The next morning we were up bright and early for our date with the AC. We arrived about a half hour before they opened, and joined the throng of people waiting at the bottom of the stairs to be admitted. There were a LOT of people waiting. Natasha told us that this was because 1) it was Thursday, and so the AC had closed early the previous day, and 2) the next day was a holiday. Whatever the reason, there were tons of people there. Natasha really earned our respect there, because somehow she managed to get us in to see Mrs. Kunko by about 10:00. Our meeting with her went very well. She was very nice to us, though she did tell us that there were no young healthy children available. She looked at the book of photos we'd brought and was especially interested in our pictures of whitewater rafting. At the end of the interview, when Natasha presented our gift (a digital clock), she at first made a show of refusing to accept it, but Natasha made a show of insisting, and she seemed pleased with it.

Then it was back out to the hallway to wait some more. Actually, Natasha did most of the real waiting, i.e. standing in line. We got to wander around, talk with other families, etc. We really began to appreciate Natasha's skills at this point, as we started talking to other families who had been there the day before and were still waiting. To this day I don't know how she did it, but she got us in to see the books by about 11:00, despite the fact that some of these other families from the day before were still waiting.

So, the books, and the "psychologists". This was the single experience that, for me, explained the most about things that I hadn't understood before going. I would read about how "unpredictable" adoption in Ukraine was, and I couldn't understand how it could be so. How could one couple's experience differ so greatly from another couple's, even when they were in the country at the same time, or in the AC on the same day? The books, and the "system" they represent, are a HUGE part of the reason.

Warning: The next few paragraphs are entirely devoted to my personal opinion. If you don't want to hear some negativity, skip ahead to the cool part, where we find our two beautiful children :)

I put "system" in quotes here, because, IMO, it's barely a system at all. It's hard to know where to even start listing the problems, but here goes: first, the books are organized primarily by region. Not by gender, not by age, not by diagnosis. Which means that if you are looking for a child with X, Y, and Z, you have to go through each and every book. Now, some might argue that that's a good thing. You don't want the children with diagnoses to be segregated into a set of books that no one looks at. OK. But why not at least separate the children by gender? Plus, EVERY child has a diagnosis. And, the diagnoses... I'm trying to think of a term to describe the diagnoses, that will express my feelings without leaving the bounds of good taste. Lots of people have described them as unreliable. I think a better description would be absolutely useless. With the exception of really major health problems (such as blood borne illnesses or severe physical defects), there doesn't seem to be any useful information. For most of the children, it's two or three sentences, scrawled on a piece of paper, and they mean the difference between being considered for adoption or cast aside without another glance. I lost track of the number of kids with "central nervous system" problems, which Natasha said could be anything from severe cerebral palsy to just being inattentive during the examination.

What really blew me away was that at one point we saw a page for an eight year old child, with a photo of about a two-year old attached. I asked Natasha how often the photos were updated. She gave me a look like I'd asked how often the children are allowed to visit Mars. THE PHOTOS ARE NEVER UPDATED! As far as I could tell, none of the other info was ever updated either. Meaning that an incorrect diagnosis is stuck to an unlucky child for good.

Now, I may be wrong about that last part; maybe the diagnoses, at least, are updated. I didn't pursue this question too far, and maybe some others who have more experience can speak to this. For the sake of the children, I hope that I'm wrong. Maybe that's what the psychologists do, because they don't seem to do much else [at one point while we were looking at the books, our psychologist pulled out a mirror from her desk drawer and began plucking her eyebrows]. But after seeing the "organization" of the books, and how chaotic the whole system is, I would be very surprised if there is any updating taking place at all.

But, since the books were the only game in town, we did what we had to. We paged through them, passing by most of the kids without a second look when Natasha read the diagnoses to us. Because the room was so crowded, I was sort of sandwiched between Anne and Natasha, and with the glare from the windows on the plastic sleeves that the book's pages were in, it was very hard to see most of the pictures, and after a while I realized that it was better that way. I would have been an emotional wreck if I had been able to put a face to all of these children that we were passing by. I know this sounds harsh, but in all honesty this was the very harshest part of the process. I don't know how anyone else who's been there has gotten through the AC emotionally, but my strategy was to concentrate on ages and diagnoses, and ignore everything else.

I want to clarify here why I'm writing about this. I don't want to come across as the "ugly American" who expects everything to be done the way it would be here. I recognize that Ukraine is a very poor country, with a difficult and tragic history behind it. I also know, both from personal experience and from reading others' stories, that there are a lot of people there who genuinely care about the children, and who will move heaven and earth to get these kids to good homes. And, somehow, out of the chaotic mess that is the AC, many people (ourselves included) have found their children. In fact, after going through this experience I have a better understanding of why people believe in miracles. But people going over should know what to expect from the AC: it's an emotional wringer, and you will not receive the information there that you need to make an informed decision. You will be forced to go with your gut instinct. Not with your heart; that will come later, when you actually meet your child. At the AC you will have to make a huge, blind leap of faith. IT'S SCARY!

Anyhow, about every 10 or 20 pages, we'd pull out a child who reasonably fit our criteria, although we were definitely not finding anyone within our preferred age range. Soon it was lunchtime, and we went to the restaurant downstairs. It was a good chance for the three of us to regroup away from the pressures of the AC. We clarified a couple of things with Natasha, specifically that we were much more willing to go up in age than to deal with major health problems. Then it was back up to the AC to finish looking at the books.

We ended up with three candidates for referrals. One was a four year old boy who had been diagnosed with hydrocephaly, and who had recently had a shunt installed. Initially we were drawn to him, but Natasha didn't feel good about the diagnosis. She spoke to the psychologist about him, and of course we don't know exactly what the psychologist said, but it didn't seem right to Natasha, who felt that if they had had to put in a shunt it must have been a pretty severe case. So, heeding the advice to trust our translator, we decided not to see him. He was the youngest of the children we had pulled from the books. The others were both 7 years old and in the same orphanage, in the town of Izmayil in the Odessa region: Ivan and Oleg. And they were both among the few children with the magic word in their diagnosis: healthy!

Our main concern about both Oleg and Ivan was that they both had siblings. Oleg had a brother and Ivan had two sisters. Before leaving, I had struggled for a couple of months to get our INS pre-approval changed from one child to two, since I had foolishly specified only one in our initial application. The change had been approved only a week before we left, and only after untold hours of phone calls, trying to reach someone who could help. So we were approved for two, but we really only planned on one. And we had no desire to break up a sibling group. But Natasha told us not to worry, that the main thing was to get the referral, and she said that in any case siblings are usually not that close in the orphanages. So we decided to go ahead and see them.

After making that decision, it was more waiting while Natasha did the referral paperwork. Then back to the apartment while she arranged our travel plans. Because the next day (Friday) was a holiday there was no need to hurry to the region, so she booked us for an overnight bus on Saturday night.