. . .and we're off!

We are now enroute to our appointment in Kiev on our second trip to Ukraine. We are sitting in the South Bend airport terminal waiting for the first leg of our flight to Kiev. My sister, Beth, and her husband Pete just drove us through the cold and the snow to drop us off for our flight. I'm watching snow plows scurry around clearing the landing strip. It's been chilly for northern Indiana with lows for tonight predicted at -5 F (-20 C). Lows for Kiev are in the lower +20's F (around -4 C). Although it will be warmer initially when we arrive, temperatures in Kiev will probably be similar to northern Indiana. One difference is we will be spending more time outside as we'll be walking and using public transportation more. Before I write more about our current travels, let me catch you up on what's been going on the past couple of weeks.
On Monday, January 7th we drove to Michigan City to get our fingerprints taken to update our U.S. paperwork. Out of all the government offices we've interfaced with in the past 3 1/2 years, I have to give this office in Michigan City the top honors. All of the staff members are pleasant and professional and they get us in and out of the office so quickly. Runner up for the best interface with bureaucracy is the Tetouan Wilaya, the provincial government office in the last town we lived in during our four years on Morocco. Every time we went there for documentation, they were also pleasant, professional and efficient.
On January 12th, just ten days ago, we were sitting in this same terminal waiting to start our trip to Edmonton - together this time. We were delayed by 24 hours due to snow so, as we're watching the snow fall today and our scheduled departure pushed later, we are praying that this won't keep us from getting into Kiev in time for our Tuesday appointment.
Our trip to Edmonton last week was a wonderful chance to connect with friends from our time there and as well as our time in Morocco. It gave us practice for packing for this trip and made the last couple weeks of waiting go by in a blink.
When my brother-in-law dropped us off at the airport, he asked us what we thought our greatest fear was for this trip. Stan said it was the process of meeting the next set of children. I fear the emotional strain if we end up doing more than one appointment again. On our last trip I would have said that I feared the appointment process (one hour to review files and choose children to adopt). In all three of our appointments during the last trip, God gave us peace and clear direction as well as unity. Through the process we have grown in our trust that he can lead us in these big decisions, even when we don't have all the information we think we need.
Although we discussed our fears, I've been feeling at peace even in that flurry of the last minute tasks that are inevitable before an extended trip. It's a special grace that God extends to me through your prayers.
Our airplane just arrived at the gate so I'll sign off for the last time in Indiana for a while.
Quick update: Our plane made it through the South Bend snow with only a short delay and we are now in Chicago with a 3+ hour layover.

Email Subscriptions

For those of you who are following our blog regularly, I've just set up a "subscribe via email" option. If you sign up for this option an email will be sent to your email address every time we post to the blog site.

Use the box on the right to submit the email address you want to use. A confirmation email will be sent to you. You need to follow the link in the email to confirm your subscription on the Feedburner site.

Any day that we post new content on the site an email will be sent to you between 9:00-11:00 pm EST.

Thanks for your prayers!

Trip plans coming together

We have tickets to Ukraine on Jan 22, which is coming up very fast, especially since we will both be in Canada for almost a week starting Jan 11 and are scrambling to catch up with some things that got put on hold during the busy holiday season. We had a lot of events with immediate family, extended family, and friends. We also ran the Frigid 5K on Saturday with temps hovering around freezing and a stiff wind off Winona Lake, but it felt awesome to accomplish it and both beat our time goals; I don't think we'll do much running in Ukraine, though.

We are looking forward to being picked up at the airport and spending our time in Kiev with good Hoosier friends in Kiev. They were traveling last time we were there.

Our facilitator is very optimistic about this trip; he is a positive guy in general, which is good in his profession. The last big detail for the trip is that we have fingerprint renewals finally scheduled with USCIS for Jan 7 (this Friday), which is great timing. PTL!

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.