Two Signatures...

We "enjoyed" another long day today. Sasha from Agape Ministries was here at the Bible House last night and we had a chance to meet him. He is very nice with excellent english. He invited us to his office this morning for their prayer meeting and then a chat about his ministry to orphans in Ukraine.

We had intended on catching a ride this morning with someone heading to the Agape offices, but when we got up, there was a car accident about 100 feet away from our front door. It probably occurred around 8AM and the traffic was horrendous. I think what we saw typifies some of the Ukrainian culture of "doing things by the book" (even if "by the book" means lots of waiting around for official things to happen....). Here's a pic of what we saw when we stepped out our door shortly after 8AM:

The gentleman (Eric) who was to drive us to the Agape offices finally arrived after fighting traffic a little after 9AM. By that time, the police had finally showed up and taken very direct action, as shown in the following pic:

Yep...he set up 4 cones around the edge of the vehicle that everyone had to drive around. Basically, an entire lane of traffic was blocked and everyone had to go around the cones, with no assistance from anyone directing traffic. And, they did not move the cars out of the way...not an inch.

The craziest thing was that the trolley buses which run off electricity and have two arms extending from the top of the bus to electric wires suspended over the road, had to stop, get out of the bus, pull the arms off the wires on the right side of the street, move them over temporarily to the wires on the left side of the street, get back in the bus and drive around the accident, then get out and do it all over again...in reverse. Here's a pic to give you an idea:

Here you can see the driver pulling the arms down off the right-hand wires and pulling them over to the left-hand wires. Needless to say, traffic was still snarled when we left at 9:15AM.

We enjoyed spending some time with Sasha and learning about his heart for the orphans in Ukraine. His ministry, Agape, has staff who go into orphanages in several regions of Ukraine, and teach Bible classes. Sasha works with the orphanage directors to make these Bible classes mandatory because, as he said, "If you make it optional, only 1 out of 20 kids will come. When it is mandatory, they may grumble at coming, but after a while they learn to enjoy it, and many have come to know Jesus through the process." Sasha is looking for a family to come to Ukraine for a couple of years to work with these orphanages, specifically in developing more programs in more orphanages throughout Ukraine. If you're interested, let us know and we'll get you in contact with Sasha!! :)

After meeting with Sasha, we did a little bit of shopping at Oskar's (the large department store above the bowling alley) and then headed home. We were waiting to hear from Tanya about any plans for the day. Finally, after lunch, she called and said she would be at the orphanage around 2:00 and we should come as well.

When we arrived, Pasha was there and we walked with him to Roman's (the orphanage lawyer) office. Natasha was still in class as she has 8 classes and is in school until 3:40. We sat with Pasha for a while and used the new translation software I downloaded earlier today from PROMT. I spent quite a bit of time looking for something that could be entirely installed on my laptop and would work without using a service that depended on a connection to the internet. PROMT appears to work very well and I have a 30 day trial to run it through its paces.

The tool worked pretty well. The only problem is that I had not loaded the Russian language add-on for Windows, so we could only do English->Russian translations. This still was fun, and allowed us to ask Pasha some questions without having the translator there to help us.

Natasha arrived in Roman's office, along with both Natasha and Pasha's primary caregivers. Then we were called to Nikolai's office (the orphanage director). We sat around a table while Nikolai oversaw the procedings. We did not know (Tanya had not told us), but we were there to witness the signing of all the papers the orphanage is required to provide to the inspector's office. This includes the papers that both Natasha and Pasha sign, saying they are OK with us adopting them, as well as the paper Jana was to sign, refusing the adoption and OK-ing the separation with Natasha.

Natasha and Pasha signed their papers, and both looked a little nervous, as if they were thinking, "I sure hope I'm doing the right thing!". Then Jana walked in and sat down next to me to sign her papers. Roman read the words on the paper to her and we all waited for her to sign. She sat there for about 10 seconds, and you could just sense that this was not going to happen. Then, she pushed her chair back, and as she wiped the tears from her eyes, walked out of the office. We pretty much all sat stunned in our chairs as the caregivers and Roman went out to figure out what was going on.

So here we were, with one set of papers to be signed, all looking at each other, wondering what to do. We eased the tension a bit by giving Nikolai the picture of Ashley and the Volf's that Kari had given us. He enjoyed seeing it (I think...). Then he proceeded to tell a fairly lengthy story of an adoption that had gone wrong... AFter about 45 minutes and multiple phone calls to find out where Jana was, the decision was finally made to leave Nikolai's office and allow Jana to (hopefully) sign the papers without all of us staring at her.

We made our way back to Roman's office and waited. About 30 or 45 minutes later, Roman came in with a look of relief on his face, and told us that not only had Jana signed the papers, but Nikolai had as well!! So, we had the two signatures that we needed and all the paperwork from the orphanage so that we could "officially" start the process tomorrow. Thank you, thank you, for your prayers. Michele says that she "smiled the Holy Spirit" at Nikolai, and that's what did him in!! It could very well be true.

Tomorrow Tanya will head to the Inspector's office and then to the notary and hopefully to court to get things going. There are still hurdles ahead, especially with the early separation of siblings and the "mess" of Pasha's papers, so don't stop praying!

We have more stories to tell, but this has gone on long enough. OK, maybe one more. When we were at the Agape offices, we were standing in the hallway waiting for Sasha and I noticed a picture on the wall. Hmm...one of those faces looks familiar. Sure enough, it was Natasha. A closer look revealed that Ashley was in the pic as well. This was a pic from 3-4 years ago at a camp that Agape put on and that Natasha and Ashley attended. It's a very small world, indeed. The exciting thing is that we hope and pray that seeds of faith were planted in both girls. Here's a pic of the pic:

Natasha is pretty much in the middle and Ashley is just to the right and below her.

That's all for now. I have to get a little bit of work done before heading to sleepy land.

Thanks for reading!

Bruce (and Michele)