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Saturday, May 29, 2004 11:14 AM CDT
Our days in Kazakhstan are dwindling to the last few – and there is not much new to report. The weather is wonderful – about 80 with no humidity and usually a mild breeze.-- which is lucky since fans are rare and air conditioning is unheard of. The sun rises around 6 am and sets around 10:45 pm. We go out for a walk once a day and play with Shelly and Amina once or twice every day. Other than that, we don’t leave the hotel very often.
We’re starting Alexander on solid food and he seems to love it -- (as you'll see in the new photos). No surprise, since he loves eating and also loves all things new. We usually have him try a little ice cream when we’re out walking. Kazakhs seem to love ice cream – we see more ice cream vendors than bread vendors.
We’ll be leaving our home away from home this coming Wednesday and moving on to Almaty to wrap up our business and finally travel home next Saturday. Have we mentioned that we can’t wait to come home?
Wednesday, May 26, 2004 12:03 AM CDT
We now have less than one full week left here in Kokshetau, then off to Almaty where Alexander will become an American citizen. Once our business is taken care of there, we can start that 24-hour journey home. Any suggestions regarding how to travel 24-hours with a teething, continually hungry and newly mobile baby are most welcome.
Alexander’s flirtations with the hotel staff continue. This little boy learned early on that his smile would get him LOTS of attention. His new best friend is a young waiter named Kwan. Every time we eat in the dining room he asks us when we’ll be back. The other night we said we’d be at dinner between 7 and 8; we were running late because Alexander decided to take a nap. When 8:00 rolled around, Kwan was at our door asking “Where’s Aziz?”. We gave pictures to Kwan and another staff person, Dena. Kwan showed his pictures to everybody and started kissing them as if they were of his new girlfriend. He only speaks basic English and asks us every day for “family picture”. We don’t know how to tell him that we haven’t had it developed yet. New pictures today include those with Kwan and Dena.
We bought an inexpensive stroller the other day and have been using it to go on daily walks with Shelly and Amina. We also made the miraculous discovery that it helps Alexander to sleep and even settles him down when he is fighting sleep, which he does about 4 times a day. We expect to wear down a neat oval path in the hallway carpet before we leave. But at least we provide amusement for the hotel staff.
Thanks again to everyone for the messages both private and public. We love checking our e-mail and guest book everyday and our gratitude for all the support we’ve received from family and friends, old, new and even some reconnected, is beyond words.
Sunday, May 23, 2004 11:56 AM CDT
Two weeks remaining until we return home. It’s hard to believe we’ve been here over three weeks – though I’ll stop short of saying that time is flying. We’re very ready to be home and to have our baby meet his new family and all of the friends who have been waiting for him. There are relatively few ways to keep a seven month old busy in a hotel room, though we’re trying to get him out for walks once a day or so – he generally loves anything that involves seeing new things and tends to like being in motion in general. Who wouldn’t after six months in a hospital room?!
I’ve mentioned the fact that children here are seen as community property. This is especially apparent in the hotel restaurant – whenever we bring Alexander in with us, the wait staff offers to take him before the food comes out. They walk him around, show him the fish tanks, pass him to each other and find lots of ways to entertain him. They act like we’re doing them a favor by letting them play with our baby. They keep him until we are done with our food and ready to pay the bill.
There are plenty of stores and shops nearby, but retail is very much reduced in scale from what we’re used to in the States. Stores consist of groups of vendors, each with their own booth selling a handful of items. They don’t have a lot of cash on hand so they’ll usually look at you funny if you give them a large bill and expect change. Twice in the hotel restaurant, we’ve handed them two 1000 Tenge notes (about $14 altogether) expecting about 350 Tenge change. The waiter came back with a 200 Tenge note and two packs of chewing gum. Since he doesn’t speak a word of English, we were unable to argue with this bartering arrangement. Whether or not we can pay our bill in chewing gum remains to be seen.
New pictures of our "hotel life" have been added.
Thursday, May 20, 2004 6:10 AM CDT
Last night we had the good fortune to be invited to the home of a Kazakh family that lives here in Kokshetau ---thanks to Madeleine’s amazing ability to make “small world” connections -- we’ve been able to meet Aliyah who lives in town here in Kokshetau and will be traveling to St. Louis this summer to study for two years at Washington University on a Soros scholarship. We were treated to a genuine Kazakh holiday-style feast and more importantly, learned a tremendous amount about local customs and traditional Kazakh culture – so that we can pass these lessons on to our son.
One remarkable aspect of the culture here, which we had heard quite a bit about through our adoption agency, is the way children are doted upon and belong as much to the community as they do to the parents. Everybody in the family, women in particular, took turns holding and comforting Alexander (still known locally as Aziz) while we were able to enjoy our meal and the company. Our adoption of a little Kazakh boy was as much of a reason for the celebration as was our friendship with Aliyah – the family wanted to celebrate his birth and adoption with Kazakh traditions. We ate a long, large dinner while every fifteen minutes or so, one of the family members would stand up and make a toast to the guests. Among the guests was another American couple, one of whom had spent two years here as a peace corps volunteer and was fluent in Russian. Luckily she informed us that we would be expected to make the next toast. Aliyah told us that her mother is sad about Kazakh children being taken from their culture, but also happy that they’ll be provided with a good life. In her toast the mother reminded us that we all live in “one world” and that things like skin color don’t matter, that children choose their parents and that there was a reason that Aziz chose us. One of the kindest comments was that he even looks like us when he smiles.
Like most middle class residents, the family lived in a high-rise apartment building, probably a remnant of Soviet design. The apartments are very nice on the inside, but it sounds like building maintenance is problematic. The elevator has been “out of order” for the past three years – the family lives on the ninth floor!
Kazakh hospitality is also quite impressive. Aliayah’s father presented and served all of the food. He stood up every few minutes to examine plates and glasses and filled those that were empty, usually without asking. If you are ever invited to a Kazakh home and want to save room for the second course or remain sober, best not to let your glass or plate get too empty. I finally had to refuse more cognac on the grounds that I had nine flights of stairs to walk down later.
At the end of the meal we were given a handmade gift bag, filled with gifts for us as well as gifts that we are supposed to bring back to the US and give to people who come to meet the baby. This is reminiscent of a custom in which Kazakh women gather on 40th day after a baby is born and exchange gifts and well-wishes. All in all, it was an evening that we will remember for the rest of our lives. We’ve put pictures of the event in the “photo album” link below.
Tuesday, May 18, 2004 3:16 AM CDT
Aziz
Grucza
Born: October 19, 2003.
Adopted: May 17, 2004.
We’re approaching the end of our first 24 hours of parenthood, with the added challenge of having to live out of a hotel room. But we’ve loved every minute of it. The hotel has been very helpful, providing us with a crib, a bathtub and a lifesaving play saucer.
Court went very smoothly both yesterday and Friday. In fact, it was a bit anticlimactic. All these months of preparation, paperwork and travel, for a few minutes in front of a judge. We’d imagined being in a grand court room with a judge on a high bench. In reality, it was in the judge's simple office in front of a handful of people. The proceedings begin with the husband making a speech of about 7 minutes in length. I wrote it in advance, memorized it, rehearsed it at least 15 times. As I spoke, the judge shuffled papers on her desk, fiddled with her computer, flipped through a magazine, and generally looked bored. I suppose at the end of a long day, she had been hearing people talk for the past 9 hours, and everything is entered into the court record anyway. When Madeleine spoke, the judge looked a little more interested, but we think this is because she was looking to see if Madeleine would cry or not. Dr. Natalia, who coaches us thoroughly on what to say in court, always asks the wife to try to cry, because this impresses the judge. Madeleine got teary at the end, but we don’t think the judge saw it. In any event, adoption has never been denied because of failure to produce tears.
The resumption of the hearing on Monday was even less eventful. I repeated our request to adopt Isenov Aziz, all witnesses (medical and government representatives) stated that they had no objections. The judge had us leave the room while she “deliberated” for 20 seconds, and it was over.
Yesterday evening, there was a very emotional goodbye ceremony at the hospital. Dr. Natalia always has a ceremonial changing of outfits for the babies. We gave gifts to the caretakers and others involved in the process, and donations for the hospital. Then it was back to the hotel room where we’ve remained ever since. Today’s new pictures are from the goodbye party.
Even though the adoption was delayed by a weekend, we still think we’ll be home according to the original schedule that puts us back in St. Louis on June 5th. We have to wait here in Kokshetau until the birth certificate and passport are issued for Alexander Aziz, then travel to Almaty to go through Immigration, then start back to the U.S. We look forward to seeing everybody when we get back, and Alexander can’t wait to meet all of you.
Monday, May 17, 2004 0:58 AM CDT
Aziz
Grucza
Born: October 19, 2003.
Adopted: May 17, 2004.
The final hearing occurred a full day earlier than we expected it – and a swift decision was issued in our favor. In 5 hours, we will pick him up at the hospital, issue Thank you’s and gifts, say goodbye and bring him back to the hotel room. More details to follow.
Friday, May 14, 2004 9:56 AM CDT
Court Update: As I mentioned a few days ago, today was our court hearing. Unfortunately we don’t yet have a final decision, but this is not bad or surprising. As we mentioned earlier, we have been anticipating some delays due to problems encountered earlier in the trip, and it appears that now is the time we are experiencing those delays. In order to finalize the adoption, the judge needs a certificate of release from the capitol, Astana. Well, this certificate was delayed and so the judge was not able to close the case today. Our hearing will resume Tuesday, and we are optimistic that with the judge and numerous others requesting the paperwork from Astana, that we will have a final decision, and possession of Alexander Aziz then. In the meantime, our daily visitations will continue. We’ve added three new pictures today and will work on adding to our photo archives over the weekend. Thanks for all of your prayers and kind words on the website. Thanks but no Thanks to all of the generous offers of fresh dill. :-)
Tuesday, May 11, 2004 5:49 AM CDT
Speaking of eating, we’ve noticed that the people in town, or perhaps throughout Kazakhstan have a peculiar affinity for a particular herb: dill. There is nothing particularly wrong with dill, but it does have strong flavor Americans taste buds are accustomed to it only in particular contexts. We enjoyed our first encounters with dill in soup and on certain meat dishes. Dill on French fries was a bit much, and on omelets in the morning, it is outright overkill. We learned through an English speaking waitress that the hotel restaurant serves American style pizza, on request. Another American staying here had taught the staff how to make it. So two nights ago, the two American couples ordered pizza and anxiously awaited some home-style food. Needless to say, it was covered with dill. You’ll now see us in restaurants throughout town, meticulously scraping the dill off of our food.
Sunday, May 9, 2004 7:13 AM CDT
Mother’s day is not celebrated in Kazakhstan, but it was a great day for our new family nonetheless. We now have only four more visits with Aziz before court, then he will become Alexander Aziz and will live with us in our temporary home away from home. For the past two days, the nurses have told us that he fusses or cries in anticipation of our visit. This is heartbreaking, of course, but it is another good sign that we are becoming part of his routine, and that the “gentle transition” process is underway. In honor of Mother’s day, all of today’s pictures are of new Mommy Madeleine and her little boy.
Aziz continues to crawl quite a bit, but seems to prefer the “backstroke”, in which he lies on his back and arches, then propels himself headfirst, using only his legs, usually grinning the whole time. We try to discourage this so that he doesn’t get brush burns on the back of his head!
Though it isn’t mother’s day here, this is a three-day holiday weekend, the second one in a row. What a country! Last weekend was Mayday, this weekend is Victory-Day, commemorating the end of World War II. These are roughly the equivalents of our Labor Day and Memorial Day, respectively. Both occasions were marked with parades and large gatherings of people in the town square. Even with the language barrier, these are still a lot of fun for us to see.
Friday, May 7, 2004 6:19 AM CDT
A few new pictures are up today. Tomorrow, we’re going to try our hand at a video using our digital camera. Can’t promise anything of course; we’re limited by our own technical incompetence and a really slow connection. But hopefully we’ll be able to put it online.
A few observations about Kokshetau and Kazakhstan in general. The country is still quite poor, but probably not third-world poor. There is a middle class, but it is fairly small. Generally, middle-income people live in apartments, which are more modern than most of the houses. Houses are usually small and close together in groups enclosed by a fence. More like a trailer park than a city block. They usually don’t have indoor plumbing. Modern houses are only for people at the higher end of the income spectrum. Some of the food is good, but we anticipate losing a few pounds during the trip, mostly from inability to find or order what we want. There is good cheese, yogurt and a variety of salads. But most meat-dishes are pretty unappetizing – tough, thin cuts often in a breading. And yes, its all “normal” meat; beef, chicken, pork, fish – (though I’m a bit wary of ordering fish in a landlocked country!). Lunch is normally our biggest meal of the day, both because it’s the local custom and because that’s when we have a translator with us. A two-course lunch for six runs about $25.
Thursday, May 6, 2004 2:44 AM CDT
We visit Aziz everyday from 10 am until noon, and then go out to lunch with our translator, who painstakingly reads every item on the menu to us in English. A few errands and some shopping, then we are back to the hotel by around 3.p.m., usually for the rest of the day. There is not much to do here without a translator, and Americans stick out like a sore thumb. We did some shopping at the indoor market the other day and received numerous conspicuous stares. We are given away by our tennis shoes, American T-shirts, and the fact that we don’t wear winter coats when it is 55 degrees outside.
Internet access here is slow and sporadic, so we apologize that we haven’t been able to e-mail everybody individually, and we are still slowly telling all of our friends about this site. Our old journal entries can be seen by the link below. I hope to get more photos online in the next few days. In the meantime I can only post three photos at a time on this site, and change them every day or two. New ones are up today.
Thanks for all of the inquiries about Madeleine’s cold –she was better within 24 hours and we were able to resume our normal visitation routine.
Tuesday, May 4, 2004 5:30 AM CDT
After some vigorous play, the nurses bring his bottle in, which he proceeds to gulp down in its entirety. As our travel-mate and fellow-adoptive parent Shelly said, he looks like he’s never met a bottle he didn’t like. After his bottle, he’s ready to doze off in our arms, just in time for the nurses to come and take him, ten minutes later.
We will continue these daily visits until next Friday, May 14th. If all goes well, the Kazakh government will then recognize us as the adoptive parents. Ideally, we would be able to bring him through Immigration two weeks after that and bring him home by June 5th. As we said earlier, though, there may be a delay in the finalization process that would require a second trip to the country by Madeleine.
We also received very good news today about the legal problems we’ve mentioned here. Again, we can’t get into any details, but for the past few days we have been extremely worried that there would be an attempt to prevent Aziz from being adopted by us. We didn’t think it would be successful, but nonetheless we had cause for concern. We learned today that this is not going to happen – court will go on as scheduled without any formal challenges. Still, nothing is final until the judge says so, and we remain guarded in our optimism, but we are optimistic.
We remain overwhelmed at how many people have visited this site, wrote in the guest book, sent us e-mail, etc. We have been showered with well-wishes, assistance, prayers, blessings and kind thoughts over the past weeks and are thankful to all of you.
New photos today!
Sunday, May 2, 2004 6:53 PM CDT
I posted three more pictures from today – in place of yesterday’s. I’m still working on another website where I can archive the old ones. It should be up in a few days.
If you’re looking at this page for the first time, you might want to browse over the “previous journal entries” to catch up. . .otherwise the next few sentences won’t make sense. . .On the legal-process front, things are looking okay. Our court date is scheduled for May 13 (as far as I know) and the adoption will almost certainly be approved. After that, however, there may be a delay longer than the two weeks we expected, during the period of time that the paperwork is to be finalized. If this happens, we may come home in mid-May, then Madeleine would make a trip back once the paperwork is finalized and return home with the baby. This isn’t an ideal situation, but it’s not so bad in the grand scheme of things. After all, we got here sooner than we expected, so having to wait a few extra weeks wouldn’t be too terrible. And it won’t be too much of an expense, since we’ll save several weeks worth of hotel bills.
To understand the scenario a little better, compare this process to buying a house –but its ten times more complicated and emotionally demanding. There are many people involved; it’s a complex legal process and sometimes it doesn’t go smoothly. And nothing is final until “closing”. Then, sometimes people get mad at each other and this makes the process even more complicated and drawn out.
We learned yesterday that Aziz and his hospital-girlfriend, who is being adopted by our travel-mates from Atlanta, have never been outdoors. They had also never seen men before last Friday. The hospital is very dismal looking, a lot of concrete and old paint. But the babies are well take care of, the hospital is very clean and very warm. Funny thing about the Kazakh people – they really like warmth, especially for babies. The visiting rooms have space heaters in addition to radiators, and the babies wear full-length outfits, sometimes with onesies underneath. All this during 60-degree sunshine! The first thing we do during our visit is unplug the space heater.
I’ll try to update this daily now that things are a little more settled and we have more time on our hands.
Saturday, May 1, 2004 9:38 AM CDT
Our 24 hour trip to Kazakhstan was followed by another day of travel to Kokshetau (the city where we are adopting from). Then on the third day of our trip, we spent 12 hours waiting to visit the government officials who needed to sign off on paperwork so that we could start visiting our baby.
We have encountered some complications -- we don't think its anything to worry about and neither does our agency -- and we trust them fully -- but there are some legal disputes that could cause problems. I won't get into the details here, but realize that Aziz, who we hope to adopt and rename Alex, is not ours until the judge says that he is. This is all a delicate process -- and is also the reason that we put a password on this page.
Nonetheless, we are confident that things will work out. We've visited Aziz twice -- today for two full hours. During the last ten minutes, he fell asleep in Dad's arms. I've posted two new photos to replace the old ones. I can only put three photos on this site, but eventually, we plan on putting some up on a separate site that will be linked from here.
Thanks again for the many prayers and well-wishes. We continue to need them....
Love,
Rick & Madeleine
Friday, April 30, 2004 1:07 AM CDT
We arrived at our destination city yesterday eveing. After a 24-hour trip to the country and a short night of sleep, we met with Kazakh legal agents on Thursday a.m. and then started on the next leg of our trip, to our destination city.
We are still waiting to complete the necessary paperwork to start the visitation process --so we haven't met our baby yet. We'll let you all know when it happens. In the meantime, thanks to everybody for their love and support.
Monday, April 26, 2004 4:05 PM CDT
We will be leaving tomorrow (April 27th) and hope to update the page as soon as possible when we arrive.
We will also provide links to photos.
Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers.
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----End of History----
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