Dear Alla and Ally,
We have been home for over three months now and I wanted to write to you to
tell you how grateful we are to the two of you and Adoption Ark for working
so diligently in the adoption of our daughter from Kazakhstan. After 18
months with another agency and another program which included an
unsuccessful trip to Russia to find our daughter, I was referred to Adoption
Ark. Out of desperation I called to find out more about your agency and
your Russia program when Jill told me about Kazakhstan. Immediately I knew
AA and your Kazakhstan program was perfect for us and Mark quickly agreed.
Ten and a half months later we were home with our healthy and adorable
daughter who just turned one this past weekend!!
As you know, we have two older boys and together we all boarded an airplane
and embarked on a journey of a lifetime on the other side of the world to Kazakhstan.
I have to say, that living my entire life in America, it was very difficult
to understand why there are so many "unknowns" in international adoption
(especially time frames). After spending a lot of time (one long trip) in
Kazakhstan things became clearer as to why. Their culture is so completely
different from ours in ways that you can truly not understand until you are
there and even then it takes time to comprehend.
As Americans we are all about "hurry up and do it now". That is not the
Kazakhstan way. It is a very "laid back" culture. I don't mean that in a negative way, unless you are the one waiting of course.
We arrived in Kazakhstan on a Friday, two days after the New Year Holiday.
On Friday much of the city was still "shut" down and still celebrating. We
were told that is typical, at least in Kazakhstan, to carry the one day
holiday in to several.
Most of the jobs are held by only one person. If that person gets sick or
goes on vacation, there is typically no one to do that persons work,
therefore everything stops until he/she returns. This happened to our
friends while waiting on passports. They also do not have FedEx. Paperwork
typically travels in country by train.
The best advice I could give anyone getting ready to travel is to be sure to
take your sense of humor with you. One night our translator ordered pizza
for us. Later we heard someone honking and honking downstairs. Eventually
we thought that maybe the honking was for us until we looked out and saw a
taxi. Then the translator called to tell us the pizza was waiting
downstairs for us in a taxi. They simply cooked the pizza and put it in a
taxi for delivery. True story!
Another time we decided to go back to this really good Chinese restaurant.
We were seated and then as European menus were handed to us, we were told
that it was the Chinese cook's day off so there was no Chinese food being
served that day.
One day we went to lunch at a Mexican Restaurant. It was supposed to open
at 11:00, but at 12:15 they told us they were not open yet because their
workers had not shown up for work. They thought the restaurant might be
open by 1 and told us to come back then. There are so many stories we could
tell.
For now, the last think I would like to is that desperate day when hopes of
our adoption becoming a reality were falling apart, picking up the phone and
calling Adoption Ark, was one of the best decisions I ever made! From the
bottom of our hearts, Thank You!!
Kristan and Mark Struck