In Edmonton on Business

I guess not all travels are for adoption. I am in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, for 2.5 weeks on a business trip. It's longer than I like to be away from home, but I am seeing lots of friends from when we lived here and very happy to be here. My employer is putting me up in a bed and breakfast that is actually no more expensive than nearby hotels; Julie and I decided a long time ago that B&Bs offer great value. The cold weather is definitely toughening me up for Ukraine; it's supposed to hit -23 degrees C tonight!

If you're going to work in the dark and cold, it's great to start your day with great coffee and a gourmet breakfast of eggs Benedict on smoked salmon with capers.




Some fun indoor things to do in Edmonton:

very professional Glo-puppet (puppets and dancers' costumes are illuminated by black light) outreach performance put on by friends' daughter and other teenagers,

or hang out at the Christmasy West Ed Mall (the largest mall west of Dubai, enclosing a water park, an amusement park, this pool of submarines and full-size replica of Columbus's Santa Maria, and many other attractions and stores)

There is some adoption news, too. After some bureaucracy as bizarre as any we've seen anywhere, we got an appointment today from the Department of Homeland Security to update our fingerprints, which will expire while we are in Ukraine but well before we will solicit U.S. visas; the problem is that the appointment is scheduled for a few hours before I land back in Indiana, so I at least will need to reschedule.

Appointment date!

Great news! On Thanksgiving Day, yesterday, we heard from our facilitator, and our official appointment date is January 25. So we will have some time to get into a groove after the holidays before heading to Ukraine. He says the SDA is closed for the first half of January as well as late December, so we expect there to be a large number of children becoming available for international adoption (after their one-year waiting period) during that time when no one is coming to adopt. Of course, God does not need to play the odds, and at the end of the day there will be only one right sibling group regardless of how many are available.

Expecting answer anytime

Thanksgiving Day is supposedly the last day that the SDA has to give us a response to our dossier submission. Obviously, we are expecting that we will be approved. I talked last week to our facilitator; he confirmed that the dossier was submitted without a problem, and he says there is a chance that we could get an appointment before Christmas, even though we still are expecting it in early January. A December appointment would be inconvenient, since I will be on a business trip until the 16th (2.5 weeks in Edmonton will be a great way to toughen up for winter in Ukraine!), and it is unlikely that we would be able to do very much after the initial appointment if it happens close to Christmas. I'm sure God's got it figured out one way or the other, though. We'll post as soon as we have an appointment date.

Fourth Dossier in Ukraine

We had thought that it would be a matter of 2 or 3 weeks in September to quickly renotarize some papers and solicit a couple of others and we could send this dossier to Ukraine, but we were very wrong. There were delays at a couple of points, and even though we tried hard to quickly keep things moving whenever the ball was in our court, we ended up running out of time to do things the easy way. The final straw was when a bunch of papers got returned to us by the Secretary of State because the notary had signed her name correctly (with a middle initial) on only a couple of documents but not most of them. That makes three different notary errors that documents have been returned for.

We didn't have enough time at that point to confidently do everything by UPS, so I drove down to Indy, and that was when I took a turn to goof up: I had driven down on Election Day, and even though the bank was open to notarize our documents, the government was not. So Julie and I drove down together the next day and breezed through the government building and the DHL shop. The dossier looked pretty good, all clean and notarized and authenticated. DHL actually got the package to its destination in Ukraine in less than 48 hours, although there was no one to sign for it until the next day, Saturday; there's some efficiency!

So we are now waiting to hear from the facilitator if everything got submitted OK yesterday, Thursday, Nov 11. We will post as soon as we have news on that.

Russian Festival, God's Purpose, Topics: Grief

This weekend we went to Goshen for lunch to the Russian festival of the local Russian Orthodox church. Here is a local news article about it. It was fun to see the little kids dressed in very elaborate costumes doing various traditional dances and to eat some of the same foods we know from Ukrainian cuisine. I was pleased to witness what a strong Russian community there is here, well integrated into American life and still successfully preserving its heritage. We overheard even children speaking Russian with their parents. There is also a Ukrainian Orthodox church just up the road from there.

My mom recently met a Ukrainian cashier who invited her to the Slavic Evangelical Baptist Church that is also in Goshen. Julie is meeting a high-school friend this week who also lives nearby and is fluent in Russian. We will certainly have some good support nearby for helping our kids not to forget Russian.

When we walked back into the office, our whiteboard still had written on it a quote that had been encouraging to us during some challenges we had leading up to our Ukraine trip, and it seemed even more helpful in understanding what happened on the trip: "What God did in this case made it perfectly plain that his purpose is not a hit-or-miss thing dependent on what we do or don't do, but a sure thing determined by his decision, flowing steadily from his initiative. (Rom. 9:12, Msg)" Some of the reading we are doing this week is giving us some good ideas of ways we can be more effective at connecting quickly with children and ways we might influence even how the professionals we work with approach the children. However, we don't pretend that any fine-tuning of skills or rehearsing of speeches is going to make the difference in situations like this; God's purposes can not be thwarted by ignorance, by errors, or even by enemies. We don't know what his purpose for us in this adoption adventure is, but we are confident that it is going to be awesome.

A scripture that has been encouraging this week is Psalm 10. Overall, the psalm asks God why he stands far off while helpless victims are being oppressed. The tone suddenly gets more positive in verse 14, though, which says, "But you, O God, do see trouble and grief; you consider it to take it in hand. The victim commits himself to you; you are the helper of the fatherless." This reminded me that it is normal in the world for people to get away with evil and for people to be oppressed, but there is a time when the God who saw everything does intervene, and in the meantime it is right for us to ask to him to do so. The song that was in my head when I woke up on most of days in our last crazy week in Ukraine was Chris Tomlin's Everlasting God, which says, "You're the defender of the weak. You comfort those in need." It was confusing to me to be in a situation where it did not seem like he was doing that or being a "strong deliverer," but that is precisely what confused the psalmist; our limited perspective doesn't change who God is, and he will make things right.

We got just a small taste of the pain that has overwhelmed the lives of children whose life is summed up by words in the verse like "trouble," "grief," "victim," and "fatherless," and that pain was the cost of giving them a valuable opportunity to change their life. Once before I used a baseball analogy, saying that you can't hit a home run unless you swing hard, so we did not regret having gone all out. Now I will also say that you can't get a hit on every swing, but that does not mean that you shouldn't swing; every swing is a potential hit, and a good batter swings confidently, knowing that about a third of them will pay off.

Regarding the word "grief", I'm not sure that it has been clear to everyone what we mean by that. We are not talking about a whiny response to not getting what we had hoped for or to losing time, money, or emotional energy with no apparent result. I think we are OK with those things; this trip certainly wasn't our first disappointment on this adventure. For us, grief is a painful response to being separated permanently from persons we love and wanted to protect whose lives apart from us will be characterized by victimization and tragedy. Lots of things that we see and do here still remind us of the imagined future that we discussed in detail with them.

Tomorrow I'm planning to start sorting through pictures so we can get some more colorful posts again.

Topics: Why would children say no?

It is hard to believe that as recently as Wednesday of last week we were still hopeful that we would be in Ukraine for another 3 weeks and come home with children. So many big changes have happened in the last 6 weeks since we flew out there, it feels like a lifetime.

This week, we have started to get updated documents for our next dossier, and today Julie posted on the wall a checklist so we can keep track of which ones have been requested, notarized, and apostilled.

As we talk with people here, we are getting a better idea of some topics that we should spend more time discussing in the blog. Here is the first.

Why ever would children refuse to come with us?
Obviously, this is a question that continues to haunt us, and from any adult's perspective this decision is crazy, but frankly speaking it is not hard to put ourselves in the kids' shoes. They are in a situation where their basic daily needs are met and where they have grown comfortable and perhaps even confident. Even with a sense of the benefits that could be gained, the decision to give up a reasonable situation for one that would certainly turn their world upside down and leave them completely out of control is not necessarily easy. This is especially true for children whose first experience in a family was horribly negative and whose life without a secure attachment to a parent has programmed them to see control as the key to survival.

There are some specific factors that influenced the situations we saw. It is common for jealous peers to try to sabotage adoptions by scoffing or abuse, and it is hard to know how much of this was going on. The first boy appeared to be hanging onto a dream that his father would come for him; if this was a coping mechanism, it would have been even harder for him to deny it. The second boy clearly was deeply conflicted about his decision, and he was the first child that our facilitator had ever seen refuse an adoption without giving any kind of reason. (Interestingly, he had seen only one girl say no, apparently because girls seem able to bond more quickly to the prospective parents.) This decision could have been the result of something our facilitator pointed out as an unfortunate byproduct of the orphanage lifestyle (and of welfare more generally): thinking that the government will always take care of my needs and losing the inner strength to take responsibility for myself. Even though all the social workers we met were passionate about adoption, we did not get the sense that the orphanages, which are inspected but not managed by social services, actively cultivate the idea that adoption into a family is the natural next step.

On another level, whatever children join our household will have an ideal opportunity to meet and to trust Jesus Christ; the same deceiver that makes all sorts of empty things seem preferable to adoption by the King would certainly have been motivated to pull the wool over these kids' eyes. We definitely had a sense of spiritual battle around us during some of our days in the regions.

Back Home

We arrived in Chicago on Friday morning, twelve hours after we left Kiev, but not too much later local time. We had a great time catching up with Julie's parents, sister, and nephew and my mom over some Chicago deep dish pizza. I was very aware that we had not had pizza, Chinese, or Mexican in over a month, so one of those is checked off now. We got home in time for me to get in on a game night with a few of my closest friends, which was a good way to catch up with them right away.

Saturday we stayed in the house. I forgot how comfortable it is! Living out of suitcases and sleeping in less-than-perfect beds for over a month was starting to get old. We still had plenty of meat and vegetables in the freezer and various carbs in the pantry, and my mom set us up with a gallon of milk, so we didn't need to go shopping right away. Lounging in the living room over coffee gave us a lot of time to talk about what happened and to talk about what our next goals are. We feel surprisingly free; I think we had been for a long time kind of driven by trying to coordinate all the details for this adoption, and now we are back in a place of resting in what God has for us each day.

Sunday morning at church we got to see a lot of people again, and we had a good lunch at Julie's parents place. I'm glad I got back in time for the first NFL weekend. Unfortunately, an intense sore throat set in while I was watching football and pretty much leveled me for the last 24 hours. Julie says it's a classic let-down illness after pushing hard through a big event.

We're expecting to still have things to blog about this week as we sort through photos from the trip and start getting our dossier updated to send to Ukraine again.

Leaving Ukraine

An interesting Coldplay song was setting the mood in the cafe as I sat down just now:

Come up to meet you, tell you I'm sorry
You don't know how lovely you are
I had to find you, tell you I need you
And tell you I set you apart...

Running in circles, chasing tails
Coming back as we are

Nobody said it was easy
Oh it's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be so hard

I'm going back to the start.

We are back in Kiev and have booked flights to leave early tomorrow morning. We stopped at the SDA and signed a petition to withdraw our application, obviously not as enthusiastically as we signed the original petition to adopt. There is nothing more that can be done here towards any kind of adoption without a new dossier, and we already have worked out with the facilitator exactly what we need to do to create one, although we have a lot of other processing to do when we get home. All we know right now is that we love Ukraine more than ever, are more passionate than ever about adoption, and will be given the opportunity on Nov 11 to ask the SDA for a referral to adopt children of any age range we choose. Only God knows how that and the other details of our lives will translate into action.

Right now we are sitting in a cafe taking advantage of our first chance to be alone since yesterday morning, the morning when our last hope for adopting on this trip fell apart. I should fill in a little detail on that. On Tuesday, the girl had said that she wanted to come with us even if her older brother didn't. That evening, the SDA recommended that we try to adopt just the younger two, so we were still hopeful on Wednesday morning; however, when it came to decision time, the girl was not willing. This was hard for us, not only because it was a surprise (she had been very engaging with us from the first day and had actually come to Julie looking for a hug at the end of our last play visit) but also because she communicated her decision with much less conviction than her brother or the earlier boy did. Prior to that moment, every disappointment had been for me softened to some extent by the expectation that God would come through at the last minute to save the day in a surprising way.

That pretty much covers the news. Thanks for your comments and encouragements, which have lessened the added difficulty of experiencing this while alone in an unfamiliar environment. We certainly welcome questions.

I will also paste in some of my personal journaling from last night. It is probably the most efficient way to show that we are not in despair even at this early point. Please forgive any redundancies.

I guess we graduated to a bigger grief. I can’t help thinking that before Morocco we would have been crushed by this one-two punch, so I think we are growing; God noticeably answered our prayers for peace in the last 48 hours, too. In the first referral, we started out with all the odds against us; in this one, everything looked favorable from the beginning, so it was a bigger shock. We were farther down the road of imagining them in our home, and things looked more positive at absolutely every point. The girl’s change of heart was very disappointing, because she seemed to be candid and engaging from the first day, unlike the older brother, who was reserved and brooding a lot of the time; I suspect that she may feel regret much sooner than the older brother because it was for her a momentary lapse of courage rather than a calculated decision.

Bottom line: we gave an awesome opportunity to 3 decision-making kids and 2 tag-along kids, and that is surely a good thing per se. Kids are smart and able to make choices; unfortunately these were not wise enough to make good ones, but we can’t control them. We should not let our happiness depend on these kids’ choices, though, any more than we would while raising children at home (cf. Danny Silk); if we are strong enough to raise hurt children, then we are strong enough to move on to other children who will at least give us a chance. We are more like God in this journey than we ever have been.

We are experiencing this grief, even the same day, with a strong sense of gratitude:

• that we can still have a positive outlook on the big picture (where some have become immobilized and cynical),
• that our eyes were opened enough to accept the awesome adoption offer from our heavenly Father,
• that we are going home to a comfortable and manageable life surrounded by loving friends and family,
• that we gained rich new experiences and skills while connecting deeply to Ukraine,
• that we have a deeper passion for adoption and orphans,
• that we have been blessed in so many ways, after seeing a country that struggled under cruel domination for so long and so many people that still have hard lives,
• that we had the honor of bringing a little bit of blessing into the lives of 5 hurt kids.

Our specific dreams have been dashed to pieces, and I think we will always carry the grief of having been parents to these specific, precious children for only a few days, but our dream of adopting and even of adopting in Ukraine is still alive (even though we continue to give God permission to replace it). One of our daily themes here has been that our efforts are in vain unless he is building our home; they are just our cooperative obedience because he includes us in the process. We have also consistently defined success as obedience, not a specific result, and in this moment he is giving me the joy of being in his arms and the feeling of doing exactly what he made me for. I feel much more empowered to wait for the right opportunity than before, less concerned about the cost, and more passionate than ever about the importance of adopting hurt kids.

End of this Road

We are leaving for Kiev in a few minutes. The brother did not even want to see us today, and the sister said she wanted to go only if he did. This was a surprise to me. Even her body language initially seemed to say something different, but then once a person rejects someone to their face, they don't want to even look at them again or say goodbye. There really does not seem to be any point in staying, and tomorrow would have been our last day to visit in any case. So another referral has come to a sudden end.

We are not sure what we are going to do next. One option is to update any expired documents in our dossier and submit again for the same age range. Another option is to come back in midfall looking for younger kids. It is not unlikely that we will be flying home this week, though.

Critical Days

Beth was right that these are critical days. Today I said a sentence prayer out loud at lunchtime before we headed out and then commented, "This could be a great day." Our facilitator responded, "It will be a great day!" He was confident because he had a long talk yesterday with the older brother discussing his area of concern, which was learning English; at the end he had indicated that if he had to make a decision on the spot it would be yes, but he wanted a little bit of time before making his final decision. The sister was hedgy, but it was clearly because she didn't know what her brother was thinking. After that long talk, we had our best time yet with the older brother, who seemed happy and relaxed. We interpreted that to mean that his concerns had been addressed and he no longer felt conflicted about going.

Well, today was not a great day. The short version of what happened is this. The older brother was like a totally different person and insisted that he did not want to come. The sister insisted that she wanted to come even with her brother trying to get her to say no. The orphanage director (who has been fantastic and seemed as affected as we were today) and facilitator had a long talk with him and there was no reasoning with him; Julie and I also did our best to explain our hearts and to convince him. Our facilitator has done well over 100 adoptions in over 10 years and has never seen a situation like this where a child says no without giving a reason. He likes us, he trusts us, he knows his siblings both want to go, but his answer is no and he refuses to say why.

I ended the session by saying we would come back tomorrow to ask what his reason was. There was no way we were going to get any kind of good response after what unfortunately ended up turning into a marathon session for the boy. It also buys us some time to pray and for the information he heard to sink in. It is possible that he is being threatened by jealous peers. Or it could be something much more complicated. He did get teary at one point, which gives hope that he is at least conflicted. The director said she had never seen him act like this.

For us, of course, it was a kick in the gut. We still have no doubt that God has led us here, even if it ends up being to fly back alone. The facilitator commented to me on the way to the cybercafe that he was amazed that we could be so patient. The only answer is that we know God is in control even of this and he has been good to us so far and will somehow bring good to us even through this. It certainly doesn't mean that we have no tears or that we understand what God is doing.

Tonight is going to be critical. It seems like the obvious thing to pray for is for the boy to change his mind, which after all this would feel like a fairy tale ending. We also pray that he not change the other two kids' minds; if he does, there is probably no point in staying. We are not child stalkers, after all.

Please also pray for us. What is happening is very confusing, especially after some of the other disappointments surrounding this adoption in the last couple of weeks and the last couple of years. Our perspective in these two painful rejections is certainly giving us a lot of clarity about the folly not only of saying no to God's offer of being Savior but also of the dumb mistake we so often make of saying no to God's awesome gifts in favor of the whims of the flesh. We walked into our hotel room this afternoon in shock but also determined not to make the same mistake ourselves by turning to anything but God in our own need.

Sunday in the Park and a Fun Monday

Yesterday in the nice city park was pretty special, although quite an overload for me as so much was going on that I always felt like I was a step behind. The kids definitely had a blast, though. One benefit of using the same taxi driver all the time is that he was able to comment that the kids had excitedly shared all the details of the day with the orphanage director, who met us at the park at the end of the afternoon to take them back. There were several little attractions set up: steerable boats in a pond, a bouncy castle including a dragon's mouth that opened and closed on kids that jumped into it, a trampoline with bungee cords that let you jump extra high, and small electric cars that kids could drive on sidewalks, as well as sturdy steel playground equipment.

Today we had a visit back at the orphanage. Things were more fun and it felt easier to keep the kids busy than in the past. It's nice that we are getting more familiar with each other. We did things like plasticine, volleyball passing, bowling with a dodgeball and empty water bottles. The girl loves to take videos with our digital camera of her little brother's antics, and it gives us a chance to all crowd around afterwards and look.

Things are coming to a head with the decision process. We ended up not having much time to talk about that yesterday. All of the kids are fairly positive individually, but it seems that they need to communicate together privately before being confident to make a final decision, because of course they all need to be agreed in order to go. So we are hopeful, but it is not a sure thing by any means and is forcing us to keep submitting the situation to the Lord (and check occasionally to make sure we keep breathing).

Thanks for your prayers. It is always encouraging to read comments.

Two very active days

As my short note mentioned, yesterday was a great day. The facilitator and I played soccer with the two boys (2 on 2 with a 2-foot goal). Being on a team with the older one gave lots of opportunity for passing back and forth and giving high fives. The two of us spent some time alone, too, passing the ball back and forth like a volleyball.

We were unsupervised again today in a two-hour Saturday morning visit except for a few minutes, which makes a huge difference in the dynamic, since the kids are naturally more reserved when there are peers or caregivers present, and these often feel compelled to give a stream of input in Russian. Even more than that, when the facilitator takes one of the kids aside or wanders off to make a phone call, we actually have much more productive communication even though it is not as precise; it forces us to make direct eye contact and do what it takes to communicate, and probably is important to give the kids confidence that life could work without an interpreter. It felt a little rocky at first, as we had a little more trouble than we had getting everyone to have fun with activities, but it ended up working out fine. The facilitator was very encouraged today, more than yesterday, by the kids' demeanor and responses, even though we still have more connecting to do.

Today we did an English language TPR (total physical response) exercise with the goal of helping the kids realize how quickly they would be able to learn some functional English. The goal is to keep the scope small and focus on understanding and response rather than speaking, so we named a few objects on the table and then had them point to the object that was named and respond to commands like "Put the key on the book." The youngest was a little distracted, and the oldest already knew a lot of the names, but otherwise it went well.

The two boys and I played "volleyball" again today by ourselves for a good chunk of time while Julie and the girl did girl stuff. We played all together, too, though; it's amazing how many activities you can cram into 2 solid hours of play when you are trying to keep everyone interested, though.

Tomorrow we have permission from the orphanage director to take the kids out; we will go to a nearby war memorial park and also out for ice cream or something. I think being in a different setting will be good, especially since we won't have other kids walking by every now and then. We might even get to look at some other Indiana pictures on our computer. Our chaperone will be the social worker, which is great since she is very positive about adoption. Last time she was with us, we went through an album she has of kids from this orphanage that are now in adoptive families, mostly in other countries; the kids were very interested and recognized a few of the children in the photos.

Note from cell phone

best visit so far today, alone with kids (and facilitator), so very thankful. all 3 are fun. the key (again) is older brother's decision. facilitator will try to get some feedback from him tomorrow. if he has any concerns, we want to address them soon. stressful. please pray.

First 2 Days in Thorez

We have been in Thorez near the Russian border in southeast Ukraine for 2 days now. Yesterday we arrived on a very well-equipped train car, although Julie didn't sleep quite as well as I did. The tracks are very rough, and you get jostled in all 3 dimensions, which does wake me up as well, although the constant rocking motion soothes me to sleep instantly whenever I close my eyes. A driver took us the additional 70 km to Thorez, where we checked into the only hotel in town. Unfortunately it has no internet and there is no cafe within a 1 km radius that is open before noon. On the bright side, we are only paying $20 a night for a room with A/C and fridge, and there are two huge supermarkets, a very acceptable restaurant, and a cybercafe right outside the door.

Yesterday was a killer, but (not to keep you in suspense) it had very good results. Specifically, all I had to eat yesterday until 5 pm was a cup of instant coffee on the train and a Snickers bar. Also, we were interviewed in imposing offices by the director of social services downtown (I think in City Hall) and then by the orphanage director (which is about a half an hour drive from the hotel through a sequence of potholes) before we got to visit the kids.

The kids are great, very active and interactive; also, they are all together, so we are trying to connect with and keep busy three at a time instead of one at a time. So far we have had the social worker, a caregiver, and occasionally the orphanage director present for both visits, but tomorrow I think we are going to be much more to ourselves. However, the visits have both been close to 3 hours long, which is fantastic especially when compared with the last referral. Also, the children warmed up to us very quickly. They seem to be extremely close to each other. The older boy comes across as very smart and can already read a lot of English even though he only has one class a week; he is also more reserved although also quick to smile and make eye contact. The little girl is very engaging and full of smiles. The little boy is very comfortable snuggling close when looking at a book or pictures together.

The obstacles that we wrestled with last time have not been a problem here and the children seem to have at least some predisposition to engage with us, too, so we and the facilitator and the social worker are optimistic. It is still very hard to make the kind of deep connection we are working on and to build trust in such a short time, especially when there is such a language barrier and it is stressful at this early stage to know how much is at stake for us and them and yet not have a well-defined path to follow to success. The older boy is very interested in cars; he did not realize that Indy cars were named after Indianapolis, for instance, and he asked me (through the facilitator) if race cars really burned nitrogen; that was fun today, but it will be a while before we will be able to have that kind of conversation (much less conversations about personal issues) without a translator.

Yesterday we met in the orphanage playground on two little benches. We played with a number of toys we had brought, went through a photo album of our home and extended family, and took some pictures ourselves. Today we were in one of the rooms because it was sprinkling at first. That cleared right up and the boys and facilitator and I went out to play with a soccer ball for a good hour. They have good goals and a battered basketball rim at the orphanage, so we had a good time. Julie is having to scramble to collect ideas for group games (indoor and outdoor) from her camp counselor days, since we are working with long visits and short attention spans, and we want to maximize personal interaction that has very simple language requirements.

Both days we have gotten back to the hotel physically and emotionally exhausted (last night I slept 10:30 hours and would have liked more) but we are very happy with how things are going and the children really keep all our attention while we are with them and make the time go fast. It looks like our visit tomorrow is also going to be from 1 to 4 p.m.

Trip to Donetsk, Ukrainian Food

Donetsk is halfway between Zaporizhia and Lugansk, the two cities we have already traveled to this month, so it will feel like familiar territory as we travel there tonight; a driver will be waiting to take us another 90 minutes out of the city. As in the rest of eastern Ukraine, Russian is the primary language, which will be make it much easier for us to communicate with the children. The town we will be in, Thorez, is actually only 15 miles from Russia.

I will be hard-pressed to do Ukrainian food justice in a blog post. It has always been important to me, since my favorite food growing up was vareniki, one of several Ukrainian staples that have been in my mother's family since her great-grandparents were all born here; cabbage borscht and stuffed cabbage rolls also hit our table occasionally. I am on a mission this month to sample as many kinds of vareniki as I can. They are basically what Americans know as perogies, and here they are usually eaten with smetana (a thin, tangy sour cream). So far I have gotten the following types (but there are dozens available in vareniki restaurants): meat, egg/veal liver/heart, cottage cheese, potatoes and mushrooms, potatoes and cheese, cheese and raisins, strawberries, bilberries, cherries, and mixed berries. Ukrainians also like to stuff blini (crepes) and pelmeni (wontons) with similar fillings and eat them with smetana. Come to think of it, they eat a lot of things here with smetana. Another good Ukrainian culinary proverb: "A pat of butter never made anything worse."

People close to me know that I make kefir every day at home, and I'm certainly not going without it here. It is served in restaurants and as easy to find in stores as milk. Most of it is pasteurized, but I've been choosing "bio-kefir" and loving it. It is available with different milkfat contents, too, but even the 1% is so rich and creamy you'd have to taste it to believe it!

Our week in Lugansk region was pretty wild, with something different going on every day, but we always were able to slow down comfortably when we got back to our hotel in its delightful Restaurant Mir. This place was a true haven, and it is my favorite restaurant in the world if you take both price and quality into account. It was decorated with nets, rigging, and fake sea creatures, the service was very professional and friendly, and I would qualify the quality and presentation as gourmet. The menu was so deep that I didn't come close to trying half of the things that looked good in a full 7 days, surely the longest sequence of daily spectacular food that I have had except at Mayca's mother's house in Spain.

What is more, I don't think we ever ordered any dish more expensive than $4; that was the price of most of the seafood dishes, otherwise they were $2 or $3. Here is Julie showing off some cheese curd cakes covered with jam (it is always runny in Ukraine) and smetana.

Another side benefit of being in Europe is that excellent western European cuisine is also available. We have had Italian gelato twice and homemade pasta twice in very authentic restaurants, and across from Saint Andrew's Church and the SDA is a French cafe that could honestly have been teleported from Montmartre (except for Ukrainian staff and bilingual Ukrainian menus). We have also found an amazing variety of seafood in addition to the obligatory caviar; sushi restaurants are everywhere, although we have not tried that here yet.

My favorite soup is okroshka, a creamy, lukewarm cucumber and meat soup flavored with dill. It is pictured here with some delicious vareniki and smetana from Puzata Khata (literally, fat-belly hut), a ubiquitous cafeteria-style chain with tremendous selection where most dishes cost $1 or $1.50.

My baked pike perch dish with Julie's beef medallions in background. Note the "Khortitzya" brand on ashtray: the name of the Mennonite colony that included all the villages we saw, and also the most popular brand of vodka in eastern Ukraine.

Ukrainians normally order a multi-course lunch, and the menus are divided into soup, salad, first course, and main course. There is a section just for sides, and these are paid for separately, even things like smetana and bread; also, every item on the menu indicates exactly how much you get in grams or milliliters, which is very useful. The courses seem to be discrete phases of the meal; once when Julie ordered a soup and a sandwich while I ordered a first and second, we got our food staggered and took turns watching the other eat! A fixed price menu like this one let us get one of a few selections for each course for just $4.50.

Successful Third Appointment

We spent last night in an apartment occupied by a girl from Manitoba who is here teaching English and studying Ukrainian. It is about 45 minutes by bus and metro from Independence Square, but the price is right and it's close to the Blakers. Speaking of the Blakers, we hung out with them most of yesterday, although Art and I went downtown midafternoon to pick up our suitcases that had been in storage at the last apartment. We ate lunch together at an Uzbek restaurant, played San Juan and Roll Through the Ages, and overall found lots of good things to talk, laugh, and pray about.

This morning we showered (this is significant only because yesterday we didn't!) , watched another fantastic Mars Hill sermon from their Trial series on 1 and 2 Peter, and headed downtown in time to get lunch at a vareniki restaurant before our appointment. We were actually ushered into the sanctum 10 minutes before our scheduled appointment time. Waiting on the stairway landing isn't the greatest, but the SDA office is really the cheeriest government office I've been in, and both of the ladies who have worked with us there (Masha and Victoria) are always kind and merry. Both of their offices have a comfortable, L-shaped, tan couch for prospective parents with a coffee table to spread files out on.

We were shown several healthy sibling groups, even from Zaporizhia of all places. There was a lot of joking about our taking one group of four; I think Julie and Masha both enjoyed seeing me getting nervous! For the third time, though, God made our decision very clear. We both felt great from the first time we saw this group of three aged 8, 9, and 10 (two boys and one girl in the middle) and no hesitation or reservation in asking for a referral to them. There do not appear to be any obstacles like there were with the last referral, and their orphanage's social worker was very positive when Masha called her. They just became available for international adoption on Independence Day weekend.

So, all in all, it was a big answer to prayer today, and we are going to keep trusting God for each step. Tomorrow's step will be to pick up our referral papers around 4:30 p.m. and then catch a 12-hour train to Donetsk, the home of Viktor Yanukovich (the controversial pro-Russian president of Ukraine), Shakhtar Donetsk (last year's European champion soccer team, owned by Ukraine's richest man), and Ukraine's giant coal and steel industry. It feels good to be off the bench again, and we are very excited about these children.

Back from touristic break

We are back in Kiev in a coffee shop after a very restful overnight train ride. It was nice to play the role of tourists, and we had a very successful trip considering that we did all the planning for it the same day that we left. Yesterday we were able to do an additional visit to the village that my Thiessen ancestors lived in. Our guide was Victor Penner, a Mennonite whose family remained here in spite of Soviet persecution and may well be related to me somehow. He is extremely knowledgeable about all the local villages and history, having been one of the researchers for the definitive resource on Mennonite history in Ukraine. Looking at his picture, I wouldn't be surprised to see him walking down the street in the Manitoba town my mom grew up in. We took hundreds of pictures in our two days in Zaporizhia, and I hope to come back again with a little more time. Even though we saw a lot of old Mennonite gravestones in a couple of cemeteries, most of them were removed and used for building foundations, so it is unlikely that I will be able identify ancestors' graves. However, it is fascinating to walk or drive on the main streets of the villages where they lived. We visited 6 Mennonite villages and saw countless old houses, commercial or community buildings, and gravestones. One village is now a thriving industrial part of the city; 5 Mennonite factories (originally for carriages and farm machinery) were consolidated into what is now the biggest auto maker in Ukraine, which still uses a lot of the original buildings. Other nearby Mennonite villages range from thriving suburban to sleepy rural to completely disappeared (it is assumed that their building materials were recycled in the 1940s while residents were in exile in Germany).

Mennonite houses are made of high-quality clay brick, with unnecessarily steep roofs originally designed to shed Prussian snow, thick pillars at corners, always two windows in the gable of the short side facing the street, cross-shaped brick pattern from alternating short and long bricks, and decorative layers at ceiling level.

Stan and Ju on the old ferry landing from Nieder Chortitza (where property records from 1847 indicate that my Thiessen ancestors lived) to Schoenwiese (in the distance, where the Mennonite factories were located).

The 600-year-old oak tree where the first Mennonites in this part of the world camped on their arrival. Only the leftmost branch is still alive, but it is surrounded by daughter trees.

Monument to Mennonite victims of Stalinist terror, including Victor's grandfather, made with granite from the Janzen Quarry

Touring in Zaporizhia

We spent 5 hours today touring around historical Mennonite sites in the Zaporizhia area, where all my maternal ancestors lived in the 19th century, so we are pretty wiped out but happy. Round-trip overnight train fare (with a compartment to ourselves each way) and a night in a fantastic little hotel costs the same as staying in Kiev, and we're getting a charge out of the new environment. I'll post some pictures later.

The important news is that, thanks to the hustle Julie mentioned in her post, the document we needed arrived at our facilitator's house today and he was able to translate and notarize it. This means that we will be shown sibling groups that include children older than 8 (and possibly others that may have become available since Wednesday). We also have a firm appointment time: 4 pm on Monday.

Second Appointment

First of all, thank you all so much for all your prayers. This process has taken more courage than the two of us have put together. This morning as we walked to our appointment I just kept telling myself that all God was asking us to do was take the next step.

We sat down in the SDA office at about half past noon. We were shown pictures of a few single kids in our age range, but all of them were doing summer visiting programs in different countries and wouldn't be back in Ukraine until next week. There are sibling groups that are available for adoption, but they don't fit into the age range we were requesting (ages 6-8). As we discussed our options, it became clear that we either needed to A. select a single child and wait until they returned to Ukraine at the end of the month to visit them or B. waive our opportunity at this second appointment, change our paperwork that states our requested age range and try for a sibling group with one or more of the kids older than eight years old.

To make a long story short, we went with Plan B. We've requested our third and final appointment (only three are given) for Monday. We don't know what time it will be yet; we should find out by Friday.

Since we got back to the apartment, Stan has been working nearly non-stop orchestrating a rush order on a home study amendment that should arrive in Ukraine by Monday. Pretty impressive, huh? Special thanks to our home study agency and our parents who are making this all possible.

What have I been doing since we got back? I made lunch, updated my journal, and had a small meltdown (not necessarily in that order). The suspense is really getting to me. Did we make the right decision? What would our family be like with older kids? God promised to give wisdom when we ask for it, so I guess I have to trust that he has given us what we needed today.

Independence Day and another big day

Today is Independence Day, Ukraine's 19th birthday. We have enjoyed fantastic music from a massive stage set up on the square (although we wore earplugs last night in order to sleep); as I type this, some of the most beautiful choral music you can imagine is floating in through the windows, but in the last two days we have had some of the most popular pop groups in Ukraine (we got familiar with some the current hot songs from listening to music videos in our hotel restaurant at lunchtime), folk rock, comic operetta, opera, orchestral music, and a variety of traditional dancing and music.

Being out at noon today was spectacular. The city's main street was closed, and there were different activities going on in the street, for example a BMX bike obstacle course competition. There was blue and yellow everywhere, with a true atmosphere of celebration all over Independence Square and Khreschatik Street giving you the sense that people appreciate independence most who remember what life was like without it.

It is clear from the city's monuments and conversations we have had that the suffering under occupying powers is still very vividly remembered. Just in the last hundred years it is easy to think of a quick list: unspeakable atrocities during the Russian Civil War, the political famine of 1932-33 when all Ukrainian wheat was taken by force to Russia resulting in the death of over 6 million Ukrainians, a brutal Nazi occupation (see the history of Dynamo Kiev for an interesting story of how soccer played into that), the deportation of entire people-groups by Stalin, and the Chernobyl disaster including the Soviet cover-up during the early days when a lot of people were needlessly exposed. Their enthusiasm about independence is a good reminder for us to be grateful, too.

We went back to the square in the evening for about an hour and a half and saw even more impressive acts: opera, orchestra, folk ballet, and lots of traditional dancing (the most interesting was one where two rows of women stretched long colored ribbons between them and then interwove them as they danced between and under each other's ribbons). At the end there were fireworks possibly precision launched with compressed air, since there was no noise and no trail before the airburst, which was consistently just above the building tops, about 10 stories high and 50 yards from us.

Tomorrow will also be a big day, our second appointment at the SDA scheduled for 12:00 local time. This time we have a better idea what the event will be like, but at the same time we are not sure what to expect. We are less optimistic than the first time about getting to see several reasonable choices, and we don't have the same excitement or the mystique of being there on our anniversary. We are very aware of how unable we are to control this outcome and counting on God to drive the whole process and to guide us whenever we need to make a decision.

But faith is moving without knowing

Can I trust what I can't see to reach my destiny?

I want to take control but I know better.

God, I want to dream again, take me where I've never been.

I wanna go there, this time I'm not scared.

Now I am unbreakable, it's unmistakable.

No one can touch me, nothing can stop me.

Forget the fear; it's just a crutch

That tries to hold you back

And turn your dreams to dust.

All you need to do is just trust.

- Fireflight

Dynamo and Folk Architecture

A couple things we had wanted to do if we had time in Kiev have come together in the last 24 hours. Last night we attended a soccer game between Dynamo Kiev and Dnepro Dnepropetrovsk. I could hardy believe the prices; the seats in the best sections were only about $6, and the stadium is only a short walk from our apartment. As in a baseball game, the atmosphere is a large part of the fun, but the action was so much clearer and more exciting than on TV that there really is no comparison, and I had a blast.

A few stats to show the caliber of Dynamo Kiev: They were winners of the European Winners' Cup twice while I was growing up (when I of course thought of them as a Soviet rather than Ukrainian team) and they came close to winning it last year. Historically, they won more USSR championships than any other team, and in the 18 years of the Ukrainian League, they have won 12 times and been runners-up the other 6. Their captain is Andriy Shevchenko, the 3rd highest scorer in European soccer history and voted the world's best player in 2004.

We got to see Shevchenko do one trick right in front of us that I had never seen before: he received a high pass off the back of a heel, looping it forward over his head and leaving 3 defenders behind. The visitors had a shot off the crossbar and a reversed penalty call in the first quarter, but Dynamo dominated overall. Some near misses included a scissor-kick attempt from the penalty spot, a curving corner kick that just went over the crossbar, a shot from within the goalie box deflected by a defender on the goal line, and a 95th-minute direct kick that bounced down off the left end of the crossbar. So the game ended 0-0, but it was an amazing experience. We got a laugh as we stood to leave thanks to a fan who eluded security to shake Shevchenko's hand at midfield and received his hero's jersey as a reward, to massive applause.

Today, we took the metro and bus to the outskirts of Kiev to spend the afternoon in Ukrainian Museum of Folk Architecture and Life, a huge open-air area that has brought windmills, whole farmyards, a village school, and a couple of functioning churches and set them up with authentic tools, furniture, and decoration to show village life from the 18th and 19th centuries. There are over 300 structures on the 370-acre grounds.

There are also demonstrations of traditional arts and handicrafts that visitors can even try: pottery on a foot-driven wheel, archery, egg painting (with wax), and zimbal and bandura players. Handicrafts of spectacular quality are available

for purchase. There also is a one-street neighborhood showing a typical 20th century house from each of the oblasts (provinces) of Ukraine. This visit gave me a new appreciation for Ukrainian culture and an idea of what some things might have looked like for my ancestors that lived in rural Ukraine. It also was nice to get out of the city into a very natural environment again.

Renewing our strength

It was surely what we needed to have a few days here with little required of us except to eat and to sleep. We slept for almost 12 hours on the train to Kiev and have had good solid nights since then after the intensity of our week out east, so the jetlag of our first week is long past. The first 3 days back were kind of surreal, with a lot of tears, although Friday we woke up with more of a sparkle and benefited from going through all our photos with the kids and comparing our recollections of what happened. Having high speed internet in the apartment has let us stream worship music, and we got to watch a very helpful and timely sermon online this morning. Being alone for the first time since we landed in Ukraine has made it easy to talk and pray and praise any time we want. We have really enjoyed being in the beautiful downtown area and doing a lot of walking.

Yesterday we actually woke up quite cheerful and trusting, and we were encouraged to see the first positive thing since Tuesday morning with the granting of a very favorable appointment time in the last hour or so of work before the holiday weekend. We certainly don't minimize the gravity of what happened with our last referral. Even though it was for only a few days, we honestly felt like these were our children, and at least one of them saw us as parents. There are a lot of other feelings that go along with that, and there were a lot of intimate moments with both of them over the course of 7 days; we have decided that it is not healthful to pretend that it never happened but that we should celebrate and mourn it as something very sweet that did not last long.

We did everything we needed to in order to bond with the children, and it was surely the right thing to do, even though it opened us and them up to a lot of pain. If we had been cautious and not fully opened up our hearts to the children in the last few days, we would be wishing now that we had. The way we see this is that you have to swing hard if you are ever going to hit a home run, and we came very close to hitting a home run even though we don't understand right now why we didn't.

What is new in the last 48 hours is the thinking that we are willing to swing hard again and the ability to trust again that God is able to work out a good adoption for us. What is most troubling right now is the undiminished confusion over what happened. We know what it looks like to see God work awesomely and to hear his guidance, especially from times in Morocco when we were under a lot of pressure or faced big obstacles; we saw that happening again here and it filled us with hope, but this sudden reversal and hard result has left us with a lot of confusion. It seems impossible that he could be any clearer next time, and we certainly don't want to go to our next appointment with the attitude that we are settling for second best.

Experiencing a new level of anguish and opposition here has given us a deeper appreciation for some of the psalms. Psalm 31 has stood out, especially as worded in The Message. We are also aware that we are going to grow from this; we will have new strengths and hopefully some of our idols less strength.

Frankly, we still hope that the boy would change his mind and things would still work out after all. We have even prayed along these lines, and you may wish to do so still, but we are no longer spending time thinking about that so as to free ourselves to be fully available for the next referral. One real concern about it is (again) that God will make the right children available and that we would recognize them; our facilitator was very surprised last time that there were so few children shown to us, and it would be very discouraging to walk in there after waiting for a week now and not to know what to do.

Second appointment scheduled

We stayed close to home today so we could go at short notice to the SDA to sign an acknowledgement of our appointment if we got a call. We finally got the call close to 4 p.m. Also, they made an exception and said that we could sign at the time of our appointment, which was fine with us. This is exactly the news we were praying for: the appointment is Wednesday at noon, which is about the earliest we could have hoped for.

Since we have a little time to ourselves this time in Kiev, we have been able to connect some of the areas we reached in our first weekend by car and metro and feel more comfortable getting around on our own. It was a gorgeous, sunny day, so we decided to go for a touristic walk of the side of downtown Kiev that we aren't familiar with yet, which includes historic aristocratic

residences, the government buildings, and the parks along the river. Some of the highlights were the presidential administration building, the parliament, and some monuments in the gorgeous parks; I'm pretty sure that Kiev beats Edmonton as the greenest metropolis I have seen.

We ended the walk by St Michael's church (just up the hill from our apartment).

Our apartment is in a very convenient location overlooking the main Independence Square, which includes a two-level, underground, Western-style mall below the glass dome. (There is another underground mall nearby that is basically a long chain of stores that runs underneath the city's main street. Under many major streets in the city, pedestrian underpasses and metro accesses contain a surprising number of stores, vendors, and sometimes even restaurants.)

Waiting for second petition

We went to the SDA today to check on the status of our second petition for an appointment. It is on the director's desk for signature. The office does work tomorrow even though they do not give Saturday appointments; this means that there is a chance that they will set our appointment date tomorrow. We are hoping that we get one for Wednesday. Monday and Tuesday are holidays (Independence Day), so a Wednesday appointment would give us a chance to see children who became eligible from Saturday to Wednesday. Also, even a week feels like a long time to wait with nothing happening.

It has been very cool with occasional steady drizzles since we arrived in Kiev on Wednesday, a huge change from our first time here; those had been the highest temperatures seen since they started recording them, and it had not rained in months. We had a picnic in the Central Botanical Gardens on a bench inside a little shelter in a forested area that was perfect for two . The gardens are very large, and you can completely forget that you are in the city, a wonderful change from the bustle of Kiev and the dreary poverty of the outlying regions. We also checked out a tropical insects exhibit and one of the two Orthodox monasteries on the grounds; photos were not allowed inside the church, but it was interesting to watch a monk anointing a fancy new car for a couple from a golden jar, opening all the doors and even the trunk and hood. We had a nice time walking around under umbrellas but didn't stay as long as we would have if the weather had been nice. Just as well, because we got back just as our facilitator was calling to have us meet him at the SDA, which is an easy walk from our rental apartment.

Back in Kiev

Back in Kiev at 9:30 this morning after a 12-hour ride on the night train, which was extremely comfortable and air conditioned this time in first class. Julie and I had a compartment to ourselves. Not bad for $50 a person.

We applied today for another appointment at the SDA. We don't know how long that will take, probably longer than usual since this is vacation month and Independence Day is coming up.

Our job now is to regroup emotionally for the next step. Not sure how long that will take either.

The fellowship of sharing in his sufferings

We will probably be away from the internet for a while and need to let you know what is going on. We are taking the train back to Kiev today and will ask tomorrow for another appointment to look at more files, although right now it is impossible to imagine choosing any different kids. We had finally given ourselves permission to think of these as our own. We don't really understand why so many barriers were miraculously removed only for everything to be stopped today by the simplest thing; moreover, it was the thing that until yesterday was giving us hope that the other problems would not be showstoppers.

After about a week here, we were finally connecting well with both children and there were no apparent obstacles remaining. We had a hard time gaining much access to the little girl until Sunday evening, and she was very quiet with us until Monday evening, when she first said she wanted to go with us to America. The boy, on the other hand, we have visited once or twice every day, and all along he has been happy and saying he would like to go with us. Yesterday, when we were ready to start paperwork toward adoption, he began to refuse. This morning, despite the girl's pleading, he insisted that he did not want to be adopted. We've been surrounded by support from some of the professionals here as well as some of the extended family members of the children. However, by law, we cannot proceed without the child's consent. The matter has been thoroughly explained to him by several people, and we are all convinced that he is not inclined to change his mind although he was not open about his reasons.

Naturally, we are devastated by this unexpected response. Our hearts are heavy to think of the future they may face because their record now states the boy has refused adoption. We now have a glimpse into how our heavenly father must feel when people say no to him.

Pray for healing for our hearts, confidence that God is still in control, and peace as we process the events of the past week. Pray also for these precious ones who face a difficult future.

(Note: Comments are now enabled again. Thanks for your encouragements.)

No Apparent Progress

Today has been a discouraging and exhausting day. Does that mean that tomorrow will be a good one? We were not able to get any paperwork started, although we were able to spend time with both children together once in the morning and once in the late afternoon. It was clear that God was at work at various points in the day, even though it feels like we took a step backward overall. We are also counting on him to open doors tomorrow, when we expect to find out whether or not we can continue our efforts in this region.

We have been obliged to disable our comments section for now, but please continue to email us; we appreciate the encouragement and prayers!

First Time Together

Today had a discouraging start when we traveled half an hour by taxi to see the girl at a scheduled time only to find out that she was not in fact available. It was frustrating because two of our three visits with her had been cut very short. We explicitly submitted the situation to God and made the best of it by going to play with the boy before lunch instead of before supper. It ended up being our best time together so far, both fun and relational.

We went back to visit him again at our usual time and the first thing he told us (through the window) was that she was here. They normally are in the same institution seeing each other all the time, although they have been in two different places since before we arrived and haven't had the chance to talk about us. However, our facilitator was able to bring her out to join us while we were playing a game with her brother. I happened by chance to know enough Russian to announce, "Here we are together now for the first time!" and our facilitator took a lovely picture of the four of us, with the girl happily sitting in Julie's lap and the boy between us. Another highlight of the day was finding out that she had asked our facilitator when she saw him where Mama was.

Tomorrow will be an extremely important day as we go to the social worker's office to ask her to start doing the paperwork. We don't take any step for granted. It is somewhat overwhelming to hear how many documents and offices are involved even before the court hearing, but we'll take it one day at a time and are praising God for his clear answers to prayer so far. Unless he does the building, our own efforts are in vain. (I noticed for the first time this week how well that familiar verse sets up the second half of Psalm 127, which is about the Lord blessing people with children.)

Saturday Visits

We had separate visits again today with the boy and the girl, both with lots of smiles. In the morning, we had to cut our visit with the girl short because of forest fires nearby; we meet with her in a park area outside the gate. We could see the smoke in the road beyond where we were waiting, although we couldn't see any fire and I did not get the impression that there was a threat to people. There were no interruptions in our evening visit with the boy, which was very comfortable. We also had calls today from two important parties in the process that were both very encouraging.

The purpose of these daily visits is of course to build a relationship with these children that we already love. This is important for personal reasons (to start bonding as a family while still in a familiar environment so they will feel safe because of us when they leave it) and for procedural reasons (since they need to formally express a desire to be adopted by us). It's a big thing to do in just a few visits and an artificial setting.

We are journaling about what is happening and intend to post pictures and more details about our visits with the children at a later time.