With a Little Help from Our Friends

Tonight we have in hand, the magic document – our permission to go to the orphanage in Gorlovka and visit our girl.  Nothing special associated with picking up the referral (thankfully).  By 5 pm, we were heading out of Kiev in a taxi on the way to the airport.  About 10 miles from the airport, however, I noticed we were losing speed and our driver began drifting to the right.  I wondered if he knew road conditions were getting bad up ahead.  But, no, it was simply that we had no more gas.  Our driver coasted several minutes or so (Matt thinks this was really just us sliding on the ice) before finally stopping.  We had seen many cars broken down along the way on our previous journeys, and we had even heard the story of friends whose taxi driver stopped to help another stranded car while taking them to the airport. 

You have to appreciate how people help each other here.  Within minutes, a good Samaritan had come to our rescue.  Our driver, a Ukrainian boy scout, was prepared for the situation.  He brought out a long strap (many of you have seen this before), hooked us up to the tiny car of our new friend, and together we were off.  A few minutes later we were at the gas station waving good-bye.  Our taxi driver added about a quarter of a tank of fuel, and we were on our way.  Thank you so much to our kind rescuer!!!  I just hope our driver had enough fuel to make it home.

The flight was uneventful, and we were met at the airport by our facilitator’s driver.  Within 45 minutes we were checked in at the Pension Ukraina in Gorlovka.  The hotel is really nice, and we were so surprised to see a beautiful bouquet of fresh flowers in our room, courtesy of our wonderful friends, Carol and Roger, who are also in Gorlovka for their adoption.  We can’t wait to see them at breakfast in the morning and thank them for this wonderful welcome. 

We spent the last hour looking over our magic referral document.  Thanks to Google Translate, we were able to read through it (a single page – mostly names and stamps).  We learned that we need to visit our girl within a reasonable time (by when?) or the SDA needs to be notified (by whom?).  The document doesn’t give specifics and doesn’t say what will happen if we don’t visit, but we don’t intend to find out.  We plan to visit around 11am tomorrow, and we can’t wait! 

I was proud of Matt’s translating skills.  Without Google, he figured out that the document ends with a reference to our dossier, which has 83 pages.  So for those of you who wonder what we’ve been doing much of this year, it can be summed up pretty well in 83 notarized and apostilled pages, now neatly bound in twine!

Welcome to Gorlovka!