SDA Appointment

Today was another adventurous day. Last night we were informed by the airport that our luggage did not make it and that we would not be receiving it until late today. That posed some problems, as we had packed dress clothes in our carry on luggage for our appointment, but not dress shoes. Also, I could not plug in my hairdryer or curling iron as our voltage converters were packed in our luggage plus I had no hairspray. We found out very late that our luggage wasn't coming, so it was too late to go buy anything. We did end up managing with what we had, though. All I had to do was buy some sandals for the appointment first thing this morning. Now I have 2 new blisters. Lucky I packed a blister kit. Our carry ons were packed pretty good. As Terry would put it... I pack for every "natural disaster." Now I know this is not what you want to be hearing about...you want to hear about the appointment......

The appointment at the SDA (state department of adoptions) was extremely difficult. We were told right off the bat that there were no young kids available as they are adopted locally. Also, they were aware of the strict health requirements that Canada has regarding immigrating children. They do not consider any child in an orphanage to be healthy. Every single child has a long list of diagnoses in their files, so it's a matter of picking out a child that you think has the least health problems. We were first shown 4 boys. All were between the ages of 3 and 5. The first one had fluid build up around his brain, another suffered from seizures, another had a very small head, which is a sign of mental retardation. You could tell just from looking at the pictures that all of them were very sick. The final boy they showed us just turned 4 two weeks ago. He has some eye problems (severely lazy eye) and some other issues listed on his file that we didn't understand. Then we were shown 1 little girl. She just turned 3. She was so precious. She had the biggest blue eyes and blond hair. Unfortunately, we could tell right away that she had a sever case of fetal alcohol syndrome. It was very hard to pass her up because we always thought we would be bringing home a little girl. It took us almost an hour to go through these files, and that's all the time they give you. We had to make a decision given the files we were shown or go home. We have decided to visit the little boy who just turned 4. We phoned the adoption doctor to go over what was listed in the file. He said it would be advisable for us to have a physical examination done on him as his file is not very clear. When we listed the conditions of the 4 other children we were shown, he advised us not to bother even looking at them, as they were all very ill. All the pictures of the children we saw, we could tell immediately they were very sick. But this little boy looks very normal aside from his lazy eye. He is quite cute with dark brown hair and very blue eyes like Terry. We phoned the orphanage to double check his condition. They told us that he walks and talks, which none of the other children we looked at could do.
This was still a difficult decision based on his age. We really did want a younger child. But we will go see him and have him examined to see if he will be adoptable. If he is not, we will have to make another appointment at the SDA to view more files, which will probably take another 2 weeks. We are really hoping that this little boy is healthy enough.

On the plus side, we did get our luggage delivered a couple of hours ago. On the minus side, one of our bags was broken into. We put big beefy locks on all of our luggage. It looks like someone took a hammer and smashed the whole zipper right off (we will not be able to use this suitcase again) The only major thing we noticed missing so far is our IPod docking station. It's disappointing because we wanted it to listen to music, but it's a very small problem in the grand scheme of things. We are just very grateful to have the rest of our stuff! Our laptop died earlier today, and we were waiting desperately for our voltage converters so we could plug it in. We couldn't get it working at first and I was very concerned that we would not have internet or email. But we've got it rigged up now...you should see it, you would be amazed it even works!

We will only be in Kiev for 1 more day. We will be travelling to the Donetsk region to meet the little boy on Monday. Our facilitator thinks we will have internet there. We're crossing our fingers.

Tara