Stahlke Adoption

The Floodgates Open!

On Tuesday, we finally wired the the$600 translation fee to Masha. My parents loaned us the money until we could access $600 from the Stahlke Adoption Fund at our church, and the wire actually went out from my parents' bank. We used the bank information that Masha had sent to us, including her account number, her legal name (Mariya . . . ), her address in Kramatorsk, her bank's name and address in nearby Donetsk, and all the intermediary banks through which the wire would travel. Since the wire's first stop was the Bank of New York, we paid the domestic rather than the international fee--$15. Beats Western Union at $50!

On Wednesday morning, we telephoned Masha to tell her the money had been sent, and also to ask her for news about the adoption. First, she told us that our package had finally arrived--at her bank!! The clerks there received our package with Masha's name and the bank's street address, city name, and zip code. They almost sent it back to the U.S., but someone looked up Masha's name and realized she was an account holder. They telephoned her, and she picked up the package immediately (on Tuesday).

(Later, I figured out how we made such an error. Rather than digging through past Email for her address, I consulted her recent messages about the translation fee. The street address under her name in the message was not her home address but rather the Kramatorsk branch of the Donetsk bank.)

Masha translated the letter and visa on the same day she picked up the package. She also notarized both of her translations and secured an appointment time with the SDA. On Wednesday, when we talked to her, she was preparing for her train trip to Kyiv that very day. The appointment is on Thursday at 9:00 am, and since Ukraine is eight hours ahead of us, she will talk to the SDA less than an hour from the time I'm writing this blog post.

She hopes to find out a travel date for us, hopefully in August. We will telephone her on Thursday morning our time to find out the news.

posted by Stahlkes @ 11:13 PM