A long day in Zaparozhe

January 23: Don, Misha and Inna picked us up at 8:15am and we picked the boys up about 8:30am and we all squeezed out way into the van for the trip to Zaporozhe to conquer birth certificate stamps, passports, and police clearances. It was much warmer but we had to deal with some bad fog as we got closer to Zaporozhe. When we reached the edge of town, we chose to try a new road which caused us to get lost for about 45 minutes before finally locating the birth certificate office about 11:30am. Misha and I hurried to the bank next door to pay the fee (all major fees to government offices in Ukraine are paid to their bank accounts and not at the office itself in order to eliminate theft and corruption) before going into the office. I wondered why there were not any people waiting outside the office door and when we knocked and entered the door we found out that they were supposed to only be doing office work and not accept anything from the public on Wednesday. My heart sunk for a moment before Misha began telling one of the ladies about our situation. After a few minutes, they agreed to handle our stamps but that the certificates would not be ready until 3:00pm. We were so glad that they would do them at all that we agreed and then headed for the passport office.

Once we entered the passport office and found Alexander (the man that Valery had been working with), we took out the package of required papers for all three boys. He looked at Viktor’s papers first and unfortunately pronounced to us that he would not be able to process them (just as we had feared). He said Viktor would need to file his paperwork in Berdyansk as any other adult even though he had been adopted and that this process could take as much as one month. He next began processing Sasha and Zhenya’s paperwork and found something wrong with each. Sasha (and Viktor) would have to take their internal passports back to Berdyansk and get a different stamp put in them to show that they were still living in Berdyansk. Zhenya’s problem would require him to get a new tax id form in Takmak and return in to Zaporozhe. They went ahead and took the Sasha and Zhenya’s pictures to transmit to Kiev but would require us to fix these issues and also give them an updated medical report with their new names on it, before they could receive their passports. Before Misha and I went and stood in a long line to make the payment at the bank, Alexander had told us that his office could process the police clearance forms but when we returned, he changed his mind (probably because we had already caused him to work through his lunch hour) and we had to go to the normal office to do this.

It took us a few minutes to locate the building since we had not been there before but the one man and one woman that were in the office were very helpful and friendly, even though she had to redo all the boys’ forms by hand. The craziest thing that happened to us was when we went to the bank to pay the fee, it was broken up into what seemed like 25 pieces and we had to wait for a slow dot matrix printer to print out the forms which I had to sign. This took what seemed like and eternity since it was already time for us to be back at the birth certificate office. We finally finished and rushed in to hopefully just grab the certificates and then finally go eat. Instead, they told us that two of the three certificates had been rendered void by a notary writing on the back. They had reissued them completely and after a little scare when I couldn’t find a translated copy of my passport at first, I signed several books before we had to go back to the bank one last time to pay a very small fee for them making copies.

There was nothing else that we could accomplish due to the time of day so we decided to go to McDonalds before heading back to Berdyansk. The boys all ordered Big Mac combos and then had hot fudge sundaes for desert and we all enjoyed fellowshipping in an environment that almost made you feel like you were back in America (until you tried to order off the menu). The trip home was very nice. We looked at photos of the kids and family trips on my laptop while Misha translated. Tammy told a long description about each of our children and their activities and personalities. We both answered any questions that the boys wanted to ask us about what life would be like in Alabama and the Swan family. We dropped the boys off at the orphanage and they hugged us goodbye. Don drove us to the hotel and I typed all of this blog while Tammy went to bed for some well deserved rest.