Stories by Matthias Part II

 

Ok, so we had been in Kiev for about three days now and we had all the papers and everything that we need to head down to Sevastopol to see Emory. Our train leaves at 6pm, so that morning we decided to take all of our luggage to the train station and leave it in lockers until our train left. We did this because we still had some errands to run and didn’t want to have to carry our luggage with us everywhere we went. So Vanya and I headed to the train station to do just that.

Vanya called a cab for us that met us at our apartment in Kiev, we loaded up the luggage and were off to the train station. We arrived about 10 minutes later and proceeded to unload our bags and head to where the lockers were to store our stuff. The picture below is this size of the lockers that we had to put our stuff in.

                                                      

We were trying to fit it all into two lockers to save a little bit of money so we started strategically stuffing our bags into the very small lockers. We started on one side that had open lockers right next to each other. We decided to use the ones close to each other so that it would be easy to find the two lockers that we put our stuff in. Although we came very close, we could not fit all of our stuff in only two lockers. We decided to relocate to another set of lockers on the other side of the room and try those. Somehow we managed to get all of our things in the two except for the stroller. It was just too long to fit inside the lockers so we had to take that to where they store bulk items that will not fit into the lockers. We took the stroller there and left the train station to meet back up with Lindsay and Emerald.

We met them back at the apartment and headed out that morning to try once again to find Lindsay some shoes. This time we headed towards McDonalds craving something similar to home. It was very refreshing having just a little taste of home, even if we were in Ukraine. From McDonalds, we headed back out on the street to look for a shoe store. We found in about 30 mins and Lindsay was on her way to buy some new shoes. Still wanting cute shoes again, but now with a little voice of reason helping her choose (ME), she decided on some tan shoes that would not try and bite her every time she walked.

From there we were going to meet up with Theresa who is the director of His Kids Too, the organization that we are using to adopt Emory through. She was here to build a community center in one of the towns as an outreach. We met up with her at a place to eat and had a very nice meal. It was the kind of restaurant where you load as much meat and veggies and stuff in a bowl and then they throw it all on a huge grill and cook it in front of you. It was really cool and really yummy. I got mostly meat on mine and Lindsay mostly veggies.

After that we had a little time before we had to leave so we decided to go to the Ukraine Wal-Mart…I would call it. We didn’t want to buy too much stuff, we just wanted to see what all they had in there. They had just about everything you could want and more. They even had a huge gun store in the same building where you could buy your own AK 47. I mean, what more could you want from a store than to be able to buy you own heavy artillery and your groceries at the same place?

Running out of time we said our goodbyes to Theresa and headed to the train station to board our train that would take us to meet our soon to be son. We were so excited to see him--not so much excited for the 13 hour train ride that was ahead of us. We headed back down to the lockers where we had put our luggage that morning and opened the two lockers that we had put our stuff in.

We started pulling everything out and stacking it either on our backs or rolling it if it had wheels. We had everything out of the lockers, but I was missing something. I brought a green hiking backpack with me that I put most of our important stuff in. It had our laptop, camera and cell phones and stuff like that. But it was no where to be found, somehow we had forgotten to put it in one of the lockers. This was very bad news because we had to board our train in about 20 mins and now we had a missing bag.

Quickly Vanya and I started to think what we could have down with it. Vanya rushed up to the counter where you buy the tokens for the lockers and told them of the situation. One of the ladies came over and started to help us look for it. It had to be there somewhere, right? Trying to retrace our steps, we remembered that we had started on the left side of the room where we had first tried to put our bags in lockers. We ran over to that side and started to look in the lockers where we had put our bags in the first time but they were all locked.

Could this really be happening? Had I forgotten to take my bag out of one of the lockers on the left side and someone snagged it earning themselves a free laptop and much more? Prayer was in the foremost of my mind at the moment pleading with the Lord that we would find it. The ladies starting opening lockers where we thought that we might have left it, but to no avail. Time was running out so we decided that we could not miss our train. We started to head for the train, one bag down and very upset at the recent turn of events. We were almost through the door to where to trains load when one of the ladies called us back and asked us to look in one of the lockers they had opened.

To our delight there was my beautiful green hiking backpack that I had gotten from a REI garage sale for 20 dollars. They asked us of the contents that were in the bag to make sure that it was really ours and I proceeded to tell them what was inside. Upon opening it I found everything just how I had packed it that morning. It was a true answer to prayer. We had somehow dodged a huge bullet.

Once on the train Vanya told me that the ladies said that one of them saw it in the locker and decided to lock it. Thank goodness for some honest people still left in this world. So we were on the train and ready to head to Sevastopol.

Wait where was the stroller, oh no, we had forgotten about it in all the excitement with the backpack and there was no time to head back now to get it because the train was about to leave. Well, at least it was only a 6 dollar umbrella stroller and we could live with a 6 dollar loss over a 600 dollar loss. Vanya said that we could get when we come back to Kiev, but they charge you like 50 cents a day to keep it so when we get back we may just leave it because it will cost more to get it back than it is actually worth.

So we were off on the train ride into the night. We made our beds and tried to fall asleep as soon as we could knowing that tomorrow we would meet our new son Emory.