ANOTHER “PINCH ME, THIS CAN’T REALLY BE HAPPENING, CAN IT?” DAY

Thursday, July 5, 2007

We got a panic call early in the morning from Yelana: “We have a problem!” It turns out that the SDA is requiring us to get documents signed and notarized from both Nikolai and Maria stating that they will not oppose the adoption of Andry. Without these documents adopting Andry would be very difficult and take weeks or months longer or be impossible. And to be legal, both Maria and Nikolai must have passports to prove their identity to the notary.

Yelana got Maria on the phone. She and Nikolai were in Kiev at their second dental appointment. But, Maria was cooperative, and even more amazingly, so was Nikolai.

We sent Yelana and Vassily to pick them up after their dental appointment. After weighing all the pros and cons of where we should discuss the issues with Maria and Nikolai, we finally decided to let them come to our apartment. Yelena was trying to dissuade us from letting the couple see our comparatively expensive apartment and from getting to "close". But, we finally said, oh what the Hell. So, they see it and ask for a color TV or whatever. We’re already fixing their teeth and have agreed on buying Maria’s decorated eggs to the tune of $100 a month; we’ll deal with it.

Maria and Nikolai showed up with Vasilly and Yelana about thirty minutes later. The children were happy because they had wanted to show them the apartment. We sat around the kitchen table and talked about the problem of the documents and unbelievably both Nikolai and Maria agreed to do whatever necessary. There was a hitch; Maria had a passport but Nikolai had no documentation of his identity whatsoever. Getting a passport could take longer than a month in Ukraine.

We decided the only sensible course was to go to their village’s (county seat) administrators and see what we could work out.

Maria had been looking over Olya’s shoulder while Olya and Andry where showing her all the pictures on Pippa’s computer.


Extraordinary! Maria was getting a good look at all the photos we had brought to show Andry what life would be like with us: Olya’s school, our house, Olya’s room, Andry’s future room, Miami Ad School, the beach, our vacation house, pets, family and friends in Miami, the beach… She seemed to be fascinated. In fact, we took the computer with us on the three-hour drive back to the village (Telizynci).



A look out the van window.

Andry continued to show Maria photo by photo and translate the description in Ukrainian, from time to time asking Olya in Spanish to tell him what was going on in the photo. After two hours, the computer was in Maria’s lap, and with instruction from Andry, she was clicking from photo to photo. She spent the entire trip looking at every photo. And I’m sure it was the first computer she ever touched.


The children hugging while asleep.

When we pulled up at their house, the kids jumped out and ran inside. By the time we got to the door Olya was coming out telling us Maria’s mother and Nikolai’s father were both drunk from too much vino.


Olya was right; the old woman was socked and babbling incoherently. Of course, I couldn’t have understood her anyway, but Andry was telling Olya that his grandmother didn’t know what she was saying. He said she drank all the time.

The weather had radically changed. From sunshine to rain and wind to a cold drizzle and all of us were in short sleeves without long sleeve shirts or coats. Pippa and the children were in shorts. We had missed lunch and only two bags of nuts for the children. And we were very distressed.

We would be back and forth from administrative offices in the village to the house. We went first into an administrative office very close to their house. It was as if we had walked into the Soviet era. We were ushered into an office with old wooden court seats at one end and a fifty-year-old man behind his big desk at the other end. Lots of loud Ukrainian and shoulder shrugging, phone calls and more shoulder shrugging. He eventually told Yelena there was nothing he could do; he would do it but his superior, a woman, would not agree to do what we asked. So we left.

We went then to another administrative building about ten minutes away. This was a notary, a woman doing the talking and an older man, not talking, working on a computer. Well, a little success. She agreed to make the document for Maria (even though it was not her day to work). She could not help us with Nikolai however. After a half hour we had Maria’s signed and notarized document in our hand.

Yelana and Vasilly dropped us (Ron, Pippa, Olya, Andry and Maria) back at the house and they took off somewhere with Nikolai. We spent a little time in the garden. Maria was digging potatoes for us to take back to the apartment (we forgot the potatoes when we left).





Andry showed Olya the vegetable garden.





There are many fruit trees in the yard; cherry, pear and another berry we don't have in the States.



Maria also showed us the new outdoor cooking area they had made since we were there.
Hannah kept talking to us and hugging Pippa. We hadn’t a clue to what she was saying. Andry showed Olya the well and how you turn the crank to pull up a bucket of water. One of the village babushkas must have seen us at the well because she hustled over with her bucket to get water and “talk” to us again.


In about half an hour, Yelana, Vassily came back to get Maria and off they went again. All the village offices would close in a matter of minutes.

We spent more time with the litter of puppies and the litter of kittens,


Hannah and the elder Nikolai, who was also many sheets to the wind. We stayed inside the house because it was really freezing outside. There was no heat inside but the house was tight and it was much warmer than hanging around in the cold drizzle.


Andry translated a bit of what Hannah told us. The whole family (Hannah, her parents, Maria and Nikolai) had worked on the collective farm. She showed us a picture of her taken when she was "much younger."


She also showed us a picture of her parents who had built the house when she was 15.


This house was the big house. The smaller one had stood on the same property about 6 feet in front of the current house. The bed Olya and Andry are sitting on in the picture below is actually part of one of the two wood burning heaters that heats the house.


One of Olya’s only memories of living in the house was of “swimming” in potatoes. Apparently there was a place in or near the house where they were stored. I (Pippa) asked Andry if he could show her that place. Andry lifted up the rug under our feet and started picking up loose boards to reveal a dark hole under the house. It was about 5’x 4’ x 3’ and currently potatoeless. Olya was able to understand her memory.


Olya and Andry were completely bored; Andry seemed more contemplative than sullen. I (Ron) took out my Ukrainian phrase book and did a comedy routine for him mispronouncing all the phrases (I wasn’t trying to mispronounce the words, mind you).


In about an hour or so, all of them returned. Yelana had performed a miracle. She had gone back to the first administrator and apparently they found a way after all to get a document for Nikolai to sign. She told us she would tell us later just how she performed this miracle.

Maria was in the indoor “kitchen”, a very small closet-like space, preparing a meal for us. She was being very hospitable even though she had had four teeth pulled earlier in the day and was in a lot of pain. She had stopped at the local market and bought a bag of things. Very quickly she set a number of small bowls on a tiny table and pulled chairs up to it and asked us to please eat. The children were eating in another room.

Of course there were the expected vodka toasts that are such a custom in this country. Nikolai sat at the table with us. Maria stayed in the other room with the kids. Nikolai declined the vodka saying he didn't drink anymore. We have never seen he or Maria take a drink in all the times we have been with them. I ate cold cuts and a few meat vereneky which had ketchup squeezed on top; a couple of tomatoes and several chocolates. There were also cucumbers and bread slices and orange Fanta, apparently the main soft drink in Ukraine. Olya skipped in to our table a couple of times, just to make contact with us. After dinner Maria gave the kids ice-cream cones and a bag of candy for the ride home.

As we were about to leave Nikolai asked if we could help them with the bus fare for the upcoming trips to Kiev for their dental work. It’s 50 grivanas for each person, round trip. I gave him 300 grivnas for the next three trips. We had no problem with this since we had promised to do it all along. We also gave Maria 50 grivnas for all the food she had bought for this meal.

We left quickly after that with a great sense of relief. We had two critical signed and notarized documents that were essential to successfully adopt Andry. Pippa and I talked at length about the cooperation we’d gotten from Nikolai and Maria. After all, they were in effect signing Andry off to us forever. Why would they agree to do it. He is obviously very important to them. And why did they go to so much trouble? Who knows?

Three hours later we were back in Kiev but before we could go crash at our apartment we needed to deliver our new documents to the facilitator who would take them to the SDA (national adoption center) as soon as it opened in the morning. The SDA had told our facilitator these were the only missing pieces they needed to approve our application. The final approval would come tomorrow, Friday. With that approval we could ask the judge for a court date, which hopefully would be next week.

ANDRY IS BACK TO HIS SUNNY SELF, AN UNEVENTFUL DAY.

Ron and I couldn’t sleep. At 4:00 we got up and alternated between discussing Andry and watching Seinfeld reruns to diffuse our stress. We developed a plan.

At 9:00, so we would have time alone with Andry while Olya was still asleep in our room, Ron and I went to his room to tickle and sing him awake as usual. He laughed and seemed himself again. Then the three of us went into the living room to talk. First we asked him if he still wanted to be adopted by our family; we were afraid he had changed his mind and that was the reason for his drastic behavior change. He said that he did want us to adopt him. Then we told him that our family was loving and always nice to each other. We liked to laugh and have fun together. We explained that the way he acted last night was bad and he couldn't behave like that. Every sentence or two we would stop and ask if he understood. Each time he quickly nodded yes. We explained that in our family, if someone was upset about something we talked about it. He nodded that he understood.

Andry really seemed to absorb what Ron and I had said. When the short talk was over he and I went to pester Olya awake. The night before, after a failed attempt to cheer Andry up, she hadn't felt comfortable disturbing him to get her pajamas which were in his room. She slept in her fathers shorts and shirt. I think she was relieved to awake and see her brother himself again and she broke into a silly and long improvisational dance.



I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for him (or anyone) to suddenly have to figure out how to fit into a new family. This has to be even harder as teenager who is also beginning to wrestle with their identity, independence and the craziness hormonal changes cause.
After breakfast and a couple of rounds of Crazy-8 and a hockey final (Ron is an ace at table hockey but "somehow" the children won) Vasilly and Yelana came to pick us up. We went directly to Hidro Park, only a few minutes drive from our apartment.

Hidro Park is on the banks of the Dnipro River and has an area of somewhat seedy carnival booths, carnival rides and food booths including several that sell whole dried fish.


It also has a lot of activities based around the river: boat and jet ski rental, beaches, volleyball on the sand, etc. However only a fool would swim in the river. The bottom is reputed to have contaminated silt from Chernobyl which is only 30 to 40 miles away. And many manufacturing plants along the river bank still dump their wastes into the river. But there were some foolish people in the water.
We only stayed a few minutes to let the children play the shooting game; the rides didn’t open until 2pm, three hours later. So, we went downtown to have lunch and take in a movie.


Lunch was really interesting. We went to a cafeteria with delicious typical Ukrainian working man’s food, just off Kreschatyk Street, which is Kiev’s equivalent of Times Square. After lunch, I (Ron) had Vassily take me back to the apartment, while Pippa, Olya, Andry and Yelena took in a movie, “Ratatouille” in Russian.

They told me later that they went to a great internet café while waiting on the movie start time. The kids played all kinds of computer games and it’s high on their list of to go-back-to places.

We had a pleasant meal at the apartment. The kids watched the videos they bought earlier in the day. We’re trying to build up a good library of Russian videos for Andry to help keep his language from being forgotten back in the USA.

No sullen episodes. Just the opposite. Many, many times Andry initiated teasing with all three of us. Just a normal, happy day and night. Thanks, we needed that!

Who Said This Would Be Easy?

There have been times in my life when I was having a particular “out of this universe experience” that was so unreal it almost seemed ordinary. This morning was one such time.

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.

Another Family Feast, This Time With a Suspicious Aunt

We hired Vassily and Yelana to drive to Maria’s village (3 hours away) and pick up Maria and Nikolai and take them to the state hospital in Kiev for their 2:00 dental examination. After the exam, Vassily took them to Maria’s aunt’s apartment in Kiev. The aunt’s name is Hallah. She is 68 and the younger sister of Hannah, Maria’s mother. We were invited to come there that evening (for dinner we assumed but we weren’t sure).

We all needed a slow day so we hung out at the apartment all day except to walk to the store to buy cold cuts, cheese and a big tin of cookies to take with us as gifts. Late in the afternoon the children were starving so we gave them a handful of mini Milky Ways and Olya had her second bowl of the day of Pippa’s homemade borsch (big mistake to do that before a Ukrainian family meal).Vassily showed up around 6:00 to take us to Hallah’s apartment.

The aunt lived in a truly soviet-era apartment on the other side of Kiev and the other side of the world from our apartment. Their apartment was very shoddy on the outside. The hallways smelled terribly bad, the paint and the walls were crumbling.


Hallah's apartment door.

All apartments used to be owned by the government and given to the workers. After the fall of the USSR apartments could be “privatized” allowing people to buy their individual apartments but the lobbies, hallways and elevators are still owned by the government. The government isn’t into sprucing up so the outside of most apartment buildings, even ours, look rough.

The inside of the aunt’s apartment was authentic soviet-era but cheerful. Every surface was covered in something: the walls in flowered wallpaper; tables in decorative linens and the sofa covered in a 40 year old Ukrainian rug that looked very much like an American Indian horse blanket.

We were greeted by a big group of people. This small two bedroom apartment housed seven people: Hallah, her son and (pleasant) daughter, their spouses and respective son and daughter and a guinea pig. Maria and Nikolai were spending the night there as apparently they often did when coming to Kiev to visit Andry. The aunt explained the sleeping arrangement––complicated but apparently it worked for them. After some fuss over Olya we sat down to a special dinner.

Hallah and Yelana, our translator.

The table was filled with many dishes, most which were grown in their garden behind the apartment: potatoes, carrots, cucumbers and onions. There was a plate each of chicken, ham and cheese. And the large bottle of vodka that was the first thing to be dealt with. Vodka toasts and clinking of glasses, several times while we politely tried to explain “we don’t really drink much.” Nikolai and Maria sat quietly in their corner not eating or drinking. (After having heard the results of their dental appointment I think I know why!)


Aunt Hallah kept up a steady stream of chatter with Yelena doing a good job of rapid-fire translation. At one point Hallah bluntly asked if we had more money than they did, were we rich? We didn’t bite on that but simply said, “our culture is different than yours.” Yelana suggested to us later that Hallah is pretentious, likes everyone to know “she did better than the others,” much better than her sister Hannah and niece Maria. Yelana thinks the aunt is suspicious of us, that we might give Maria and Nikolai more than she has.

The aunt explained that she receives a pension of 150 grivnas a month ($50) and must work sweeping to support herself. She said it is hard to find good work without an education. That during the Soviet time, before the currency changed, it was better because they could live on their pensions. She had received the same pension her bosses received. Now she works as the cleaning lady for the advertising agency where her daughter is the office manager. The daughter’s husband is an electrician. Both live in the house with their son. Also living in the house is Hallah’s son who paints cars for a living and his wife and baby.

Having dinner with Hallah is like eating with your drill sergeant. She is a conversation monopolizer and openly critical. Our translator told us that when she went to the apartment earlier to drop off Maria and Nikolai and to see where the place was Hallah barked, “Why are you bringing this bandit to my apartment?” She told Maria and Nikolai that it was stupid of the Americans to fix their teeth. It would just bankrupt us.

A little later in the conversation, Hannah said that she would have liked to adopt Olya, but as we can see she doesn’t have enough room. (Good news to us since it is an indication she won’t likely go to the judge to try to adopt Andry.)

Hallah began to press on about Olya saying that Olya is not the happy child she remembered. Olya and Andry as well had been sitting quietly, each engrossed in their Game Boys during the adult conversation. Olya was bored for sure. She didn’t understand the language and didn’t remember anyone there including Hallah. But to make it worse, Olya ate nothing; her tummy was filled with the big bowl of borsch and Milky Ways. We tried to tell Hallah all about Olya, how happy she was, how accomplished in school and sports, but it was a lost cause until the chocolate covered cherries appeared. She’ll accept anything with cherry in it.

Then, because we know how much Olya wants to know about her life before her memories started, we asked Hallah if she had any pictures. We hoped there might be some of Olya as a baby or toddler.

When the photos came out Olya perked up and invited Andry, who had gotten up to help Maria and Nikolai with their cell phones, to come sit between Pippa and her to see the pictures.


Most were of Hallah, her husband and their three children. Historically and artistically many of the old black and white photos were interesting. Young men going to Soviet military duty. Hannah and five other giddy 18 year olds girls on their first day of work at the factory. People working on a collective farm.

There was a photograph of Maria at about three with her mother and grandmother. There were three photographs of Maria as a teenager.





There was a picture of Andry as a toddler, starting his first day of school when he still lived in the village and two of him in Spain, one of those at the beach.





There was also a picture of Olya when was in Spain.


Ron carefully took photos of all these pictures. Olya was very interested in the photo of her taken when she was four.
Fortunately they gave her the picture because I know she would have just taken it if they hadn’t. I don’t really blame her. From Olya’s point of view it wasn’t fair for this unpleasant stranger, Hallah, to have one of the few photos documenting her early life. There don’t seem to be any pictures existing of Olya before the age of four and at four only a handful taken by her Spanish host family.

Maria had brought the eggs she had decorated for us. But we decided not to discuss our idea in front of Hallah. For most of the meal both Maria and Nikolai sat quietly, not saying a word. Yelena told me later that Maria was beginning to get upset saying she would never see Olya or Andry again.

The short dinner was complete, we thanked everyone, and took a group photo of all as Hallah had requested.


Hallah followed us out and so we had no chance to say anything privately to Maria and Nikolai about the egg decorating idea.



On the way back to our apartment we discussed plans for taking Maria and Nikolai to their first dental extraction session tomorrow morning. Between them they need about a dozen teeth pulled before the false teeth can be created. We concluded that Pippa would remain in the apartment with the children and Ron would go with Maria and Nikolai to their dental appointment and make the financial arrangements.

Our trick is to certainly allow children contact without all of us becoming too familiar with one another. Then we must help Maria and Nikolai without them becoming too dependent on us. This is no little challenge. So far they have seemed very appreciative of everything we are doing; the chances to see the children and dental work. When we first saw them today they gave us huge jars of canned apricots, cherries and mushrooms.

Our Daughter is Coming Back

It has been heart-warming to see Olya so deeply bonded with her brother. For these first two weeks she has barely left his side except to go to the bathroom. Sits close to him on every car ride. She has been insisting on wearing the same shirt as Andry. She’s been glued to him. But today we noticed that she has returned now to her mom (Pippa). Today Olya wanted Pippa to wear her red “girl” shirt that matches Olya’s turquoise one. She still loves Andry for certain, but often now wants to divide things: boys in that seat, girls in this, meaning Andry and me in one seat, Pippa and Olya in another. Today she wanted Andry and me to kick the soccer ball while she and her mom played Frisbee. That she wants Andry to connect with me is evident, but she and Pippa have had this very close mother––daughter thing; it’s good to see it coming back. It’s really beginning to feel like a complete family of four.

The day was easy and casual. A late breakfast of French toast and cherry syrup. Heinz makes a cherry syrup here in a large plastic bottle exactly like their ketchup bottle. Everything has to have cherries. And now having seen the house where Olya and Andry had lived together with cherry trees all around, we understand. But there are cherry trees everywhere; Ukrainians are nuts about their cherries.

After breakfast, in fact, we had another cherry event. Pippa had been given the name and phone number of a woman folk art painter, Oleana who was the daughter of one of Ukraine’s most famous folk artists, Marfa, who lives in Kiev. (The painting below was a the painting we had liked of hers from the museum.) Yelana had called her for us and arranged a visit.

The woman and her 27 year-old daughter met us at the lower door of her apartment studio. The studio was one large room, with folk art paintings of all sizes covering the walls. Around the perimeter of the room was a ledge of decorated vases, urns and pots.
There was one large table occupying most of the room. We guessed the table was for teaching art to children.

Oleana explained which paintings were her mother’s, which were her father’s, which were her’s and which were her daughter’s. While the style of Olena and her mother were very similar, the father’s style was more heavy handed and expressionistic. We learned that Oleana’s mother had been employed in a porcelin factory for years painting very exquisite designs. Perhaps the best description is of more sophisticated, more detailed, Pennsylvania German graphics. In World War II she had been captured by the Germans and sent to Germany; she escaped and returned five times. The soviets had her working in the porcelain factory for years and would have her paint special pieces as gifts for visiting dignitaries. She was from a village where all the artists painted in the same style. The village still exists in eastern Ukraine. Marfa is 86 now and doesn’t paint anymore so Oleana is trying to arrange exhibitions to show her work (and want us to take pictures inside the studio.)

While Olean was carefully showing us all the paintings, Olya and Andry were a few feet outside in the apartment’s playground. Actually, to be factual, they were climbing the cherry trees all around the playground, ignoring the slides and swings. Andry would climb high and get the ripe cherries and Olya would eat them. I came out to check them and Olya’s hands were covered and her mouth dripping in cherry juice.

When I came back into the studio Oleana had just brought out a painting her mother did of a large, stylized cherry tree. Perfect. Pippa and I agreed that while we liked all the work we had been shown, we hadn’t found one we would enjoy on our walls. This cherry tree painting however was one we’d like to own; it also has a symbolic meaning for us.
We stayed only for a short time longer to see Oleana’s daughter’s work, who studied graphic design in art school. Very talented and different from her mother and grandmother. Her work was not at all painterly but large graphic, representational shapes that told a story. As we were leaving she brought out something else she was starting to work on – hand painted traditional paintings.

After we left, we went downtown to make prints for Maria from all the photos we had taken when we visited their village. Like any American city, Kiev has dozens of places to make prints from CDs. We went back to a place next to the Mac store we had been to a couple of times. The shop made the prints and also made the passport photos of Andry we will soon need. We first bought some more new clothes for Andry so he would have a different shirt than the Ukrainian football shirt we had given him. No big deal, but in a few years he might rather have some other shirt in his photo.

I’m not suggesting that we are trying to erase his Ukrainian roots however. On the contrary, we want to keep his history alive: we visited his biological parents and family; intend to help them if we can; bought them a cell phone so he can stay in touch by phone and we’re paying to have Maria and Nikolai brought to Kiev to get both their teeth fixed and footing the bill for the denture work.

Well, after the prints were finished we went back to the apartment to cook dinner. The children told us they are tired of eating in restaurants and wanted to eat at home. I cooked a pork roast with roasted beets, potatoes, carrots and onions. Pippa made a pot of Ukrainian borsch to have for lunch tomorrow.

I had bought a DVD player (the fancy apartment had a big flat panel TV but no DVD player). I had let the kids each buy three movies, all in Russian. (We want to have movies at home in Russian so Andry can continue to hear the language. Olya has totally forgotten it.) But I screwed up and let Andry buy a scary vampire movie. Since the packages are in Russian I couldn’t tell what it was really about. It scared Olya (back home I would never have let them buy it) and she slept with us last night.