This morning we left for the orphanage for the last time. Ksenia picked up the boys and I and drove us to the orphanage. On the way, I realized that I had forgotten to bring the remainder of the cash donation. I guess it was a subconscious way of saying I did not really want to give her any more money. But I did plan to give a small amount yet, so I asked Ksenia if we could stop at an ATM to get some additional cash out. While we were in Oktyrka to stop at an ATM the director called wondering why we were not there yet. She had expected us at 9am, (it was 8:45am) and wanted to be ready for an inspection she had scheduled at 10am. We were only about 30 minutes from the orphanage, so we were not running that far behind. Ksenia was not worried, and I figured it could not take that long. We had already gotten everything that he wanted to bring with him and said good byes, now we just had to sign him out.
We got there and took about 5 minutes for me to sign about 6 copies of a couple documents and then we left again. We collected Sergei's file and found out that he had a significant amount of money in the bank that we could try to withdraw. The trouble was, we were not sure where the bank was or which bank had the money. We asked around town to find out where the bank was located. After several tries we finally found the bank. But the bank official was not there, so we had to try a branch in the next town. We were hoping we could withdraw the money there, but no such luck. We did get a phone number to arrange to make the withdraw later, but we would have to go back to the town near the orphanage on Monday and hope it would work out to get the money. It is a large enough amount to make it worth going the 2 hours back there, although it would have been really nice if we could have gotten it while we were already there!
So the town with the bank was also the town where we did the paperwork for Sergei's passport. I have felt like I was back in our military days where the motto was "hurry up and wait!" At the passport office, we sat and waited. Ksenia started filling out paperwork and soon the gentleman took the papers and began the process. It would take a while, so while Ksenia went to make more copies, the boys and I went to the little store and got some food for lunch. Yarik got pizza, Sergei and I ordered hot dogs....although it was not really appetizing. It was more like mush than a hot dog. I wished I had gotten the pizza. Oh well, the bread was good, so I ate most of the bread and left the mush.
Then we went back to the passport office to wait for the signatures. Before too long, the guy came back with the file and we were ready to go. We drove back to Sumy to the bigger passport office to turn in the paperwork for both boys to get their traveling passports. We are praying that nothing goes wrong and we will be able to pick them up on Tuesday, or even Monday if that is possible. It is supposed to take 3 working days, which supposedly include Saturday, so we are hoping for a miracle! Once we have the passports in hand, we can travel to Kiev and get their Visas and medical paperwork for our final approval to get home to America!
The passport office was not far from our apartment, so since we were done for the day, we walked back to the apartment. We walked past the soccer stadium. It was huge, I wish we could have seen a game there during our stay, but we never figured out when we could go. And now it was so cold, I was not sure I would want to sit out there and watch one.
Back at the apartment we had a quiet evening. We ate some dinner, and went online, watched some videos and got to sleep fairly early again after another long day.
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