Monday March 31

Greetings from Ukraine,

We didn't hear from our facilitator until late in the afternoon. We had a feeling that since it was so late, that he had nothing new to tell us. When we finally spoke to him, it was apparent that that was the case. As he has been doing for us off and on during this entire month, he was camped outside of the SDA office today hopeful of a development. He is good at being the squeaky wheel. As of yet we still do not have a new appointment date but he is confident that there will be an appointment soon.

I do not know an exact number of families that are waiting for 2nd or 3rd appointments but I did get the impression that the number was a higher than normal. Both our facilitator and our drivers and interpreters have all said that none of them have seen anything like this scenario before in past years. They've never seen so many rejections. Until recently virtually all families selected a referral during their first appointment with only a handful needing a 2nd. Now families like us that are waiting for 2nds and 3rds seem to be the norm. No one seems to know how Ukraine evolved into such a mess.



For an early afternoon activity Shirley and I opted to take a walk to the nearby Russian Art Museum. Our travel guides described the Museum as a combination of beautiful works of art of both Russian and Ukrainian origin (some works are claimed by both Russia and Ukraine). The Museum is fairly close; a little less than an uphill mile. Unfortunately when we got there we found the Museum closed. Then when we looked at the small print of our Ukrainian guide books we saw that the museum was closed on the last Monday of every month. Wow...how's that for taking a hit from Murphy's Law? We're going to try the Museum again tomorrow or some other time during the week. We're still not sure of when we're going to have to leave this apartment.


One thing that strikes me about our neighborhood is the number of casinos that are within walking distance. Although they can't compare to the sprawling Taj Mahal or Tropicana in Atlantic City, this street is nevertheless littered with casinos. We’ve yet to go into one of them although if we keep going through money the way we’ve been, it may be a temptation that I can’t fight anymore. I used to live an hour away from Atlantic City and actually fared fairly well at their Blackjack tables. On the other hand there were days when AC bled me dry in a matter of minutes.





Finally here is a tribute to the dentists in my family, namely my sister in New Jersey and my Aunt in Seattle. How nice it is to be able to find a dentist office without having to be able to read the language, thanks to signs like this. In fact you could probably be a total illiterate and still know where to go to fix a sore tooth!! Here in Ukraine we may be suffering from boredom or otherwise going nuts but at least the family dentists back home can be assured that our teeth will make it even if we don't.






In case you couldn't tell, its been a quiet day with not much going on. But we expect that any day we'll get a phone call that will send us packing and into some kind of action; that seems to be the way things work around here. We're not sure where we'll be sleeping tomorrow night either. We've seen some new names commenting on our posts and some new names sending emails to my inbox. Thanks to everyone for your support and for being in touch.