First visit

After a 16:30 hour train ride, we arrived in Uzhgorod around 8 this morning. Although Ukrainian trains make sure you wake up frequently during the night because of stops, lights, or jostles, I find that trains anywhere in the world put me quickly back to sleep; unfortunately, Julie and our facilitator Val both lost a lot of sleep. I still was groggy enough in the morning to forget my glasses, either in the train or in the van.


A driver was waiting to pick us up and take us 20 km to the town of Perechyn, where we will probably be staying for some time. On the way, we actually got to see the Slovakian border, as well as lots of beautiful forests and Carpathian foothills; check out the satellite view on Google maps if you want to see what the surroundings look like here. By 9 we were waiting in the hall outside the social services office for someone to arrive and unlock it. The inspector was the first of the delightful, friendly people we met today. The chief arrived shortly afterwards, a very kind, motherly figure who went out of her way to make us feel comfortable and make some calls to find us a good hotel. Since this is ski season, the nearest one was full, but it turns out that the other one is just a short walk from the orphanage, on the very edge of town, so it is actually more convenient. This is the most remote part of Ukraine, and prices are very low. We are paying about $30 a night for a suite with a couch, extra large bathtub, shower, 4-chair dinette, fridge, coffeemaker, and Wi-fi; the smaller rooms were booked up, and we like the idea of being able to eat light meals in our own room. We had a chance to get settled and showered and then rush through lunch (including the best borscht I've ever had) for a meeting at the orphanage that was moved up from 2 to 1.


After a brisk 10-minute walk through the snow on the ground and the first bright, warm sun we have seen in weeks (in Canada, the U.S., and Ukraine) the chief of social services met us and introduced us to the very pleasant vice-director of the orphanage, who sent messengers to get the girls from the infirmary (since the youngest had a fever), the yard, and from an unknown location. We were able to meet with the youngest for a while alone and found her to be extremely engaging and talkative from the first minute. The middle girl walked in after that, much more reserved verbally (we weren't able to find out her nickname except by asking her little sister) but in contrast giving Julie a hug immediately (and a couple more later). The eldest girl came in after we already had some activities going, so she joined in on those right away; she comes across more grownup but had plenty to say and plenty of laughs. Although Ukrainian is their first language, they do fine with Russian, which is lucky for us and allowed us to interact with them quite effectively. We also had Val nearby a lot of the time for the times when something needed to be explained.

The short version is that these girls are absolutely amazing and we are going to have a hard time waiting to bring them home, assuming all will go well, which we are.

All 5 of us had a blast even though all 3 of them had colds. Probably the most interesting thing is that the social worker made it clear at the very beginning that we were here to bring children home with us to America and asked what they would think of going. The answers were all somewhat positive, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm, which was very natural seeing that we hadn't done anything together yet. The only real concern expressed was a cute question to the social worker: "Will you be there?" Because this conversation got sprung so early, we whipped out our photo album and ran through pictures of our house and our extended family. They were trying to get the youngest girl to say which bed she would like to sleep in, and she just continued to point to all the pictures of the house including the backyard and say, "It's all mine!" which I was happy to agree with. We spent the next couple of hours with a number of games and activities that gave us all lots of chances to interact and to get close as we focused on the same things, some together and some in two groups.

After leaving the girls with some chocolates and the photo album and getting some hugs and kisses, we sat down for a minute with the orphanage director, who was also explicitly supportive of our adopting these children. We left the orphanage with plans to return tomorrow at 12; we will also be able to visit on the weekend. After we got back and resolved an issue with the wireless router in our part of the hotel, we were were very ready to eat at 5, and bone tired when we got back to our room at 7:30 or so. We didn't take many pictures today, but we did get to taste some regional specialties. Mine was a dense roll of ground meat wrapped around egg and served with white mushrooms (a delicacy in Ukraine that grows more in local forests than in most places, and has a bright taste like nothing I've ever had). Julie had something I can best describe as Hungarian gnocchi with stewed meat (the province of Transcarpathia is 12% ethnically Hungarian). Trout is another regional specialty, but it'll wait for another day. The hotel, especially its restaurant, has a mountain lodge feel to it. Hopefully we'll sleep well here; jet lag has been more brutal than either of us is accustomed to.