Vasilly and Yelana picked me up around 9am as we had planned and we drove to the apartment of Hallah in another part of Kiev. Maria and Nikolai were waiting in the peculiar squatting position we see all over Ukraine that is not seen often in the States.
Maria and Nikolai sat in the back seat of the VW van, I was in the middle seat (Pippa and the children stayed back in our apartment), Yelana in the shotgun seat and Vasilly driving. We drove forever to avoid the traffic jams of downtown Kiev during a workday.
At last we pull into the Soviet style apartment complex and up to the door of the State Hospital (dental unit). The place looks like it’s just another part of the residential housing. Inside there are a half dozen people waiting on a long padded bench. A lazy cat is stretched on the bench taking a lot of space. No one makes the cat move. Doors open and close, various nurses in various types of uniforms come in and out of the rooms. One fat man approached a dentist as the dentist came into the hall and everyone burst out laughing. Apparently the man had just left his teeth on the train and he wanted help from the dentist.
The dentist attire is really hard to take with a straight face. First of all they wear no shirt under their white coats and each one seems to have more than a normal share of chest hair. More ludicrous however is their white caps. They are identical to our old fashioned butcher’s caps. I would have a hard time having one of these guys do a root canal on me.
(Is this where the phrase “the surgeon butchered me” came from?)
When it was Maria’s and Nikolai’s turn, Yelana and I also went in. The dentist already knew I was going to pay for whatever the couple needed. There was a lot of Ukrainian language flying around and a lot of scribbling on paper that was easily translated as lines of grivna’s. From the prior examination the dentist told us that he first must take out more teeth before he could begin treatment and only after that, could he make new teeth. I was given two choices for both Maria and Nikolai–the easier, cheaper way or the more costly beautiful mouth way. I opted for the pedestrian version for Nikolai and the cosmetic jewel for Maria. Bottom line about $3,000 total. (I can’t imagine what this would cost in the States.) I paid the first installment so the dentist could get started working on them that very morning.
We left them at the hospital to go and pick up Pippa and the children. That meant going through horrible traffic to get to our apartment. Then back through the same traffic jams on the way back to the hospital to pick up Maria and Nikolai and then once again through traffic to get to Sheschenko Park. We needed a place to sit and discuss with Maria and Nikolai our idea of a way to help them financially. The causal setting of the park’s outside restaurant with its soft, easy to eat, blini (crepes), and a playground where the children could play while we talked would be perfect. Except, the outside restaurant cooks take their break at 12:30. I guess cooks have to eat too.
We had to eat at the somewhat formal inside restaurant where Olya had, the week before, lost her retainer. Vasilly and the children sat at one table while Yelana, Maria, Nikolai, Pippa and I sat at another table just out of their hearing range. In case Maria or Nikolai responded in a negative way we didn’t want the children to hear. We had already shared our idea with the children and they thought it was really good and wanted to do whatever they could to help. We had also explained to the children that we didn’t want to just give Nikolai and Maria money. We wanted to help them find a way to earn the money so they could feel better about themselves.
As soon as the ordering was completed we told the couple something like the following, “We would like to help you. And we have an idea of how we can do that. The reason we asked Maria to decorate eggs in the Ukrainian style was to make certain she could do it and liked to do it. We would like for Maria to decorate eggs, twenty eggs each month and ship them to us. We will pay $100 for the eggs. We will also advance Maria the money for supplies and equipment to make the eggs.” We added that we intended to teach Andry how to make a web site. The site would be a way of selling Maria’s eggs. This would also be a good way to teach Andry some business principles. (We’ll try to do this but it was mainly a way to let Maria and Nikolai feel like they would also be helping Andry by decorating eggs. We doubt the eggs will sell. We’ll just have closets full of traditional Ukrainian eggs.)
Maria's eggs
Both Nikolai and Maria seemed very pleased with the idea immediately and agreed to do it. Nikolai told us that Maria likes to draw and was the only person in her village who has such a talent. We gave Maria some books on egg decorating. She immediately began pouring over the books.
We also asked them some questions. They said life was easier during the Soviet time. Everyone got a salary. That until five years ago they had worked on a collective farm. Maria milked cows, about 40 a day, there were 80 in total. Nikolai took care of the horses that pulled the wagons used to gather and haul the food. (While Olya doesn’t remember much from the time she lived in the village, she has a couple of memories of being lifted onto a horse and of riding on hay in the back of a wagon.) Finding work in the village has been hard since the collective farm closed.
After lunch we drove to the outside of the city to drop them off at a bus terminal. The trip back to their village will take them about 3 hours. We gave them the bus money for this day and the next trip they must make for their dental appointment. Then we were off to meet Vlad’s assistant in a parking lot who had a letter we needed to sign requesting a court date from the judge.
Unfortunately, the SDA still has Olya officially listed as “available for adoption.” To prove she is adopted and adopted by us, Vlad has to go to the courthouse in the region where her adoption is recorded to get a certified copy. Then he has to take it to the SDA where they have 5 days to get it officially recorded. That “official adoption recording” is the last missing piece we need before the SDA will officially approve our dossier so we can request a court date with the judge. Time wise this means we lost about five days.
Fortunately, Vlad worked something out with the judge. Tomorrow Vlad is supposed to meet with the judge who has said he will give us a court date without the “offical adoption recording document.” We can bring that document as soon as the SDA completes it. With this news we might have lost a few less days. Tomorrow we will find out.
With the paper signed we decided to have Vasilly drop us off at a Japanese restaurant very near our apartment. All of us like the food there very much. Once in the restaurant, a dark gloom slipped into Andry. From this happy, cheerful kid with the great smile, he changed into something else. He stopped speaking to all of us. Sat glumly, angrily and refusing to answer any question or make any response. He ate his food but that was it. The meal-time was a disaster. Olya, like Pippa and I, was dumb founded. As best we can tell, the catalyst for the transformation happened when he wanted “Burn” (a strong caffeine drink like Red Bull). When we were at this very same restaurant a few days before, he had asked for the drink and Pippa told him no. He pouted for a couple of minutes and then was fine. This time however, Pippa didn’t refuse him the drink. The negative came from Olya to him saying in Spanish “You know Mom won’t let you have it.”
A few days ago he told us that in Spain he drank Burn whenever he wanted and that he watched R movies. He had wanted to buy a scary R rated movie and we told him couldn’t do that until he was 17 and the legal age in the United States to watch movies with adult content. We explained that families are different. That these are the rules in our family. We felt he was testing us for control.
The fifteen-minute walk back to the apartment was very unpleasant. He would not speak to anyone and walked ahead of us.
As I write this, Andry is alone in his room refusing to join us. He’s been doing this for hours. We feel sad for him. He answers a direct question, such as – Want something to drink (no)? Are you ok (yes)? He won’t talk about what’s wrong. He remains stone-faced and unmoving. He keeps his door shut against us. Periodically we check on him to see if he is ready to come out to see a movie or play Crazy-8 with us (no). Making it worse for him, the cable is out. The only channel the TV gets in his room is a very snowy, cheesy looking, romance movie. Pippa took him the Game Boy and several games he hadn’t yet played. He hasn’t touched them.
Of course we aren’t going to permit this sort of thing in our family. And we don’t have enough language without our translator around to set rules so Andry can understand. I suppose we will have to wait until tomorrow morning to a have a session with Andry explaining how things must work in our family––what’s acceptable and what is not—how family members are treated. The quandary is that we are only days away from the appointment with the judge. How will the boy accept our rules? Will he “run away” from adoption with us? How strong can we be? I am not talking about punishment at all but just the act of discussing our expectations of him. Can he accept such a dialogue? From what I am seeing at the moment, I don’t think so.
This is difficult for all of us.
Let’s see what happens when the sun comes up.
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