Saturday April 29th - Saturday In Uralsk

Well folks, there were no belinchiki for me at the Chagala. I asked and was denied, although I did not understand the complete denial, I had to settle for my kashi, yogurt, juice and toast. Still good but no belini; oh well. Laura and I did have breakfast with Anne and her new daughter Aida who is about 11 months old and just has an incredibly infectious smile. Anne told us that she heard today is the day that all of the couples will be able to visit the orphanage which is home to older kids including teenagers. We are all excited about this opportunity and we actually have a package from home for Sholpan, one of the new English teachers there. Sholpan is a sponsor daughter of a family in New Jersey and they asked us to bring her some teaching materials for her. Of course it was our pleasure to help out. Anyway, we were as excited as usual to get ourselves ready to visit Joseph. Today is the day we speak with the doctor in charge of him to hear about his health etc.

On the way to the baby house this morning our cell phone rang and we got a nice call from Shachar in Israel. He is a very good friend and always is there watching to see if he can help us – Thanks Shachar! Our morning visit with Joseph started off by introducing him to a Spinone and told him stories of the slobbering lovable dog that awaited his arrival in Chicago! He seemed to like the idea as you can see in this photo. Just after this we were able to meet with the doctor. She came into the music room right away after Joseph arrived and she sat down with his medical records. She ran through some basic statistics about his birthday (9/20/05), his height/weight at birth etc. His teeth started to come in around 5 and half months (we can see two bottom teeth) and besides his current cold/congestion he received medication only once before around 4 months of age. She explained how many times if one of the children receives some medication for an illness, the others may as well as they are in groups so have close contact with one another. She remarked what a good eater he is and that he just needs individual attention and a family – we of course told her that was no problem any longer! We asked what she thought she would like us to work on with him and the translation came out to be massage and gymnastics. Olga said she could arrange for us to see what they do in the baby house in this regards. This is great so we can do things he is already comfortable with doing. The doctor also said he had received his vaccinations and has not shown any signs of allergies or negative reactions to any medications. All good news for Joseph! The doctor was very pleasant and even made cute sounds and smiles across to Joseph being held in Laura’s arms. After the meeting we only had about 15 minutes to hang with Joseph but it was a lot of fun.

After our morning visit we went back to the hotel and then took a nice walk. We decided to head to one of the local bakeries for lunch. We ordered several of the pieroskies to sample and all of them were great. After lunch we headed over to the promenade near the Atrium shopping mall. The photo shows how busy it was in the morning and that it was a sunny day. It was really nice to see everyone out and about. The cell phone company Beeline was sponsoring an area cleanup and afterwards provided some entertainment and food. The woman on stage in the photo is a singer who is fairly well known in the area. We learned this from the two guys from Beeline who rushed up to us as we were walking away from the stage. They seemed excited to speak English to us and then had their photographer come over to take a group picture of all of us! It was pretty funny to see their enthusiasm over meeting us. After a bit of shopping we headed back to the hotel to await our afternoon visit with Joseph.

This afternoon at the baby house, Olga asked us if we wanted to feed him his bottle. This was great and unexpected as usually you are allowed to feed him just once. This would be our second bottle and then the other day we fed him his semolina so we were feeling very privileged. The feeding went very well and he just chugged the whole bottle of formula so he really is a good eater. He really puts a great deal of work into getting it all out of the bottle and even worked up a bit of a sweat! After the bottle he was pretty relaxed so we did our standard music playing, ball playing and of course book reading – he really likes books. As you can see in the photo he has even taken to baseball caps like his Dad and for the afternoon was our Chicago Joe! Pretty cute isn’t he? He is also testing out an American style pacifier and seems to like to chew all parts of it. We think he also loves the handle as it allows him to manipulate pretty easily. As the clock approached 3pm we, as always, were surprised how quickly the time passed and we had to say goodbye until Sunday morning. Now it was time to join up with the other folks at Zhas Duren which is the orphanage for children from about 8 to 17 years of age. We were really looking forward to this trip.

The drive out to Zhas Duren took about 20 minutes from town and was just off the Chagala River (which we learned was very polluted). The drive took us past a bunch of summer cottages which are weekend and summer homes for people from Uralsk. People visit and stay in these small cottages as well as plant vegetables in the summer. You enter Zhas Duren from a long winding road and on the way to the main building you pass wonderful statues, play areas, outdoor concert stage and seating as well as open fields. We all met at the main building on this rainy (a bit of sleet too) day and then went into this large foyer. In the foyer were about 30 kids, both boys and girls, of all ages. They were very excited to meet us and there was a bunch of energy and noise in the area – it was great. Kids were surrounding each of us to say hi and really loved to be in and to take photos. Here are only a couple of them but my camera alone took about 40 or so. I hung out with a bunch of 10-12 year old boys who wanted to take photos, look at my iPod and in the end challenge me to endless thumb wrestling competitions. Laura spent time speaking to a couple of the older girls who told her about how they all go to a Summer lake house after the school year ends and how their Kazakh and Russian folk dance troop travels around and has won several competitions. One of the girls has recently been awarded a scholarship to the university to study English next year. Just like our visits with Joseph, this visit soon ended and we were on our way back to Uralsk. It was a great visit although bitter-sweet. He had so much fun seeing the kids and they seemed to have as much fun seeing us. Of course we thought about how some of them were probably like Joseph one day, waiting for a family that never came to adopt them. We have heard of many families from our agency (World Partners Adoption, Inc) who have come to Kazakhstan to adopt an infant but who also then sponsor an older child at Zhas Duren. They consider these kids their adopted children as well and the kids think of these adults as their parents. It is really a wonderful thing. So once again our experience in Uralsk has touched our hearts and made us think about how lucky we are and how perhaps we can make a difference.
See you tomorrow - Remember , no comments too small to leave for us! WE'RE IN KAZAKHSTAN and we love reading your comments!!!