All done and ready to return to the U.S.

It’s Friday afternoon and our hotel room is darkened as Michele is catching up on sleep. She got very ill last night after eating something funny in a Korean restaurant – though I had exactly the same order as she, and didn’t get sick at all. Hopefully (likely) she’ll be feeling well enough before we have to fly early Saturday AM out of the Almaty Airport - about eight hours from now.

Morgan is lively and giggling, blowing raspberries and entertaining herself with gurgles in her crib. We haven’t quite found the right balance of fruit juice and sugary yogurt vs. starchy rice cereal and mush, so she’s either high and bouncing off the walls, or grumpy and sleepy much of the time. Naps are very hard to schedule between the important trips about town.

Yesterday, we went to the SOS Services medical clinic and Morgan got a checkup and HIV test required by the U.S. Embassy. She’s healthy of course, but it turns out that every possible medical problem on her original medical records was either self-contradictory or just fabricated (the incentive to fabricate medical problems stems from the way that baby houses are funded and the arcane rules by which babies are eligible to be put up for international adoption).

We met a couple of interesting people at breakfast in the hotel. Austin is an adoptive father and lawyer from New Orleans and will be taking home baby Merina; Grove and Jennifer are from New Mexico and are taking home baby Pavel – and like me, they work for nonprofits; and JoAnne is returning Sunday to Buffalo with new son Nicholas. We also enjoyed meeting Chan Park, a professor from Ohio doing a 2-week educational exchange on the Korean diaspora that are in Kazakhstan – over 200,000 were relocated involuntarily from Russia in the 1950s to farm wheat.

Having accomplished the last major bit of business this afternoon – a trip to the heavily fortified and guarded U.S. Embassy to pick up Morgan’s Kazakh passport with U.S. visa stamps, medical records and an “instantly valid upon arrival” U.S. citizenship document – we are now about 12 hours from departure. We thought about registering her to vote liberal, too, but she’s too young – darn!

It’s a huge relief that there have been really no surprises on this trip, and we must again thank the fine work of Libby, Dina, and Zhanat of MAPS; Oleg in Almaty and Efrat at Lifelink in Miami.

Morgan can’t wait to come drool on her new family, and in about 36 hours from now we’ll get the first chance to do that!