Orekhovo-Zuevo

With all the rush and business, I have not had a chance to post on some of the details of our visit with Grace. Of course, due to privacy concerns, I can not/will not post pictures of her until she is in our custody. But there is detail that I can provide.

The town that Grace's orphanage is located is in Orekhovo-Zuevo. It is a town of about 130,000 located in the eastern side of the Moscow Region. It is about 130 km from the center of Moscow. The first reaction from our driver and translator when they heard we were going there was, "ooohhhh." It is not the most popular orphanage to visit with the facilitators. It can be reached in as little as two hours when there is good traffic. When the traffic was bad, well, it was a lot more than that!

We arrived at the orphanage on Tuesday afternoon. Our first impression was that it seemed bigger than Vidnoye. We went inside and found out that Tuesday was the day where all the kids were being examined by specialist doctors. This just seemed like a normal thing, they were just doing a general overall inspection of the kids.

Of course no child likes to be around strange doctors and these kids were no exception. So there was plenty of crying in the orphanage. Everyone was busy. Caregivers with kids were coming and going. We saw more caregivers during this short period of time than we ever saw in all our visits to Vidnoye.

Unlike Vidnoye, there was no private play room for a prospective family to utilize to spend time with their referral. Instead we were told to wait in a hallway. It had several couches and it was lined with plants. There was even a parakeet in a cage. There was no place for the child to get down and move around. Plus, it was just a few feet from where the doctors were examining the other children.

So it was this environment when they brought Grace out to us. She was naturally reticent of us at first, and this was compounded by the fact she could hear other wailing children. She was visibly upset and was shedding a few tears. I couldn't blame her a bit. We saw some things that put us on the verge of tears as well.

After a couple of minutes I decided I needed to snap some photographs. Somehow I had managed to leave the digital camera on, or it had gotten turned on while it was in my backpack. I pulled it out and the low battery light was blinking! Aghghgh! All this way and I have a nearly dead camera. I managed to snap a couple of pictures and it was dead. There are no pictures of the three of us from day one. I took about five pictures and a short video to send to Dr. Chambers of the International Adoption Clinic in Birmingham. It was kaput after that.

Fortunately, I had a video camera. Minutes before Wendy's father took us to the airport to go to Russia, this same camera decided to eat a tape for the very first time. It wouldn't give it back and it set off a pretty good panic right before the trip. I was able to get the damaged tape out and a new tape worked just fine. So I had two camera panics during this trip.

The video camera worked fine and got some video of Grace. Unfortunately, this video is punctuated by the cries of children in the background and Grace is visibly scared. So it was not the romanticized, idealized, perception you have of meeting your child for the first time. That pretty much wrapped up our first visit.

The next day, Wednesday, we arrived and the orphanage was much less busy. However, our perception of the orphanage compared with Vidnoye took a few more down tics. The guards at the entrance prevented us from taking pictures. This was totally unlike Vidnoye. Sonya, our translator, read the guards the riot act. But ultimately we had to respect what they said. Wendy had gotten one picture of the outside before the crack down. I got no video with the video camera. This was totally unlike Vidnoye where no one cared about this.

When we got inside, we asked if we could be put in a room where we could privately meet with Grace. They did accommodate this request which made our second visit much better. They gave us a big blanket to lay on the floor so she could get on the floor and move around. When they brought in Grace and she was less upset than the day before. She was still pretty unresponsive and had the classic "orphanage stare" going.

It was not until we brought out a set of plastic keys that she got much more engaging. She really got into them. She laughed when we played with them. I helped her count them and she mimicked the pointing. I gave them to her and she gave them back to me. That was really funny for her. Eventually she started chucking them and was looking at us to give them back. After several minutes of this, she shocked us by standing up on her own, walking over to the keys, and stooped over to pick them up. It was quite a demonstration of skill that she had been hiding from us up to this point.

Whereas Jason was a ham during our visits with him, I think Grace up to this point had been a tease. Or maybe cautious. It took her a little while to warm up to us, totally understandable, but she must have felt more comfortable with us and started to show off a little bit.

What was funny was that it with both children, Jason and Grace, that it was a set of colorful plastic keys that really started our good interactions with them. Maybe that is just unique to us, or maybe there is something to them. It made us feel good that we were able to draw out Grace as well we did.

That was all the visits we had. Thursday was Wendy and my medical checkup, then we went to the notary to get some court documents filed so that we could get the ball rolling on our court date. Once those things were done, there was no time to drive back to the orphanage. Vidnoye would have been a different story, but Orekhovo-Zuevo (or OZ as some people call it).

Hopefully next time we will be able to sneak around the guards and get some video and pictures of the orphanage. Not having those will mean an incomplete picture of her story, especially compared to what we have with Jason.