September 19, 2002

We arrived in Kyyiv right on time at 1:00pm. The airport was smaller than I'd expected--similar in size and layout to the airport in Warsaw, Poland. It took us about 50 minutes to get through passport control, baggage claim, and customs. When we finally exited through the customs gates, we received our first nasty shock of the trip: no one to meet us!

We both looked frantically around the lobby and found no one carrying a sign for us. Lee had the information desk page our contact, and Kristin made a sign with the name of our coordinator and our two last names on it and held it up for everyone to see. Lee visited the currency exchange and the small post office in the airport and purchased a phone card and tried to use the pay phones to call our social worker, Nikki, but the phones just wouldn't work.

Just as we were about to try to get a taxi to the U.S. embassy, a man and woman ran up and introduced themselves as our driver (Vitali) and translator (Inna, pronounced EE-na).  Inna breathlessly told us that since the change in management at the National Center for Adoption, they were only honoring appointments Tuesday through Thursday, and thus our Friday appointment would not be possible.  Instead, we were going there straight from the airport so that we could get in for a 4pm appointment.  This was our second shock!  We'd thought that it would be important to be dressed up for this appointment, but apparently we weren't going to even have a chance to clean up.

We walked quickly to the car and drove straight to the National Center for Adoption (downtown). We spent the next hour or so watching Inna assertively lobby on our behalf all up and down a short corridor of rooms, until she motioned to us to come in for our appointment. We met with an official of the Center for Adoption with Inna translating. She showed us a couple of volumes of one-page profiles of children in orphanages all over Ukraine, and we requested a visit to one of the children.

Ina told us that we would be traveling to the orphanage city the following evening. We would be going to Donetsk, in the southeastern part of the country, very near the Russian border.

Having completed this first part of our trip one day early, our next stop was the apartment where our host family lived. Our hostess showed us our room (a spacious living room with a hide-a-bed and french doors for privacy) and then served us a hearty dinner of eastern European dishes.

By 7:00pm, we were ready for bed, the first official day of our adoption journey behind us! Tomorrow evening, we catch a train to Donetsk!