Seeing Andry for the First Time

Andry’s school campus has many well-maintained brick buildings plus a soviet tank on a concrete pedestal. The main building was the administrative area but also housed some of the children as well. Andry’s room was in this building. The lobby is huge, with very nice graphic murals at each end. There was a large aquarium with healthy looking goldfish. Some of the children were playing with tiny kittens in their end of the lobby.

The children who attend the school are seven to sixteen years old. As we drove up there were teenagers hanging out in front of the school. One of them was holding a puppy. They weren’t unfriendly nor particularly curious.

Yelana, our translator, went to the receptionist who sent her down the hall, Very soon Andry came into the room a little shyly but with a big, happy smile. He sat by his sister. We introduced Andry to Pippa’s parents who had come along on the trip with us, They have been such an important part of Olya’s life with us, we thought they would want to share this same experience with Andry. I don’t think Andry knows exactly how they fit in his life as yet, but he’s apparently accepting of them. He watches Olya carefully and takes notice of how Olya is bonded with them.

We chatted for a while and I asked Andry if he had any photos he could show us. When we last saw him in Spain we gave him a small digital camera with a bunch of memory cards and told him to take photos when he returned to Ukraine of his friends, the school and his family.

Well, as it turned out Andry had done a great job with the camera we gave him. He had photographed his friends, his room, and more importantly, his Ukrainian family: his mother, Maria, his father, Nikolai and his grandmother Hanah. We were so pleased to see the photos of his parents. We had been so curious. (Some of the photos he took are at the bottom of this entry. The first photo is of his school lobby.)

Andry looks so much like his Nikolai, the same facial shape, hair color and physical build. Olya looks very much like Maria but with a wider face. They have the same physical build and hair color. Maria’s nose, however, had obviously been badly broken at some point and so it was difficult to tell what she really looked like. It didn’t help that she was missing all of her front teeth. Many of the older people are toothless or missing many teeth but Maria is only 33. It’s likely that she had been a pretty woman when she was younger and still smiled.

As we were talking our translator returned and said the director was not here but the assistant director had agreed to let us take Andry to stay with us during the adoption process. That was remarkable; we had hoped for this and told it would be allowed but had not really expected it would happen. We promised to take very good care of Andry and and agreed to accept full responsibility for him. We were amazed and very grateful.

Andry went to his room one last time and came back with a suitcase of all his things. (We found out later he had very few of the clothes we had sent him, and not much else. We have no idea what happened to them and forgot about it. We’ll buy him whatever he needs; we had expected to do that; when we got Olya she left with nothing except what we brought her.)