Monday, June 8, 2015

Pishana tomorrow

Josiah and I arrived safe and sound in Odessa around 1:30pm today.  We were blessed to have on-time flights and short layovers.  Josiah was an excellent traveller!  Slavik and Laura picked us up at the airport and delivered us to Laura's apartment.  While they went back to work for the afternoon, Josiah and I took a 3 hour nap.  Feeling refreshed, I took Josiah on his first Ukrainian grocery shopping experience.  We felt pretty independent as we maneuvered through the store and were able to find everything we were looking for and pay for our groceries with my limited 10 Russian word vocabulary.

We got a call from Alyona tonight with some exciting news!  Many of you are aware that last Friday, our facilitator in the States called me to let me know there is another unexpected delay in our adoption.  Apparently, Ukraine just passed a new law that requires all children from the Lugansk region to have a special birth certificate that can only be issued in Kiev.  In order to obtain this birth certificate we need either a new court decree or an addendum added to our current court decree.  The judge who is assigned to us is busy working on a criminal case until Wednesday.  At that time, if he issues an addendum to the current court decree it will take 5 days to obtain the new birth certificate.  If we need a new court decree it will take 10 days to get the birth certificate.  So we have an extra week or more to wait.  We were told on Friday that it might be best to wait until this is all resolved to travel.  Our family prayed over the decision of delaying our flights and felt that it would be best to travel as planned on June 7th.  We were told we probably couldn't take Isaac out of the orphanage until we have the new birth certificate, but we could visit him and hang out with the other children there.  Slavik and Laura, with his ministry Nasledie Heritage Foundation, are busy getting the camp for orphans ready to begin on June 13th.  There is much that we could do to help them with preparations.  So we are here to assist in any way we can.  Today Alyona called and said that we will be able to pick Isaac up from Pishana, sign him out (permanently I think!!!), and bring him here to Odessa to wait with us!!  Woo Hoo!!!  We're so excited!!  Tomorrow night our new son/brother will be here with us!!

Please pray that the birth certificate issue will be resolved as quickly as possible this week.  In the meantime, we are thankful for the God-given opportunity to help Nasledie Heritage Foundation and for the unexpected blessing of having Isaac here with us while we wait!!


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