December 23

December 23: For the first time on our trip, we were able to go back to sleep after our usual 4:00am awakening. Unfortunately we were supposed to be at breakfast by 9:00am in order to be ready for Don to pick us up for church at 9:35am so we had to quickly get ready in about 30 minutes. Don arrived to pick us up about 9:40am and we arrived at the church in plenty of time. The room where they had the service was beautiful but very cold since they had just completed the installation of the radiators. The praise and worship, message, offering and testimony time were all very good. We were both very blessed but we felt like a block of ice by the time the service ended about 12:00 pm. Interesting the Pastor spoke about being willing to give up comforts and luxuries and being willing to make sacrifices when needed. At the time, we were all giving up the comfort of heat, and it brought to mind all the people who have done this around the world, meeting to worship God in less than desirable circumstances. Nevertheless, God’s presence was definitely among us. After church, We invited Don, Rick and Fran to go with us to lunch and we decided to go to The Potato House. Since none of us could read the choices on the menu, we all decided to go with Burritos. It sounded safe enough. They were saturated in garlic, and weren’t like we get back home at Habenaros, but we ate them anyway.

Don then took us to the orphanage and Tamara and I began our search for the boys. I went up to their rooms and they were not there but one of their friends called Vitya on his cell phone (Orphan technology is amazing these days). Vitya and Zhenya came in and then found Sasha and all three of us went down to find Tamara. We need to go and get their passport photos made so we called for a taxi. When the taxi arrived, there was no way we could all fit so Tamara volunteered to stay behind at the orphanage. After a few minutes, I called to check on Tamara and found out she was alright. She had gone back inside to the school dining hall and asked the ladies in the kitchen for some “chai”, tea. After they gave her two small cups, she sat down at one of the tables to rest. Sveta (Galina’s Assistant) came in and saw her sitting by herself. She immediately went to the kitchen and barked out an order to the ladies in Russian. She then returned with two plates of pelmeney, meat filled dumplings, and a plate of sliced pickles. Tamara didn’t have the heart to tell her she had just eaten, so she tried to politely nibble while they managed a conversation with a little Russian and a little English and a lot of sign language.

Since I knew Tamara was in good hands with Sveta, we proceeded with getting the passport photos of the boys. The first place that we tried told the boys that only the passport office could take the photos so we called Valery who began researching if this was true. Since we were close by we walked back to our hotel to wait on Valery but for some reason the boys wanted to just stand outside in the cold instead of standing in the lobby. Again, Valery’s “few minutes” turned into at least an hour, but the boys didn’t seem to mind being in the cold. Finally he called us and told us to come to another photography store a couple of blocks away. When we got there, we paid them and the boys went in and had their photos. I was a little worried because none of them wanted to brush their hair for the photos, but they still turned out ok. When we were finished, we walked to the taxi stand and found two taxis to take us all back to the orphanage.

When we got there we found Tamara in Sveta’s office talking with her as best she could. She had been taken to observe a ballet class and had been fed and given chocolates while we were gone. We spent quite a long time talking with the boys about school in America and the importance of getting a complete and accurate transcript of all of their courses so that they could be sure they would be admitted in the highest grade level possible. Vitya was the most concerned about this and said that he really wants to be no lower than the 11th grade. We found out that all of the boys have taken cooking courses but the Zhenya is exceptionally fond of it and might like to be a chef someday. After this, Victor had to rewrite his adoption agreement document changing some of the wording since he was going to be a special case where he is requesting to be adopted on his own and not through the SDA like the other two boys.

Since Valery hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, we decided that we better leave. The cab driver suggested a very nice Georgian restaurant near the Inspector’s office. We enjoyed the food, especially the cheese bread, which was round and flat like pizza, but tasted like crescent rolls. We also ordered way too much because the portions were huge. After finishing, we decided we better walk back to the hotel! We checked email, uploaded our blog for the first time and signed some papers that Valery needed to take to the judge the next morning.