We Made It!

We finally made it to Ukraine after 16 hours of traveling! YAY! It was so wonderful to walk around after sitting on planes for so long!

When we stepped off the plane, we waited in line for a very long time to get our passports stamped. After that we claimed our luggage, which all got here safely, and we were even waved on through customs!! That was a huge miracle!

We are staying in a children's home right now. It's run by two Christian American ladies who are friends of some of our friends in Florida. They own four buildings on a piece of property here. One is used for housing boys, another for girls. The third building is used as a school room and the fourth is the cafeteria. The children age in range from about 7 to 16. They are all orphaned kids that were pulled off the streets. What an awesome ministry! We have loved staying here!

Tomorrow we get to go and meet our boys! We are so excited! Our facilitator Konstantin has been amazing! He has worked very hard on our behalf! I'm hoping that we will have internet in the area where our boys are so I can post some pictures for
you all to see. It's a very small town but our facillitator is pretty sure there will be internet access somewhere. So, I'll send pictures in my next post if there is! Now, drum roll please, I have just talked Derek into blogging about some of our experiences today. As most of you know, he is NOT a blogger :). I'm sure this will be quite entertaining! Love to you all!


- Hey everybody! This is Derek interrupting. I'm not a blogger at all but Renee picked up an AK47 today from a Russian mob road side stand and is making me do it. She also has purchased two very sad Russian violin cd's from a street performer and is playing the music as I write. I feel like I'm trapped somewhere between the Godfather and Fivel. Wait ... nope, that was just a mouse running through the orphanage.

Today was quite an adventure! Renee and I jumped on a little van/bus and took it into the outskirts of Kiev to catch the subway into downtown. We had a little paper with instructions and a few Russian phrases on it like, "Where is the bathroom?", "I'll have more cabbage, thank you", and "Are you my mother?" Needless to say, we were successful in getting into downtown Kiev and back for under $2 and it was incredibly entertaining. The van was the size of an airport shuttle but with over 60 people "inconveniently" packed in (I counted). Renee and I stood out like sore thumbs because we were smiling. We really tried to get everyone to sing, "If you're happy and you know it" but they just wouldn't clap their hands! Guess if we'd broken into some good late eighties Def Leopard we would've gotten a response but I've had all those lyrics "surgically" removed from my memory by an IHOP healing room prayer team. We met our facilitator under a giant golden angel downtown ... things were "looking up". At 11:40 we arrived at the Central Adoption Authority building for our interview. We were in there for about an hour but interestingly never were asked one question, Darn it, I had my answer buzzer and "call a friend line" all ready to go ... all for nothing. About five women ran around diligently for about an hour looking through one large binder after another of children's pictures and profiles. In the end, they presented us with four children. Well, we came for three boys and only one picture was of a girl so, it made our selection pretty clear. God speaks like this to me ......... "Hey Derek - adopt 3 boys from Ukraine" ... "Ok Lord, we'll do it. Which ones should we get?" ... "Whichever ones you want to my son" ... "Ok, great - thanks God, can I see the options?" ... "Sure son, here's number one, here's number two, and here's number three. Which three would you like?" .... "Uhhhhhh, Lord, I'LL TAKE THOSE THREE!" ... "Good job son, you really can hear my voice clearly!" ... "Gee thanks PAPA". Hold on ... I'm tearing up cause this violin music is really really sad! Get back to you later.