Frustrations and Regrets

Jim:

I made the decision yesterday to leave Josh at SB one more night. Now I’m regretting that decision. It was based on Oksana’s recommendation and convenience for both him and for me, but now it has turned into yet another night at the orphanage. I know I had good intentions – not wanting to force Josh to tag along on a long day of waiting in offices and/or the cold car, as well as giving him a little notice of his departure so he could feel that excitement for one day. And, yes, it did allow me the chance to focus on work for one more night. But after today’s events, I’m forced to leave him there one more night, and I’m really feeling guilty about it. I told him I’d take him out of there today, and now I can’t.

Today was one huge delay followed by a 3 ½ hour wild goose chase. We’ve been blessed up to this point with relatively quick appointments, and little to no waiting for them. Usually when we arrived at an office, we walked in, sat down, and the people there dropped what they were doing and took care of us. Sometimes this took a long time, but those were generally expected, and we weren’t in any great hurry anyway. Today was different in that I fully expected to be busting Josh out early in the afternoon. Our first appointment was at the Kherson Vital Records office to get Josh’s new birth certificate. We arrived a little after 9am, and there was a crowd of people. Fortunately, there were only 2 people ahead of us for the lady we needed to talk to, and one of them was already being helped. But we still waited almost 2 hours for our turn. Then it took almost another 2 hours for them to get the work done. They have a new program to do this, and they were paranoid about making any mistakes. Apparently if they make a mistake, the person in charge’s pay is docked 80 grivna, which is pretty substantial here. Anyway, my initial thought after it was completed was that I was glad Josh didn’t have to sit through that. But now that I think about it, he might have enjoyed seeing part of the process we’ve been going through for the past 5 weeks. After this, I waited another hour in the car while Oksana took these docs to another administrative building. We were running late, and we knew we wouldn’t make it to the passport office today, but we still planned on getting Josh. Then came my next mistake and the wild goose chase. We went to the Tax Authority to get the kid’s names changed on their tax id forms. Oksana had started this process 2 days ago, and the paperwork was supposed to be waiting for us there, but it was not. Someone had failed to submit the forms to Kiev electronically. So we waited about 20 minutes to see if they could get them, but they could not. They said we could either come back tomorrow about the same time (2:30pm), or we could go to the towns where the kids were registered and pick up the forms directly from them there. Oksana recommended the latter because if we don’t get them today, we may not be able to apply for passports tomorrow, either. I knew at this point that I’d be leaving Josh there one more night if we went to get these docs. I asked Oksana to call SB and tell Josh what was going on, and we drove to Nova Kakhovka to get these docs. It’s an hour drive, and then we had to find the place, and got bounced around a little before someone said we had to go to Kakhovka, not Nova Kakhovka. It’s only about 5 miles, but when we got there, the guy would not give us the documents because he said they would be waiting for us in Kherson. He called Kherson to talk to his boss, and Oksana could not get him to change his mind. So I didn’t get Josh, and we didn’t get the docs. Even if we had gotten the docs, I still wish I would have gone to get Josh and accepted the delay.

By now it is 5:30pm, we’re an hour and a half away from SB, so there’s no chance of getting him tonight since there is no one that can authorize it at this hour. So we head back to Kherson to call it a day. SB is our first stop tomorrow morning, and we’ll be there by 8:30am to take Josh out. He’ll get a full day of the paper chase, and I will be thrilled to have him at my side. I just regret not having him with me today.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Ashley today as well. I’m looking forward to seeing her tomorrow and to introduce her to Josh.

PS - Lisa Howard, can you send me your email address? Oksana asked for it. (Apparently she didn't receive your email to her).