The boys are soo sweet....

Today we arrived at the orphanage at 10. Just as soon as Valery saw us he ran up to us and grabbed my hand. Ruslan left somewhere then came back seconds later holding a skirt, he said “This is for Vanessa”. The teacher later told me that Ruslan woke up early today and told her he needed a dress for Vanessa. I melted right there!!!! I hugged Ruslan and told him thank you, he hugged me back.
We then went to the room where the boys sleep. It was a room with 20 beds standing right next to each other. The boys showed us their beds. The orphanage is very old and extremely dirty. The bathrooms were disgusting!!!! (I’ll spare you the details)
Later all the kids where called for a head count. After counting all the kids, the kids where given a candy. Valery ran into the room we were in and gave Vanessa his candy. What a sweet little angel.
We then sat around in the family room with about 20 kids, mostly boys. The boys were all wrestling, jumping off furniture, walking on their hands, etc all of them were trying to impress us. The older kids would approach us to ask us if we are adopting Rulsan and Valery, we said yes, hey said that they thought that they were very lucky. That was really hard. All the kids wanted to tell us what happened with their parents and where their brothers and sisters are. After telling a 13 year old girl named Tanya that we are adopting the boys, she said “that’s awesome, if I was old enough I would adopt them too”.
Being in the orphanage just confirmed to me that this is really what God wants us to do. Seeing the circumstances the kids are in makes me really happy to at least take 2 of them out of it. I’m praying that everything goes well with court paper work and that we will be able to adopt these 2 boys.
Spending week in Ukraine has really made me realized how blessed us “Americans are”. If someone would to ask me how Ukraine is different than US, I would say everything is different!!!! People look different, ACT different, absolutely different. People buy raw meat in 80 degree weather on the street with flies all over the meat. At the market you will see grandmas selling eggs, garlic or tomatoes in small amount. You can see that is all they have to sell that day and that in their income for the day. There is no such a thing as customer service. If you came to café or restaurant you better be on you best behavior. One example :yesterday I came to a coffee shop where a girl told me I needed to wait for her to make my coffee because she first needed to finish hers. Once she finished her coffee I ordered my coffee and asked for it in a to go cup. She said that they don’t have to go cups (which is very normal here and even if she had one in would be a plastic cup with no lid. So I asked her if I could take the cup it up to my room (we are in a hotel btw it’s probably the best one in Simferopole) She said “NO!!!, if I let everyone take one to their room I wouldn’t have any cups, besides I know you won’t bring back. If you ask the waitress, receptionist, etc a question will answer as fast as possible and as rude as possible. Yesterday we went to expensive restaurant were we were severed cold mashed potatoes, cold French fries. . The locals see nothing wrong with it. It is normal to see people arguing with customers. At first this really bothered me but now Sergei and I have a good time laughing about everything that is going on.