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.