We Got Zoya's Referral!!

We had our SDA appointment this morning. I was a nervous wreck before hand. Even though we were “committed” to Zoya, up until this point it was possible for someone else to come and get her file to adopt her. It rarely happens, but it was a possibility. I was so worried about it and just wanted to see her file in our hands! Nicolay picked us up around 9:50. We got to the place around 10:15 and our appointment wasn’t until 11:00. We went into the meeting at about 10:20 (early) and were done by 10:35. In the meeting, we sat down with Serge (our facilitator) and the psychologist.

The psychologist showed us Zoya’s file and Serge gave us a little of her information. She was abandoned at birth by her parents and left at the hospital (most likely because she has Down Syndrome). It sounds like they don’t even have any information on her parents or if she has any siblings. Earlier we were told she had heart surgery for an Atrial Septal Defect (which would be a hole/holes between the top 2 chambers of her heart). At the meeting we were told she has an open oval window, so I will have to ask the Doctor at the orphanage which of the 2 it is.  We do know she had heart surgery in November. 

We were asked why we wanted to adopt a child with special needs. Serge told us we will be asked this a lot and people will say, “why young handsome beautiful people like you want child like this?” He said lots of people think Americans come here and adopt children with special needs to sell their body parts. I guess they think that because they can’t fathom why someone would want a child with special needs. In America, not so long ago, we treated people with disabilities the same way, so we are really only a little bit ahead of this country. We too locked people with disabilities away in institutions at one point. We told him, from our hearts, why we want to adopt Zoya. In her file they had the cutest little baby picture of her and I asked if I could trade them with the picture I had of her (the only picture we had up until now) and they said YES!! Having this baby picture is such a blessing, I cannot even tell you how special it is to us! We got the referral for Zoya and we are not allowed to officially accept the referral until we meet her. After that all the paperwork to begin adopting her will happen and we will wait for a court date.

Here is her baby picture! I took a picture of the picture so it's not the best quality but I had to share!!

So now we were told that we will be leaving tonight on the train to her region.

We are in Kyiv right now, which is the capital of Ukraine.  Zoya lives in Dnipropetrovs'k, which you can see is right along the Dniper River (to the East). So that is where we will be taking the train to.

We need to pack all of our things and Nicolay is picking us up at 3:30 to go back to the SDA building at 4:00 to get our paperwork. After that we will go to the train station (still not sure what time the train leaves) and start on our 8-9 hour ride to Zoya’s country. Once there we will get a new apartment and hopefully get to meet Zoya sometime tomorrow!!! I can’t even believe this is actually happening. I will not be able to sleep at all tonight! That’s it for now…off to pack! Thank you for all your support and prayers and messages….hearing from friends/family back home is priceless to us during this time.