So I'm more and more convinced that Snezhana believes that coming to America with us is the best thing for her. But there are unresolved things that are keeping her here. I'd love to know what those are and which ones aren't just trivial to resolve. Gma is a big one but not knowing the specifics on Gma I can only guess at needs:
1) Call ever day: 5min/$1 so for $40/mo you could have 200min of talk time. Maybe it is not everyday but it could be any day.
2) Send letters with pictures
3) Week long summer visits accompanied by mom. This actually give more and higher quality visiting time that she has today.
4) Helping grandma... the USD is so stronger than grivna, you can easily feed gma for $300 USD per month. Health care in Ukraine is crazy cheap (like $80 for an appendectomy). In the US this is the type of money you make on a summer job and send some home.
As the kids come to live with us I intend to send updates to gma....via Snezhana if she doesn't come. If Snezhana does come I would put her in charge of keeping gma up to speed.... and actually that would go for all the gmas who want to get the updates.
Forgive me if I missed something but have you tried talking to grandma? We had a somewhat similar circumstance with our two girls (whom we are about to pick up...our gotcha day is Monday the 27th). We hosted our girls this Summer and their grandma was very much opposed to them being adopted and even gave strict orders to our girls that they are not to find new parents while in the U.S. Even after the girls headed back to Ukraine, grandma was very much against adoption (so was biomom but that was another story!). However, we eventually wrote a 10 page letter to grandma telling her about us, why we wanted to adopt, etc. and our facilitator spent several hours talking to her. She completely changed her mind in one day. She went from being our biggest hurdle to our biggest supporter. Perhaps it is worth a shot? Anyway, I thought I would share. I will continue to pray for you all.
ReplyDelete@Marti: Yeah, this was a surprise for us as Snezhana had only once talked about her gma. Her having a real connection/influence on her was actually a surprise and wasn't confirmed until the 3rd day we were here. I actually thought of you guys right when this started but it wasn't until communication was restored with Snezhana two days ago that it was a real possibility.
ReplyDeleteWe talked about it yesterday... including making sure we get info to be able to send Denis updates frequently so she'll see she's actually getting more than she did when he lived in Ukraine. Today we got gma's phone number in another rough day. We've asked our facilitator if she would call gma to explain things.
It's certainly worth a try to call grandma. You know there are all those crazy wild stories about why Americans want to adopt Ukrainian children. If they only knew the torture we go through to do it:0 You never know what irrational reasons they have for not wanting the children to be adopted. Personally, I would think they would want their grandchildren to have a better life than they could give them.
ReplyDeleteOn another note, we have ATT for our phone provider. We pay $5 a month for international calling plus 22cents a minute. We keep it on our phone to call there occasionally. We call a man we met and the orphanage director and sometimes other people.
There are also all kinds of calling cards that you can buy that give you special rates for international calls, but make sure you can call Ukraine with it. Then, doesn't Skype sell special rates for international calls?
June
I certainly agree on the torture to do it... I certainly didn't expect the process/paperwork to get worse after we got here.
ReplyDeleteSkype is like $0.195/min I believe. That's what we've been using to talk with Snezhana.
Ah, but if you knew ahead of time all that you've had to go through, you might not want to do it. I'm sure you've learned that some Ukrainians don't tell you much ahead of time. They like to surprise you!
ReplyDeleteThen there are those of us who've done it once, know what we're getting into and go back again:0 LOL
June