Pipes and phones

***Update #2: We got our translator on the phone and they called out someone to fix our pipes. He's here now and is almost done. Its fixed! Yay, we have water again!***

***Update: We got our phone working, YAY!! Yulia emailed us right back and had the code to reactivate the other chip inside the phone. But by the time we fixed it, had our afternoon visit with Pavel, bought a REAL phone card, it was too late to get together with the other family for dinner. And we still don't have their number to say we aren't coming, so we hate that but... we tried. :( Also the man who sold us the phone card smiled at us when he heard us speak and in a Ukrainian accented english said "what city are you from in America?" We told him Nashville and he said "I'm from philadelphia"! So we talked for a second and he let us pay in Dollars which was awesome, and we told him we'd come back and see him if we needed another card on our trip. But PRAISE THE LORD our phone is back to normal!!!***

Today has been, um, interesting. :) We woke up this morning to a kitchen floor half flooded with water. The pipes under the kitchen sink have sprung a leak. We got one of the women who sit out front (there isn't exactly a 'front desk' here :)) to come look at it and tried to ask if we could get it fixed. Jake found the main knobby thingy that turns all the water OFF, but now we think she thinks that fixed it and we're not sure she's going to have anyone look at it now. We'll have to get our translator to get this all worked out later.

Then on our way home from our morning visit with Pavel/Micah/Berusa/Pasha/Berushi/Pashka (no wonder this poor kid doesn't respond to anything!!) we tried to stop and get a phone card. Something we've been meaning to do since we got to Odesa. Actually, we really needed it because we were invited to dinner by another American family adopting, along with another American family adopting and our translator (who is also theirs) and her husband. Anyway, I told them we would call them back, hense, needing the phonecard.

ANYWAY, we went into this store to buy one and asked the man if he spoke any english, he said he did and said enough back to be pretty convincing that we all understood one another, and asked to see our phone (we assumed so that he could see which kind of card we needed). After we paid 25 grivna's (which is only like $3.50) he handed us our phone back along with this little plastic case. We asked how many minutes that gave us and he rattled something off that we didn't really understand but it sounded like he was saying 'plenty of minutes if you're just making local calls', and we left. When we got home we realized he changed a chip INSIDE the phone and now we have a whole different service! Crap! The only numbers we have written down are Nikoly (the driver from Kiev) and Bridgitte- everyone elses were IN the phone and no longer there! But we can't even call those two numbers, it says something in Russian we can't understand, and we're PRETTY sure our phone number isn't even the same, so no one can call us! This is not good.

So I've emailed Yulia and explained the whole thing to her and we're hoping she can email us back with some kind of instructions on how to get this fixed. We would take it back to the same man and have him change it back, but to put the old chip back in and activate it requires a four digit code and who the heck knows what that is.

So please pray that this phone situation gets resolved quickly!! We are meeting our driver back at the orphanage at 6 tonight, so if all else fails we can try to explain the situation to her in spanish (she speaks no english either, but we communicate mostly in our broken spanish!) and she will call Alyona (our interpreter) for us. We are both so frustrated and wish we had just waited for our driver to help us buy one. Oh well, though! Live and learn!!!

I do have to say that the redeeming highlight of this whole day was our visit with Pavel. He was already out on the playground with his group when we got there, and when he saw us coming, he RAN all the way to us with both arms in the air and Jake scooped him up and they held each other for about 10 minutes straight. As soon as Jake picked him up I tried to show the caretakers our little red form saying we could visit him, but they smiled and shook their heads no and waved us away as if to say 'don't worry about it'. Which I thought was kinda cool. Anyway, we had a great two hours with him, he stopped every little while to hold Jake and snuggle with him. When Jake picks him up he smiles SO big and presses his cheek against Jakes. Its just the sweetest sight and everyone who's around to see them can feel it. :)