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 | Traveling to Kazakhstan
by Tonya Podradchik |
It is 7 a.m. on a cold February morning in Seattle. Like many other bleary-eyed travelers, my husband Steve and I are hurrying to catch an airplane, but unlike most, we are doing so not to reach a destination but to begin a journey that we will embark on for the rest of our lives. We can scarcely believe that the time has come to bring our son, Alexander Andrey, home from halfway around the world in Kazakhstan.
The previous October we mailed our first piece of paperwork to World Partners Adoption without knowing what to expect. From then on, we tracked a seemingly endless trail of paper around the world without truly understanding that eventually all of these interviews, questionnaires, applications, forms and documents would lead us to become the parents of our first child. It wasn’t until we first received notice of our little boy from Tchuchinsk that it all began to seem real.
His video was extremely brief — about two minutes — but that was all the time it took for us to fall in love. Being 7 weeks old at the time, Alexander didn’t do much except struggle to hold his head up. He wore tiny red velour pants and a fuzzy blue sweater that kept falling off his shoulders, and like all babies his head seemed far too big for his body. Like all parents, we thought he was the most beautiful baby we had ever seen.
To reach Tchuchinsk, near the Russian border, we had to fly from Almaty into the capital of Astana; it was a flight that turned out to be an experience in fear and faith.
The plane was a Soviet-made Tupelov 154, the design of which did not instill confidence in either of us. When we sat down, Steve’s seat divider fell off. My safety belt did not pull taught. The window shade kept falling down, although I continued to shove it up. Each time we touched the unoccupied seats in front of us, they lurched fully forward until they lay flat.
We took off with window shades falling and seats banging, all the while hoping desperately that we would live to see our son. After we were airborne I felt calmer, and even managed to settle into a book before lunch was served.
After deplaning more or less in one piece we met up with our driver, who ushered us to a decrepit Soviet-made Lada. As he careened into Astana’s afternoon traffic, I groped for my seat belt, only to discover that the back seat contained none, while the occupants of the front seat chose not to wear theirs.
While the roads outside of town were wide enough for traffic in either direction, the snow had melted in a narrow swathe across the median divider. Because of this, when two cars approached one another they both traveled in the center of the road; the strategy seemed to be that at the last possible second both cars would veer wildly to their respective sides, their tires hugging whatever bits of bare pavement happened to be available.
After nearly four hours of non-stop driving we arrived at dusk and were taken directly to see our son.
The outside of the baby house appeared to be another of many boxy, cement, nondescript buildings so prevalent in former Soviet-bloc countries. Once inside, however, it was obvious that this building was modified to be a cheery, functional home for children. Brightly painted murals decorated the stairwells, and each room was painted a series of primary colors.
A caregiver arrived wearing a baggy knee-length smock dress and a tall, conical paper hat much like a chef’s taupe. She spoke rapidly to our interpreter in Russian, and then disappeared into an inner room while we waited in a hallway. We heard a child’s brief wail of distress, then she reappeared carrying a tiny bundle of blue-knit baby. At first I couldn’t tell if he was ours because he was covered entirely in a fluffy fleece sleeper with nothing showing except a tiny moon of a face peeking out from under a pointy cap. “Andrushka!” proclaimed the nurse, handing him to us proudly.
Even at 5 months he seemed unbelievably small, with the wizened, wrinkled, splotchy appearance of a tiny baby. I held him first, and then Steve, who said quietly, “Look, here’s my son!” Alexander smelled pleasantly of baby and he didn’t cry; rather, he looked at us quizzically, as if he weren’t quite sure how he was supposed to react to all this attention.
After nearly two weeks of daily visits we were ready for the court date at which Alexander would legally become our son. We were told to be ready to leave by 7:40 a.m. for our 9 a.m. appointment, so with great anticipation we were scrubbed, coiffed and decked out in our finest winter wear at the appointed time.
At 8:45 a.m. our translator bustled into the room muttering something about snowstorms and road blockages, and bundled us into the car. Our driver pushed the Lada to breakneck speeds up to 80 kilometers per hour on the icy roads as we careened around corners, horn blaring at anyone we passed, and we arrived at the courthouse with two minutes to spare.
We were ushered into the cold cinderblock building and up a flight of stairs to a sparsely furnished room, where we were instructed to sit in two hard-backed chairs against the wall while our translator stood next to us.
The proceedings were as long, verbose and dry as one would expect from a court of law. The judge read a statement attesting to the fact that we met all of the qualifications of an adoptive parent in Kazakhstan, and at the end of the interminable speech, we were led over to an official looking ledger and shown various lines that indicated “Papa,” for Steve’s signature or “Mama” for mine. These were words that needed no translation.
Several days later we were scheduled to leave the baby house with Alexander. We would head to Koschetau, a small town north of Tchuchinsk, then back to Almaty for several days, and then on to Moscow.
We arrived at the baby house in high spirits. I could hardly contain my enthusiasm as I changed him out of his multiple layers of unmatched fleece and dressed him like a typical American boy in a black turtleneck, blue jeans and white sneakers. I couldn’t believe that he was actually our baby, and we were finally able to begin heading home!
We weren’t ready to leave until mid-afternoon, and we had eaten little since that morning. One of the matronly caretakers offered to feed us tea and pie before we departed, and we gladly accepted her offer. By this time I had grown quite used to seeing some of the children, and felt a twinge of sadness at having to leave, but it was a feeling that disappeared as the car turned out of the gates for the final time. I was anxious to begin our life as a family.
The rest of our trip was a blur. My computer journal entries, which had been prolific and verbose, stopped abruptly, and were replaced by hours of videotape and countless rolls of film. The impatience that we had felt at the beginning of our journey was replaced by sleeplessness, then by wonder.
It is now more than a year since we left Seattle to travel halfway around the world to bring home our son. The tiny, quiet baby we left Kazakhstan with has been replaced by a sturdy toddler with a voracious appetite, an infectious giggle, and an obvious love for life. Although it has been more than 12 months since we first boarded the airplane in Seattle, we can hardly remember a time when we weren’t his parents.
Tonya Podradchik has a Bachelor of Arts degree in magazine journalism from the University of Oregon and a teaching credential in English and journalism from the State of Washington. She currently works part-time at an independent bookstore, but her most rewarding job is taking care of her 18-month-old son, Alexander.
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