. We told her why we were there and showed her Misha and mentioned adopting his older sister. John pulled out his cell phone to show her Mari and Duncan’s photo and she said “Masha”? Masha is Mari’s diminutive name. We said yes. Apparently she sat next to Mari during the program and hoped that someone would come to adopt her. Talk about prayers being answered!

We gave her a quick tour of the building as we are now experts and know every room and have free reign. I then confess to her our depression over the huge price tag of adopting these kids and how very little of the money is actually given to the Orphanage – where it could do the most good! Beyond giving the Director the sum that he requested for a “donation” we also bought two large electric radiator heaters and a new LG vacuum cleaner (able to be used bagless to save the Orphanage money in the future). We purchased as many DVDs as we could find for the kids at the Bazaar and left them a bunch from our binder that we brought over (in case of rainy days during bonding time). We would have loved to have spent our donation on a new stove for the Baby House and whatever items Mari’s caregiver needed – like coats, hats, and clothing. Instead it goes into a black hole and we pray that it will be used for the kids. It is so nice to speak English to someone, other than my spouse who I have been cloistered with for over three weeks! We explain that we are running out of the funds that we brought and that the stay in Kyiv is a concern. This is when she says “Why don’t you stay with me”. We are thinking sure; you want 4 strangers – one of which is a 5 year old – to stay with you. She stresses yes that she would really like us to. We almost fall over. She mentions that she has a king-sized bed with a pillow top mattress, three bunk beds, a pull-out couch, and a tub. She will give us the bed, she’ll sleep on the couch, and the kids can have the bunk beds. We are thinking no way, but to be honest, she had me at “pillow-top mattress” after weeks of sleeping on what we have affectionately termed “our piece of the rock”.

She then said she was leaving on vacation over the next weekend, so the place would be ours. Okay, we are not the kind of people who stay with someone we don’t know. I hate imposing on my Jr. High school girlfriends when we visit them. Allyson confessed she is not the type to invite strangers to stay with her. Something about it felt right … did I mention “pillow-top mattress”? Really, her sitting by Mari during the presentation, and her being in our building, during the time we always visit Misha every day. We were probably the only Americans in Gorodnya, possible the only Americans in the Chernihiv Region, that afternoon and we all end up in a tiny building at the back of the Orphanage at the same time.

It was then that I noticed the boxes that the group, a Ukrainian church group from Kyiv, brought to the kids. They were full of toys, crayons, stickers, small trucks, and candy. They were shoeboxes. They were labeled “Operation Christmas Child”. I almost fell over. We have assembled boxes for 8 years for OCC, when I heard of the program the first time at my MOPS group at Church. For several years we have volunteered to transport the many boxes given by our church members to another church, further north, that OCC parks a semi-truck trailer at to collect the boxes. We have then joined the Pastor of that church in praying over the entire truckload of boxes for safe transport and to bless the lives of children around the world and to spread the message that they are loved by a wondrous God. I have volunteered at the Distribution Center in Denver pulling out plastic snakes, chocolate, play weapons, money, porcelain dolls, etc. and re-filling the boxes with McDonald’s toys and donated toothbrushes! This is when I knew everything was meant to be. Blessings - full circle – how fortunate are we?

P.S. Thank you Allyson, the pillow-top mattress is the most comfortable bed I have ever slept on!