Day Thirty Six – Back In The Paperwork Jungle

Sherri doesn’t have a computer in Ukraine, so I (Todd) am blogging this from phone conversations with her and some email she has been able to send from the internet café in Rivne. The bus trip from Kyiv to Rivne with Viktoria was a real trial. There was something very wrong with the bus (it felt like there was absolutely no suspension) and we could only go about 40 miles per hour. Finally, about 30 minutes outside of Rivne, the driver stopped on the side of the road and had us all board another bus. The entire bus trip took 6 hours!!! I (Sherri) have now given up on any further bus trips in Ukraine, especially after a girl sitting next to Viktoria said that her husband was on a bus last week that crashed and turned over!

Today has been a fairly full day as expected. We started at the lawyer’s office - he had to get the judge to sign ten copies of the court statement approving the adoption. He was very happy with the bottle of Jack Daniels I found in Paris at the duty free shop! After about an hour there we were off to the orphanage to get Peter's original birth certificate. We filed the paperwork and returned four hours later to pick up the new birth certificate. Viktoria said that the birth certificate bureaucrats told her that this process normally takes a week! The next stop – tomorrow – is the tax codes office. Once that is done, we'll pick up Peter and take him to get his passport pictures prepared (so as not to waste time).