Overnight Train to Odessa – Fast Car to Belgorod

Our hosts in Kiev were a delight to stay with. Their hospitality was fantastic! After the embassy visit we walked through the city to their home. The old town sits on a high hill and the embassy is on the slope of that hill. On our way back we stopped at an indoor market. It was quite a mixture of booths with everything from butchers and cheese sellers to vegetable, fruit and flower sellers. We picked up a nice flower basket for Irina and went on our way while we noted the possible places to change money. The people and government of Ukraine need prayer. They had a bank collapse back in the mid-nineties where all deposits and withdrawals were frozen. Nobody could get money. It helped them survive. Now with the current crisis in government related to the disagreement between their president (pro-western) and prime minister (pro-eastern), the effect looks very similar to the last time. The $ and Euro continues to get stronger here and that’s effecting the banking and credit system. They have again frozen the deposits and withdrawals. People are afraid to put their money in banks, but keeping the money at home is not safe either because it potentially makes them a target. Please pray for all of this.

We received our referral letter and adoption dossier on the way to the train station. A very fun taxi driver named Misha took us to our facilitator and then to the train station. Yulia gave us our tickets and then the dossier saying, “These are your adoption documents. They are extremely important. You can lose yourselves, your luggage or whatever, but losing these documents will severely delay this adoption.” We still have our documents, our luggage and ourselves! 

Misha took us directly to the station and escorted us to our room on the train. We slept a bit better on this train. It was a faster train, which meant more movement, but that seemed to be better than stopping 10 or more times. We arrived in Odessa at 6am and were met almost as soon as we stepped out by a taxi driver named Gene (pronounced “Je-Ne”) hired to bring us to Belgorod. He was the fastest taxi driver we’ve had yet! Gene took us to Belgorod. In this part of the country we are near the Black Sea. The countryside and villages are much like our days in Czech, except that the buildings and homes are much more run down. There are farms and fields and there was lots of fog. We traveled over a bridge that spans a bay of the Black Sea. The bridge is the kind that has a center section that lifts straight up for ships to pass under it. After another 20 minutes we were in Belgorod by 7:30am. Gene tried calling some people but found nobody answering. Possibly it was too early. We eventually spoke with Tasha, the lawyer involved with adoptions and with our facilitators. She encouraged us to get to our hotel at the Christian Clinic in town and then go with Gene to meet with Lyudmila, our translator. We didn’t know exactly where the Christian Clinic was though as we had only a phone number and nobody was answering. But, when I was speaking with Kim about it and said the words “Christian Clinic”, Gene piped up and said, “Christian Clinic?”. The next thing we knew we were on our way through Belgorod. We arrived at this medical facility, which has rooms upstairs. We then left our luggage, took our backpacks and documents and went with Gene to find Lyudmila. Gene picked her up at her home and then we went to the department of education. Here we were to receive a letter of referral in exchange for our letter of referral from the SDA in Kiev. This would allow us to go to the orphanage.