This morning Dan leaves early with the driver and the translator for Liliana’s village (Zolotoye Pole, or Golden Fields in English) to get the necessary documents.  They allow me to stay behind in the apartment with Liliana.

About six hours later, Dan returns, and he’s visibly upset.  They’ve returned from the village and attempted to get the documents apostilled in Simferopol.  The woman at the office refused to do anything, because there are only two days a week that they offer the apostille service–Tuesday and Friday.  So because of the court documents not being ready yesterday and throwing everything out of whack, we can’t get anything done until Friday, which means that we can’t submit passport information until Friday afternoon.  Acquiring the passport can take 3-5 business days, which puts us into next week.  We still have Kiev’s U.S. Embassy responsibilities to fulfill, so our Wednesday departure date is looking less and less like a possibility.

I think the translator senses our disgust with the system, because he promises to see if he can get the passport process going before the apostille is done.  He says he will ask a certain woman (who is notoriously rigid) if she will expedite the system by starting the passport process without the necessary apostille, if he promises to bring her the documents on Friday.  He will tell her how important it is that we return home.  I’m sure all parents say the same thing, and our translator is quite rough around the edges, so I’m not sure it’s going to work.

I pray, though.  I tell God that this has been an extremely hard time for both of us, and that we are doing our best to remain positive.  We started this whole mission with a good heart, and we want to end up with good hearts.  Couldn’t He please do this one thing for us?  To speed the process along?

An hour later, the translator calls and says that the strict passport woman will allow us to start the process if we bring the child right away for photos and documentation.  We wake up Liliana from her nap (which is disastrous for so many reasons, one of which is that she threw a temper tantrum when Dan tried to put her down, and after 20 minutes of screaming, she’s finally fallen into a snoring slumber).  We are picked up by the driver, and we go to the passport office.  Liliana behaves beautifully, and the process is begun.

In my heart I’m saying, “Thank you, thank you.”  I felt a little like Liliana this morning–out of my element and frustrated with how things are progressing–ahem, aren’t progressing.  Now we’re back on track.  We hope we can get everything wrapped up here in Simferopol on Saturday, so we can fly back to Kiev on Sunday.

Dan says this evening, “A woman from the village offices came up to me and said, ‘Thank you for doing this good thing for a child of Ukraine.  We are so grateful.’”  Dan says she was visibly touched, and she had come out of her way to express herself.

There are a few times here I’ve felt exactly like Liliana.  A few rainstorms of tears seem to make the world a little brighter and the living a little easier.