Manicure Day!

CW from the bottom: Lisa, Anya, Sophia, Lyuda, and Jula

This morning we were met at our door by a new facilitator.  She is basically going to be handling the paperwork locally while our main facilitator is in Kyiv dropping off those documents.  Seems like a ripe opportunity for FedEx, but instead he takes an overnight train 14 hours back to Kyiv.  Maybe even a fax machine, but this country is all about their paperwork and face to face meetings.  I have lost track of how many different ledgers, yes I said ledgers, as in old school bound books where they hand write everything down.

A quick side bar for those families who have been here and for those who will be coming to adopt from this orphanage or a Ukrainian orphanage in general.  This country has been through a lot.  Russia did them no favors, and still doesn’t for that matter.  But there is a spirit of life that is truly refreshing to see.  First off, I don’t think I’ve met anyone who doesn’t have a farm or garden of some sort.  Ukrainians know how to live off the land. Second, take some time to at least learn what sounds the Cyrillic letters make because being able to sound out the words helps tremendously.  I would highly recommend learning the Russian language.  It goes a long way when talking with street vendors, shop keepers, and it’s especially useful when talking with the orphans.  A few simple phrases in Russian opened up many people to actually smile when we talked with them.  Even just level 1 of Rosetta Stone will help your ability to communicate.  Shopping at the grocery store can be daunting as the system has to be learned.  If it gets put into a bag, it needs a sticker.  The bigger stores, or super markets as they are called, have sticker ladies (my description, not theirs) who will weigh the product and put a sticker on the bag.  Bring your own grocery bag as they charge for theirs.  Buy big bottles of water and just fill little ones as needed.  When buying water, they have two types, with and without gas, i.e. carbonation.  To get water without gas, you need to look for negazovana on the label.

From our perspective, Simferopol is a great city and the people are friendly, again it helps when you can talk in their language.  We have eaten at a couple of different restaurants both great meals.  The first was a pizza joint and we stopped here because we were starving after not eating on the train and running around town until late in the day and we had not found the grocery stores yet.  The second was because we were looking for a café with free WIFI so we could download email and upload pictures to the blog.  We get onto the internet now using a cellular modem that works great if I’m sitting next to the window.  This apartment has AC (yay!) and digital TV with only a handful of channels in English.  One is CNBC, another is Bloomberg, and the rest are Christian evangelistic stations.  We did find an Italian station playing old American 80’s & 90’s movies, but it was dubbed over in Italian.  So we have been doing tons of reading and walking.

Anya and Sophia painting nails

Now for our favorite part of the day, seeing Sophia!  Today’s visit was about the same time, around 10am.  When we arrived Sophia was in the bathroom getting cleaned up so we walked around taking pictures and chatting with familiar faces.  It looked like the kids were doing a little summer cleaning job around the grounds.  We saw several of the children had the blue antiseptic paint all over their cuts.  Poor Vova had a cut around his left eye, so he has a blue stripe over the cut.  Vitalik had a small cut on the top of his head, so in the middle of his white blond hair, he has a blue dot.  A few of the children were walking around with coughs and runny noses.  We were sitting in front of the children’s dorm when Sophia came out.  When she saw us she immediately had a smile as big as the one plastered on my face.  We got hugs and they seem to get better every time.  Her hair was still a little wet so I guess she just stepped out of the shower.  She also had on “new” clothes today.  Maybe different is a better word as I don’t think new is ever heard here.  Today was nail painting day so we asked if we could go inside.  We went just inside the door and sat at a small table.  It doesn’t take long for the other children to show up.  They so want to interact with a new face.  There is one little boy who comes up and hugs you immediately.  I love hugs and will gladly give him one every time.  Well we set up the Davis Salon and craft spa at that small table.  Lisa was busy cleaning the old polish off their fingers while I got to hand out the lanyards.  We started a bunch last night to hand out to the kids today so we didn’t get mauled.  It worked out great.  The kids were quickly satisfied with working on their lanyards, mostly the boys as they did not want to paint their nails.  The girls, even some we have not met yet, showed up and started painting away.  This is such a privilege to be a part of this.  BTW, the 4 small vials of polish, cotton pads, and one small bottle of polish remover cost about $4-$5, or 32-40 grivna from a merchant at a small open air market near our apartment.  The girls all showed their nails off when they were finished.  After a while, one of the caretakers came over and in very quick, stern, loud Russian, told the children to go eat.  When the majority of them left we pulled out the iPad and again went through more pictures.  This time there were pictures from last year’s hosting program which had children from this orphanage and Sophia recognized many of the faces, one who has already been adopted.  After the pictures, we showed her one of the flashcard apps that we put on there for Adam to learn how to read.  It won’t take much before Sophia is speaking and reading English.  However, we have made it clear that we want her to continue speaking Russian.  To that end, she will teach me Russian and I will teach her English.  When she is older, she wants to be an interpreter.  I think she can do that and so much more once she sees what’s out there.  At the end of the visit she and some of her close friends walked us back to Yevgeny, gave us another hug and waved bye.  I hate leaving the orphanage, it hurts.  I want to spend more time with her, and also get a better sense of what life is like, or not like, in her world.  I want to spend more time with the boys I know from last year as they are wonderful spirited boys.   They just need someone to show them how to be a man and what it means.  I want to get to know her friends and tell, no shout,  their stories to the world.

So on our way back to the apartment, I asked Yevgeny if we could play futbol sometime this weekend.  He said, not tomorrow, but on Sunday.  So this afternoon, we will go out and buy a soccer ball so we can play down at the stadium on Sunday.  I look forward to it.  We also had the idea that we would get an inexpensive digital camera and let Sophia take pictures of whatever she wants to have as a memory and we will put them into an album.  Most likely my wife will make her a scrapbook with the pictures.

This whole experience has been like P90x for the heart.  It is such a life and love-broadening trip.  It’s hard to describe the feeling.  We miss our three sons big time, but this one on one time with Sophia is going to be huge for our relationship with her.  This kind of dedicated focus on her will be few and far between once we get back and life rolls on.  I don’t want to miss a single moment.  For now, we will continue to drink in all that Simferopol and my dear Sophia have to offer.