There and Back Again with Four Children and My Husband's GPS

End of Day 20

Vitals:  Our court date for Ruslan is scheduled for Friday, October 22nd (which will be day 27).  Still waiting on a court date for Roman.  The rest of this is long. I'm warning you now.  Run while you can. It was a long day.

Life:  So, we had planned all along to go see Roman today.  We hadn't seen him since Monday and it was clearly time.  The problem was that Roman's orphanage is in Boyarka, a new town for us and therefore a new bus route and bus for us.  Bill is still gone, so the debate of the hour was whether to take a taxi or try to figure out the bus system on my own, which was a little daunting.  I debated about it ALL DAY on Thursday.  I hate it when I don't know what to do.

On Friday morning, I finally decided.  Bill was gone, so it would be me and the four kids alone in a strange place, it was overcast and cold, the kids were still a little sluggish, I hadn't had time to look at a map and figure out where we were trying to go, I still had no IDEA where to find any sort of bus schedule here, thus I wasn't sure where to even catch the bus and to make matters worse, I couldn't find the sheet of paper that Nadya had given me for the bus driver with the name and address of the orphanage.  According to every factor that a rational human and loving mother (with small children in a foreign country) might consider, I should call Nadya and ask her to get us a cab.  As I was pondering these things in my heart, my kids got into a fight over a butter knife and two plastic forks. I figured if they were healthy enough to fight, they were healthy enough to travel.  I decided to take the bus. 

After all, we had to figure this out sometime.  Besides, if I didn't do this on my own, then somewhere in the back of my mind, I would always remember that Bill was the only one with the guts and brains to get us from place to place in a foreign country. It would bug me for the rest of my life.

I got the kids bundled and told them to pack their DS's and books for the trip. I knew the town name and I was pretty sure I remembered the street name, because it is also the name of a street here in Kiev.  So, while the kids were getting their shoes on, I got on line and looked up the Ukrainian word for "orphanage" and wrote it on a piece of paper.  I wanted to get on google earth and at least get an idea of where we had to go, but the kids had taken so long to fight for me (thus making up my mind) that I didn't have time to look it up. I figured if it all turned out terrible and we got lost in a foreign country, with no cell coverage, no translator to get us home and no idea where to find a taxi or bus station, I'd still be able to blame them.  So, I felt safe.  We were out the door at about 9am, hoping that two hours to get to Boyarka would be enough. 

As we were walking I remembered that I didn't know the Ukrainian spelling for Boyarka, so I got out our little pocket guide and tried to figure it out using their English/Ukrainian alphabet page.  I can't read a lick of Ukrainian, but I can pick out a few letters here and there.   The problem is that, like English, they can have more than one letter for each sound.  So, to make a long story short, I realized there was a whole bunch of letters that might work together to sound like Boyarka.  I didn't even know which ones to use, let alone their combination.   I finally settled on looking for a small looking "b" with sort of a tail on top at the beginning, skipping the middle stuff and looking for "ka" at the end. I was sure I had those right. 

Anyway, we walked around a local bus area for a few minutes, but I didn't accomplish anything beyond loosing time and annoying my kids. So we went back to the metro and took the subway to the bus station in Cybertown.  The buses all line up along the sides of the road in this one area.  There are schedules posted on a few poles, but depending on the number of buses there at any one time, they don't always end up next to the schedules.  So, you have to look for cardboard signs in their front windows with a list of all the stops that they make. I actually found two for Boyarka (probably), both empty, with no sign of a driver in sight. I stood around in front of the cleanest one until the driver appeared.

He looked safe enough. I walked up to him and said, "Boyarka?" and he said "da" and a bunch of other stuff which I ignored.  I showed him my paper with the word "orphanage" in Ukrainian, which I had VERY CAREFULLY copied by the way, and he looked at me like I was a nut, shook his head "no" and said "nyet."  Well, this was annoying.  He was the bus driver, he should know where everything is! I was sure I copied it right...I think.  So, I said, "Kershatick?" which I was pretty sure was the name of the street and he kind of shrugged his shoulders, looked around the bus area, nodded no, and then shrugged his shoulders again.  So I said "Kershatick" again, because that is the word I was the most sure of and he nodded "no" again. Then he looked at me, shrugged a third time, nodded yes, and waved us into the empty bus.   All I could think at that point was, "OK. Well.  He looks safe enough...Remember the mantra: 'If I perish, I perish."  We got on the bus. 

Bill has this sort of endearing/infuriating habit of taking a GPS with him everywhere he goes.  I both love and hate him for it because it undoubtedly HELPS, but he is always wanting to explain things to me and, God love the man, he is a horrible teacher.  It usually ends up like this: He will be holding the thing, zooming in and out, getting his bearings, marking sites with little red dots, and then the GPS will track our location and direction with a green triangle.  This is fine as it goes, but I'm usually not in a position to see what's going on at this phase.  Bill knows that I would LIKE to know, so his solution is to hold up the GPS after he has figured everything out so I can see it over the children's head.   Then he will say, "we are here, where the green triangle is, and that red dot is where we just turned left and that other red dot is where we are going."  Since there is nothing else on the screen besides a green triangle and two red dots, all I get from that is: we are the green triangle and we are between two red dots.  This is where we have been every single time he has ever showed me the GPS.  In case anyone is wondering, we have never NOT been the green triangle between the two red dots....   ...so WHY are you showing me the page? Why not just say, "Marnie, in case you are interested, we are still the green triangle between the two red dots.  God is in His heaven and all is right with the world.."  At least then I can just smile and nod and I won't have to lean over a small child to see your screen and feign interest.  ...not that I'm bitter.  I love you.  Really.

Oh....Right.  Anyway.  Bill left me the GPS. I didn't want it. I told him that we would still be the green triangle between the two red dots, regardless of whether I actually carried the thing with me.  But, he insisted that I take it.  I have to say, it's a pretty handy little device.  Once I had it in my own hands, I saw that he has labeled all the little red dots.  I could zoom out to see all of our Kiev dots and zoom in to various dots to find where we are in relation to them.  He had labeled every turn during our taxi ride to Boyarka on Monday. So, by looking at the green triangle, in relation the the red dots, I could tell with absolute certainty that we were NOT following the taxi route.

When I "read" Ukrainian, I often think to myself that they must be attempting to get the right spelling for a sneeze. Their words are just a huge mass of letters, mostly consonants with a lot of "sh" and "ch" sounds in them and they look and sound like someone sneezing. (For example, the word for "OK" is "kha-rah-SHO" with the emphasis on the "sho."  They say this all the time.  "kha-rah-SHO, kha-rah-SHO."  It's like the whole country is continually suffering from a massive case of hay fever.)  Anyway, like I explained about looking for "b----ka" you just learn to ignore everything else when you are reading and look for the few things you understand.  It's the same way with bus riding. You learn to pick out a land mark here or there, and ignore the rest.  But when things are SO unfamiliar it's really difficult to remember if that white building you are passing is THAT white building you were trying to use as a landmark on Monday or just another white building. Since we'd only done this once before, nothing looked familiar.  There was nothing to do but sit in silence and wait until the bus cleared out.  I figured it would empty at SOME stop and if not, we could just take it back to Kiev. 

--UNTIL we passed an auto repair shop. I zoomed in and out on the GPS and saw that we were between two red dots!  I held it up for my kids to see and then I said gleefully,"hey, look guys! We are between the two red dots!  We are here, where the green triangle is, and that red dot is where we just turned left and that other red dot is where we are going!"  My children dutifully leaned over each other to see the screen and feign interest.  Suddenly, everything was fine.  God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

We kept getting closer and closer to the orphanage (in a round about way) until he finally let us off about 1/4 inch from the red dot.  Nothing looked familiar, but thanks to the GPS, I knew which direction to walk.  I showed my kids the GPS and pointed to the red dot we needed to walk toward so they would know.  I was really getting the hang of the thing.  The orphanage was actually pretty close. We arrived at 11am, just on time according to my schedule.

From the front door, you walk into a huge reception room.  There were two women there. One was on the phone and the other one left as soon as she saw us.  The phone-talker finished about a minute later and since I was standing relatively near her, in her line of sight, I thought she would look up. As I was about to say my rehearsed speech ("Roman?"), she pressed down the reciever without looking up at me and went right to dialing the next number.  I moved a little closer to ENSURE that I was within her line of sight, but she never looked up. Three calls later, I decided to go to the bathroom.

When I came out, another woman had corralled my kids onto a bench.   I said "Roman?" and she said, "Roman."  Then I said, "da" and she said, "da."  Then she went into another room, well within our hearing, said something and WOW was there a lot of yelling. I think anyway, maybe it was just casual conversation.  We sat on the bench for another ten minutes and they finally told us we could go to a meeting room down the hall where we had first met Roman.  Paul stupidly stood up and walked down the hall toward the room. Big mistake.  She talked and sneezed at him ten ways to Sunday.  We had to go outside and enter again through a the side door.

So, we had a nice visit with Roman.   He is not afraid of us at all.  He smiled as soon as he saw us and went straight up to Paul and gave him a huge hug.  We all thought that was really sweet until we realized he wanted Paul to put him up on a rocking horse that Paul was standing next to (a plastic horse attached to a metal base with four squeaky springs).  Well, he rocked, and he rocked and I realized that he might rock the whole visit.  This is actually good behavior for him.  They get SO LITTLE stimulation, that their little brains and bodies need to move like this.  I've read great articles about how little kids NEED to be tossed (gently) into the air by their daddies and tumble all over to help their brains develop.  So, the rocking was fine, the squeaking about killed Reilly. 

He got off about 15 minutes later.  He didn't talk much, but he smiled the whole time.  The kids were great with him.  They were just working on a second puzzle when the ladies-in-white came to get Roman.  I couldn't believe it. I think we got 30 minutes with the little guy total. 

Now we had to figure out where to catch the bus home.  I got out my handy orange GPS to get a reassuring glance at my green triangle and the red dots, but it was out of power.  I forgot to turn it off and the batteries were dead.  No matter, I had a good idea of the direction of town, so we started walking. Luckily, it was only about five blocks.  There is a nice town center that is Triangle shaped and there were a bunch of buses gathered all around it.  I got the kids meat pies and juice for lunch.  Paul and Sharon also got some deep fried yeast patties that appeared to be filled with beans and meat.  They were actually pretty good, but you have to chew meat products VERY CAREFULLY here, because every meal usually has at least one bone chip.

After that, it was a small matter to find a bus back to Cybertown, hop on and get comfortable.  I know Cybertown, because it is near that huge line of shops and there is a billboard with a little yellow man holding a phone.  I had to keep watch, but we made it home by 2:30, collapsed in front of the TV and didn't rise again until dinnertime. 

So, that is the story.  There and Back Again.  I am STILL not over my bad self.