After crashing into bed at 6:50pm, I woke up at 1:30am and pretty much was awake until 9:30pm that night. I was very sick after the ride back from Elatma and a long, hard day and went straight to bed after dinner again. Ended up getting 12 hours of sleep a (few here and there) and feel much better today.
When the van arrived for us to go to Elatma the first day, our pastor host pulled the agency worker out of the van and insisted that we use his better van for the second day, as the one we initially rode in wasn’t good enough for us and we were paying for the transportation. At his insistence, we rode in his van with seats that had headrests, a few even reclined, and that had a decent suspension system. Once again, with the inside of the van overheated, I started to get nauseous within the first few minutes of the ride. The heat was turned down and Dave pulled out a blister pack of pills from the side pocket on the wall of the van and told me, “Here take one of these.” Did he even know what it was? No. He passed the pack to Vika who looked at it for Russian and said, “Look Monica, it has a picture of an airplane and a car on it. Take one.” Okay, I must be stupid, but based on my husband’s assessment of pills he found in a van in Russia and my interpreter’s assessment of the pictures on the back of the blister pack, I took one. Turned out to be fine and I didn’t get sick from the ride or from the use of unknown substances.
On the way Vika told us many details on the paperwork and told us all about our court hearing. By the time she was done, I was ready to call it off. She gave us every worst case scenario there could be, told us about all the numbers of our assets, monthly payments, etc that we had to memorize and “Oh, when asked this, say this, but do not say that. And for this you must say that. And always do this when speaking and never do that”. We were supposed to memorize something to say at the end that is our request for the judge to rule in favor of us adopting, but I can’t remember it to save my life. Luckily she is coming over today to go over all this information AGAIN. Basically, she told us to expect to be grilled and for no one in the room to understand what we know about dwarfism, attachment issues, etc. Assume they know nothing and tell them everything.
We got to the orphanage, were sent into the room we used the day before and Matt got out his violin for the “concert”. All the little children bustled in and took their seats. He played a few songs for them and they enjoyed the time. Later the interpreter told us that when they talked to the children before hand, most of them didn’t know what a violin was and were trying to guess what one looked like. They headed back to their classes and Anya stayed with us. Matt let her try the violin and she was very concentrated on playing it and enjoyed that time. We played with more toys that we brought and ate snacks again. I had Dave take more than half of the gummy snacks out of the bag and hide them when she wasn’t looking as she was downing them a little too quickly! One of the toys I brought was magnetic “paper dolls” and when Anya put one of the summer dresses on the doll, I commented in Russian “summer dress”. She jerked her head, looked at me strangely and said “dah”. She looked shocked that I was speaking properly. Most likely all the other things I’ve been saying have been off in some way!
(photos won't load, will try later as a separate blog)
It was decided that this would be our last visit before court as Anya needed a day of rest before that. So, we headed back to our station in the better van. We ate, slept and got up for a day of resting a bit, filling out more paperwork for the Embassy and Immigration and going over the details of court again. It is early in the morning on the day of court and will go over there, be questioned, followed by Anya being questioned and will get her photos and things ready for her passport. At that point, even though she is legally ours, she goes back to the orphanage for a two week waiting period (I’ve heard it is in case we change our minds) and then Matt and I will get her and process her to leave the country.
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