Once we discovered that we could adopt a child in Ukraine independently, we were ready to part ways with the incompetent agency we were using. I found an online support group of families that had adopted in Ukraine and I asked for some referrals of translators who specialized in helping foreigners facilitate adoptions. I received a dozen or so names and I either called or e-mailed each and every one of them, asking them for their rates and descriptions of the services in which they would provide. Pa and I narrowed down our options and found a person who had been highly recommended by several families. Not only was he competent in guiding families through the adoption process, but he had a great deal of compassion toward the children. This really meant a lot to us since more often than not, the adoption had thus far been treated like a business transaction by nearly every one we approached.

Without asking for any money, the facilitator assured us that he would go to the adoption center in Kiev and look for our dossier. A week later, he e-mailed us to let us know he’d found it sitting on the desk of an employee at the adoption center, who had been fired. What was worse was that the facilitator told us the translations were awful, and if the dossier had been reviewed for approval, it would have been rejected a second time. He promised us that he’d re-do the translations and turn the dossier in as soon as he could.

In the meantime, our facilitator told us, we had to have a series of documents renewed since their dates were either a year older or more. We went back to the agency and told them that we were no longer using them for the in-country adoption process, and that we had hired a facilitator. They seemed pretty happy to let us go as clients, but before we completely severed our ties, we made them, without charge, procure new copies of the expired documents. Of course these documents took weeks to gather, and so September 2002 turned into November 2002, by the time we were ready to send our updated documents to our facilitator. Our facilitator contacted us about ten days later, letting us know the documents had arrived and he took the newly-revised dossier to the adoption center in Kiev.

In late November, Pa asked me if I’d like to come along with him to London during the first week in December. It had been awhile since we’d taken a vacation together, and for the first time during the adoption process, we finally felt at ease and that it wouldn’t be too long before we heard anything about our appointment date in Kiev. So, we decided to make a vacation of it and we added a week in Prague, which was absolutely amazing. The nice thing, too, was that Prague was the first city we’d seen that still had subtle bits and pieces of communist history entwined with its Gothic architecture, and so it gave us a rough primer of what Ukraine would be like.

We returned home just a few days before Christmas. Both of us were run-down and had bad colds from traveling. Gearing up for Christmas seemed rather mundane, especially since we hadn’t heard any news from our facilitator and we were still unsure as to when we’d have a chance to go to Ukraine.

But on Christmas day, our facilitator wrote to tell us that we needed to pack our bags. We had to be in Kiev on January 7 for our appointment at the adoption center.

To be continued…

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