I have to admit, Pa and I were a little alarmed at first, when our Klas told us he wouldn’t be joining us on the train to Donetsk. Instead, he explained, his wife Koshka (or Koko for short) would be escorting us. Once we met Koko at the train station, her warm smile put me at ease and I believed it when Klas assured us we were in good hands.
Klas bought a sleeping car for us and a separate one for Koko. We said our goodbyes to Klas and he wished us well on our journey to meet the little boy who might become our son.

After the train rolled out of Kiev and we settled in to our cozy compartment, we knocked on Koko’s door and asked her if she wanted to accompany us to the dining car. Since it was at the end of the train and we were somewhere toward the front, we had to go through a dozen treacherous passageways between the cars, each time having to slide open two sets of heavy doors and exposing ourselves to the freezing air outside. If we had any food with us on the trip, I would have recommended we give up on the life-threatening attempt to make it to the dining car, but Pa and I were both pretty hungry, having had nothing to eat since lunchtime. There were times, though, as we opened each heavy, sliding door to the next train, I wondered whether or not we’d make it to Donetsk in one piece. Pa simply laughed it off, likening it to a Super Mario video game, shouting “Ba-NA-NA!” every time we made it through to the next passageway.

We had a long, leisurely dinner with Koko, and though they were young, she and Klas had two teenage children. She told us that they had met at the University and were married soon after. Her English was just as good as Klaus’ and she told us that she helped him by traveling with couples to a particular region whenever he needed to remain in Kiev to incoming families to the adoption center. She and Klas loved helping children find families and Koko said that if they were wealthy, they would have already adopted twenty children. We stayed in the dining car for as long as we could, before having to make the arduous journey back to our compartments; but the lull of the train and our jet lag was getting the better of Pa, who practically fell asleep in his Borscht. Once we parted ways with Koko for the evening, Pa and I slid in to our bunks, underneath warm, heavy blankets, and promptly fell asleep.

We arrived in Donetsk at 7:30 a.m. the next day. Koko knocked on our compartment to tell us that the stewards would be bringing around tea. I got up from my bunk, grabbed my toothbrush and headed toward the toilet, which was down at the end of our car. Any fears I had the night before about the dangerous crossing between train cars was quickly eclipsed by visiting the bathroom. Rather than have a full-fledged, flushing toilet, there was simply a hole over which to hover, thereby depositing any waste on to the tracks below. I’d been warned that Ukraine was a tough place to visit—I just didn’t realize to what extent.

Once in Donetsk, Koko introduced us to our driver, dubbed “Schumacher” by a previous family because of his love of cars and a penchant for fast driving. Though his car was an older model, it was spotless inside and out. The beige paint glistened even in the dreary January daylight, and the back quarter panel was adorned with a large, checkered flag decal. Once he started the car, techno music blared from several speakers all around us. I guessed that Schumacher was in his mid- to late-fifties and I wondered why on Earth he’d like techno. But who was I to judge?

Koko told Schumacher that we had to drive to the central office that managed all of the children’s homes in the city. As we made our way into town, we passed several large hills dusted with snow; but upon closer inspection, it was clear that the hills were actually made of slag from the adjacent coal mines. Koko explained that Donetsk was the largest coal mining center in the country, and as we passed a beautiful new stadium, she told us that its soccer team, the Donetsk Schachter, meant “coal miner” in Russian.

The city was compact but, like Kiev, its striking architecture gave it more of a western European feel than a city in the former Soviet republic. Where Kiev had its gold-domed churches and vibrant blue and white colored buildings, Donetsk’s main, wide boulevard was lined with sandstone colored, Romanesque buildings like those found in Paris or Vienna. It was a huge contrast to the slag hills and mining machinery off in the distance.

The central office for children’s services was located on a tree-lined square, adjacent to, Koko explained, dormitory-style housing and a school for older children. Schumacher parked next to a building with “Nirvana Rules” spray painted in English on the side. There were several snow-covered picnic tables in the courtyard, along with outdoor fitness stations to do pull ups and stretching. Koko told us to wait in the car while she went in to speak with the manager.

Schumacher turned off the engine and got out of the car. I watched as he took a handkerchief from his coat pocket and wiped the hood of the car lovingly. Pa got out to stretch his legs and I stayed in the car, bundled up from the cold. We waited for a long for Koko to return. Pa took a short stroll on the grounds, I opened a book I had brought with me, and Schumacher fiddled with the car radio. Apparently there was more than one techno station in the Donetsk region. When Koko returned, she said a few things to Schumacher in Russian and then explained to us that since it was Saturday, the city manager had to pull a few strings to enable us to visit the child at his orphanage. Thankfully, the director of the orphanage was expecting us and but we had to get across town quickly before she left for the day. It occurred to me, as we drove nearly 60 mph along the slick city streets, why Schumacher liked techno. It seemed to complement his erratic maneuvers and provide the perfect soundtrack to our bobs and weaves through traffic. Without seat belts Pa and I clanked against each other in the backseat like two bowling pins. We were grateful for the “oh, S&!t!” straps above the doors, otherwise we would have had nothing to hold on to.

Schumacher slowed to turn into an icy, unplowed and unpaved street. I gave thanks once the car stopped in front of a building with a snow-covered play structure in the front, but my waves of nausea from the car quickly changed to butterflies at the idea of meeting the little boy.

A faint smell of bleach permeated the lobby, which was adorned with a large mural of a panda. We climbed the staircase and I marveled at the little handrail installed several inches lower than the one adults used. I thought that despite its simplicity, it was a cute and thoughtful gesture. As we rounded the corner of a darkened hallway on the upper floor, I saw clothes laying flat on top of the radiators along the wall, and it occurred to me that perhaps donating an industrial-sized dryer might be something they’d appreciate.

We were led into a large, cheerful room with painted murals of children dancing together. Stacks of toys and stuffed animals filled bookshelves along one of the walls and Koko motioned Pa and me over to chairs by the window while she excused herself to speak with a woman sporting the brightest orange hair I’d ever seen. We had only been in Ukraine for 22 hours, half of which were spent sleeping on a train, but I still wasn’t used to the way in which people communicated with one another. Everyone seemed so tense, always using raise voices and wide, sweeping hand gestures, I was certain that the woman, whom I later learned was the head teacher, was angry at us for arriving with little notice. When they were finished with their…dialog…Koko told us that the little boy was not at the orphanage, but in the hospital with a nasty bout of bronchitis. Koko pleaded with woman to allow us to see him at the hospital, arguing that we had come all this way. The orange-haired woman was not going to let us go, until finally, she relented, providing we took her along as a chaperone.

Koko squeezed into the back of Schumacher’s car with us and drove back toward the edge of the city, passing the heaps of slag and coal mining equipment. Instead of it being a high rise, the hospital was a series of long, two-story buildings. But it was in a pretty bleak neighborhood filled with graffiti-tagged, communist-style apartment buildings, stray dogs picking at trash cans, and people huddled around over one with a fire. We started off in the main building—a darkened lobby that smelled of vomit and disinfectant; but we were lead to another building on the grounds—which, presumably, was the children’s’ ward, judging by the wall mural inside. I’d begun to think that wall murals signified “children present” in Ukraine, and this pretty one was offset by the smell of urine and feces. Inside, there were a series of rooms cordoned off by glass, and we were led to the head physician’s office where we met a middle-aged heavy set woman with a warm smile and a firm handshake. The teacher explained our presence and handed the physician some clothes she had brought with her from the orphanage. The physician left the room to go and get the child and I looked out the window on to the snow-encrusted grounds just as a pair of orderlies were wheeling a sheet-draped body on a gurney.

Moments later, a nurse entered the office, along with the physician who carried a little boy with the blondest hair I’d ever seen. He was holding a cookie in his hand and the physician said something to him and he smiled a wide, two-tooth smile at us and held out his cookie. I was stunned by how big he was and how different he looked from his little photo on the profile sheet. I turned around and asked Koko, “Are you sure this is the right kid?”

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