Our Day in Court

Our day in court was an interesting affair. Neither of us were nervous going in, for a couple of reasons. First, the Kemerovo Region is very adoption friendly. While some judges in other places will have a 2 hour hearing, it is usually over in about 30 minutes in Kemerovo. Second, as an older couple, with other children, in a community with many Russian Emigres, we're a no-brainer for approval.

Perhaps I'm difficult to deal with. You be the judge. We're on the steps of the Court house, waiting for our hearing. The agency rep says she needs payment, and hands me a scrap of paper with $4,100 dollars as the total. That's just this payment. Many have preceeded it. She requires Cash. In $100 dollar bills. I ask for a signed receipt. She refuses. What? You expect me to hand you $4100 dollars in cash, but you can't give me a receipt? They actually call our Agency in Oregon so they can explain to me that no receipt will be forthcoming. I can think of very few reasons why some one would be unwilling to issue a receipt, and frankly, none of them are good. I am told, flat out , that I can pay up, with no reciept, or end the process. No pressure there.

I'm used to the Pirates. I fork over the cash. This is about one little girl, not cosmic right and wrong.

Court was harder than expected. The Judge speaks Russian (no real surprise), and we get simultaneous translation from our person, Svetlana. It was surprisingly hard to be looking at the judge talking in Russian, and listening to Svetlana translate in English. We were fed the proper answers, and gave them at the correct times. After 20 minutes of the prescribed protocol, we broke for the judge to consider her ruling. After 60 seconds, we were summoned back into the court and awarded custody of Dasha.

We're happy and relieved, but the we're-too-shady-to-give-you-a-receipt experience was unpleasant. We spent the rest of the day goofing around. We went shoe shopping with the couple across the hall from us. They needed smaller shoes for their little boy. We walked a few miles, then I finally hailed a cab and asked him to take us to a place with a kids shoe store. It is amazing the words I can string together. I belive his answer was "The cows are on motorcycles - film at 11:00".


The cabbie took us to a Mall. 3 stories, 60 stores, food court, holy cow this could be Kansas. There were 10 shoe stores, and we found some they liked. We spent 45 minutes in the grocery store in the base of the mall shopping for supplies. It just occurred to me that this was the anchor store, not Macy's or Nordstroms. It was very much like one of our upscale supermarkets, but just not as big - and the labels were in Russian/Cyrillic.

When we returned to our room, our day took a nose dive. We received a call from Svetlana letting us know that we would not be driving to the orphanage to pick up Dasha tomorrow. The orphanage director has a meeting in Kemerovo, and she'll bring Dasha to us. I say no. There is a lot of hopeful symbolism in retrieving a child from an orphanage. The reality we were to face was far different.

I dug in my heels, but it was obvious that we had no options. To complicate the situation, we had planned on locating Dasha's grandmother when we picked up Dasha. Prokopyevsk is 3 hours away, and it was the only way to do it. If we didn't go pick her up, there was no way we could look up the grandmother. And we had added in an extra 3 days to our trip (for $1,000), to accomodate this side trip. We went to bed unhappy, to say the least.

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