Day 4 - Bratsk and first day at orphanage

Weather is great, we leave hotel at 10:00 and go to orphanage. Before meeting the girls we meet with Victor, the director of the orphanage. Then we met Victoria. She readily came into my arms, smiling. Sergey says she is always smiling. She does not talk to us. She likes the dog puppet and books, she appears very curious. She played well with Rich and ate goldfish crackers. Physically she is very small and has sketchy medical history, but she looks healthy. She was left at the hospital at birth and the only thing we know about the mother is that she has other children and lives with a man who is not Victoria�s father. She has all vaccinations, has had pneumonia, broke her leg 1 year ago , ear infection 1 year ago, chicken pox 1 month ago. We both fell in love with her and know that we want to adopt her.
We went back to orphanage at 4PM. Next we met we meet Galina, Serguey has said she is very active child, but she is frightened at first. She is beautiful, black hair, dark eyes. She is heavier than Victoria, but seems to be all muscle. She sits quietly and just stares at us, does not smile at all. Just as she starts to adjust, she has to go for snack. They accidentally brought Anastasia and Alyssa out at the same time. Anastasia starts screaming and they take her back to her ward, which is OK, she was a little younger than we want.
Alyssa is also afraid of us, especially Rich & Serguey. I finally get her in my arms, then in Rich's. She did not want to leave at end of visit. She is also very tiny, brown hair, big brown eyes, one of them crossed, and adorable dimples. Both Galina and Alyssa were afraid of the puppets. Now we have to decide between Galina and Alyssa. We leave at 6:00 and go to dinner with Serguey, he is wonderful and language makes conversing fun. We laugh a lot. For example, he said he needs to meet with garden committee, I assumed this had something to do with gardening. This afternoon he said that tomorrow we have to meet with garden committee; turns out he was saying guardian committee. We all had a big laugh over that. Since there is not air conditioning, we have to sleep with window open. Our window looks out over a large open square. A lot of people gather there and it is very noisy until after midnight. It doesn�t get dark until after 11:30.


View outside our hotel window, 11:15 pm