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in a book. MY KIDS — those have to be the two most beautiful words in the English language. MY KIDS — I will say it over and over again until I believe it myself II I can find no way to describe with accuracy the moment when my children entered my life forever. The caregivers brought Olena in first. I can still hear her footsteps as she came through the doorway of the room where we were waiting. Without hesitating, she hurled her slender body across the floor into me. She slammed into me so hard she knocked the wind right out of me, and then her body seemed to melt into me and there were no more words to say after that, only tears. There she was, almost four feet tall, sweating in her red snow pants. No matter how heavy she felt or how much we both sweated, she kept her soft, small cheek pressed tightly against mine and ran her fingers through my hair as if to make sure I was real. My two younger children, Lenya and Vlady entered my life in a similar fashion. If I had had any doubt, their embraces dispelled it. I went back to the hotel that night dreaming of their sweet, happy faces. From that day, we visited our children daily, often twice a day, for two more weeks. We spent hour upon hour playing with them on the wooden floors of the orphanage. We ran and played with them outside in the play yard and began teaching them English. As days passed, I was beginning to get homesick. There had been some nice autumn weather when we first arrived, but now, winter was setting in. Our court date was November 12 and the days went by quickly as we made preparations to return home to Michigan. It was a bitterly cold, snowy day in Kyiv when we finally boarded the plane to Warsaw. A few days and a couple of embassies later, we arrived home — in the wee hours of Thanksgiving morning — weary and jet-lagged, but relieved to be home at last. As difficult as it was, I know every Thanksgiving from now on will hold special meaning for us. We have . much to be thankful for .... we are a family at last! MOVING IN KYIV, 2001 By Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak The time has come to move from the apartment I have been calling my Kyiv home during my extended stays here for the last eight years. I cannot manage the four story climb, and there is no room for my 91 year old mother. So we are moving to a different apartment. Every move — and I have moved about a dozen times in the last couple of decades — makes me melancholy, at least until the heavy lifting begins. This move, moreover, coincides with the forthcoming tenth anniversary of Ukrainian independence, so I can join the scores of commentators on the kind of independence the country has. As the date approaches, hundreds more are protesting that reforms and salaries are not keeping pace with expectations, and that the political leadership must be changed. This is the revolution of rising expectations, the most dangerous and unstable time of any revolutionary cycle. Most people in Ukraine, however, are politically inactive. Not from fear, for they certainly talk, even as they complain that there is no free speech, but from some deeply imbedded sense of withdrawal. There is even more complaining on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the independence of Ukraine than there was during the last decade of the disintegration of the USSR. Because that conglomerate — and it was an aggregate of various fiefdoms rather than a functioning centralized empire — simply stopped functioning. There had been heroic desperate and protracted opposition to the regime that accompanied each phase of USSR history, literal heaps of corpses that could put any tyrant to shame. But in the end, the USSR, as the Austrian and Russian Empires, collapsed under the weight of its own ineptitude and not because of active opposition. The USSR slithered apart. Sure, there was fear of armed revolt, ethnic strife, bloody battles of a new revolution. Ukraine, with its long history of repeated struggles and even stronger tradition of singing about those struggles, was considered the ethnic and social tinderbox of the area. Ukrainians themselves were careful not to provoke the use of arms. They just facilitated the disintegration, and then effectively legalized each degree of separation. As a result, the
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