God's wonders never end!

(To the right are pictures of some of the children at the orphanage playing and a picture of their cafeteria)
Hello everyone!
Unfortunately, due to all of our required running around, we did not get to see the girls today. We were able to text and speak to them through Larissa, our translator. Today the documents went back to Kyiv via bus, only with God’s intervention! The lady, who is in charge of writing the conclusion to agree to our adoption for the national adoption center back in Kyiv, wanted a supplement to her salary and made it clear we should pay for getting her job done today. Since we did not offer the money, she made sure our documents did not arrive in time. This might have cost us a week delay in the process since these documents could not be submitted again to Kyiv until Friday and push court date to the following Friday. But, all things are possible with God! He will find a person (the taxi driver) and a way (pushing a taxi) to make his plan succeed!!

At 07:50am this morning, Dan and Larissa went to the Juvenile center to have the supervisor (lady #1) start signing the three copies of each of the three sets of documents for the girls. She was pleasant and since this was going to take almost an hour and a half, told them to take one completed set to another lady (lady #2) to start writing her conclusion. Also, we still needed the completed medical forms signed by the 5 doctors and the orphanage director to submit to her. We could get this after 10:00am from the orphanage. Well, lady #2, who used to have the position of lady #1 before the adoption system was redesigned, was used to being given extra incentives for doing her job and making things flow well. This morning, she was horrible to Larissa. She angrily questioned Larissa about all of the documents over and over. In the end, she said she had a lot of work today and didn’t know if she could get to our documents when we left her office.

Next, we went to the notary and they didn’t have our documents completed that we left for them yesterday. They also requested additional information from the adoption center. We were told, once again, to come back after lunch around 2:30pm.

At 4:00pm we arrived at the Juvenile center to pick up our finished documents (Larissa called and they told her the conclusion was done), and lady #2 was no where to be found. Finally, she arrived at 4:28pm. But, the document still needed two other people to sign and register it. We left the center at 5:20pm to try and catch the 5pm bus. Dan and Larissa grabbed a taxi and headed to the bus station. When they arrived, they learned the bus had left 10 minutes earlier. However, the cab driver said he could “catch” the bus. They proceeded to chase after the bus at 100-140 km/hr with the fuel level near empty! The driver did pull over for fuel at one point, but only put in 1L. So, they ended up running out of gas further down the road anyway, and Dan had to push the cab!!! There were lights up in the distance and praise God, it was a fuel station ¼ mile ahead. An hour outside of Berdyansk they purchased gas again and caught the bus by flashing the headlights and honking the horn at the driver. When bus pulled over, the documents were handed over to the driver for delivery to Kyiv!!! (Below are pictures of artwork that some of the children at the orphanage completed)


Thank you for your prayers! They are making the difference in making our path straight! So, today we claim Habakkuk 2:3 “If it seems slow, do not despair, for these things will surely come to pass. Just be patient! They will not be overdue a single day!”

Blessing! Dan and Julie