Forming a family through international adoption.
Vlad was a little late this morning. He picked me up at 10:30 and we went to the NAC. The director wasn't there. So much for getting the referral letter at 11:00. The letter requires her signature. So Luda (my new escort) and I waited at the cafe across the street. Elena-#2 and Vlad were waiting in the NAC lobby. Finally the director shows up and told them that she would not sign the letter until 3:00 p.m. That means we would miss our flight. We'd have to take the 5:00 p.m. flight to Simferopol. We had already arranged for the inspector in Simferopol to wait for us to arrive so she could give us the letter to visit the orphanage. On Friday's people usually leave work about 4:00 p.m. - they make it a short day because of the weekend. So because the NAC Director is an unreasonable unprofessional pain in the hinnie, she is costing me the last day in the week in which I can get paperwork completed. All because she insists on waiting 3 hours before spending 2 minutes to sign a letter. That woman is on a major power trip.
The good news is that the orphanage director is willing to work with us and let us visit Roman this weekend. The inspector also said to fax her the letter and she would draft up the paperwork and then we could drop off the original when we hit town. So the folks in Simferopol are willing to work to help this adoption happen but its like pulling teeth to get the NAC Director to do anything.
We got the referral letter at 3:30 p.m. and headed to the train station. We waited in line about 1.5 hours and were then told that the train was sold out. The last flight out for the day is at 6:00 from a small airport and it was already 5:00 p.m. So I went ahead and hired Loonya to drive us to Simferopol. Loonya is Luda's husband and Luda is my translator/facilitator for this adoption. I only had to pay $350 for a round trip plus adoption related driving while in Simferopol. They know that money is tight for this adoption so discounted it $50. Simferopol is MUCH further than Donetsk.
We grabbed a quick dinner then started to Simferopol. When we got on the outskirts of Kiev, Luda got a phone call from another translator named Yonna. Yonna knew we were going to Simferopol and so was she. She wanted to know if we managed to get a train or plane ticket because she was unable to. Luda told her that we had the same problems and were driving. So we waited for Yonna to arrive via taxi and gave her a ride to Simferopol. Yonna is very nice and is handling the adoption for a single man (Shilom?) in Cathy Harris group.
Luda had been trying to find us an apartment via phone since 5:00 p.m. About 8:00 we finally got a place to stay in Simferopol at a reasonable price. The trip down took us a little over 9 hours. By the way - restrooms here are typically not free, nor modern. I've even had to use the "exotic" toilet a few times. We finally rolled into Simferopol around 4:30 a.m. We dropped Yonna off at her apartment then headed to ours. The landlord met us on the road and directed us where to go. The apartment was nice, clean, and updated except it didn't have a microwave or washing machine. At 4:30 in the morning, I didn't care. The bad thing was that the matresses are 3" thick and rest on plywood. So the beds are very hard.
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