Bureaucracy Jungle_Day14

We woke-up this morning, feeling shell-shocked and worried at the new hurdles placed before us yesterday by the Ukrainian government, but went to the computer to see kind words of encouragement on our blog!!! We so appreciated each and every loving thought. Next we checked our email, and learned much from Pam's research (thanks so much Pam) and our facilitator Galya, that we knew the next step was to start making phone calls to the Embassy and our Government.

Pam, who had adopted 2 years ago, had a name and number for us of a person that had been fantastic at helping her and Len in their adoption process, so we started with that phone number. Unfortunately it was not a direct line, and after trying multiple phone tree branches, David decided to be brave and push #1 - for emergencies - the line used in case of an American death on Ukrainian soil. This seemed quite brazen until after doing so, he was simply greeted by another voice-mail box. We are not sure what will happen to us, if we should have an emergency involving bodily harm as we are not looking forward to hearing a voice-mail box at such a time. He left a message, but we have not heard back from that number.

Luckily we had one phone number that was a direct line to the US Consulate in charge of adoptions, but the person we most wanted to talk to, wasn't in and had to leave a message. Then we called a more general direct line at the Consulate and had a lengthy and frustrating call with someone who basically said, "we're so sorry about this mess, but there's nothing we can do about it, it's between you and the Ukrainian government."

So, our next step was to try and get a better number for the contact from Pam from the person we were talking to, but as luck would have it, her contact was no longer in Ukraine, and they refused to give us a number for the new guy...they kept giving us the same number we had used to report dead bodies. David continued to persist, asking to speak to a supervisor, but was told the supervisor was at lunch. After much discussion, I heard David say, "I just don't believe you, that everyone at the Embassy besides you, is at lunch." I guess the speaker was so caught off guard by this comment that she suddenly changed gears and did give David a better phone number than we currently had.

Time was running out, and we had to keep our appointment with the girls. We were glad that they didn't understand all our worries and were just glad to see us. The germs of the younger one had spread to the older one who was beginning to feel a bit worse for the weather, so we all just hung-out and played games. It was nice to feel so at home with them, and we so hope we will be bringing them back soon to U.S. soil.

While we were at the orphanage, we got a returned call from the U.S. Consulate and they had actually taken to heart our pleas for more information. They still didn't know what would happen but seemed to have a best-case vs. worst-case scenario for us so that helped. It appears that the best-case is the Interpol search will be short and sweet, coming back quickly, and not delaying us significantly. The worst-case is it could be a delay of up to 45 days - ugh!! Hopefully we will have more information by the end of the week which way it will be going for us. The good news is we have something positive to hope for!

The beautiful pictures on this post are of hand-painted murals on the inside walls of the orphanage. As you can see they are wonderful, and there are more we will share with you. It shows the warmth and love we see in this place dedicated to the care of these dear children.