Its another beautiful day in Kazakhstan. When we left this morning, the temperature was already about 80! Never the less, we had a wonderful day as always.
When we arrived at the baby house, it appeared that they were having a work day. All the staff were out pulling weeds, sweeping and painting the curbs. We figure they are probably getting ready for Astana day. This is a major celebration that the whole city gets ready for. We have seen countless landscaping, painting and public works projects everywhere we go. The people of Astana really take pride in their city!
A little while into our morning visit with Kaite, a bunch of two-year-olds came out to play. We really enjoyed seeing some of the other children from the orphanage. A few children kept walking up to us to investigate what we were doing. We had fun exchanging smiles with these poor, orphaned children. It was heart-breaking that they were getting older and were still not adopted. We would have happily taken one of these children home if it wern't for the fact that the government always turns down requests for adoptions of two non-related children. We hope and pray that more people will consider adoption so that these children can find their forever families (see page two for pictures).
At the end of the visit, it was very hard handing off Katie since we will not see her tomorrow. To make matters worse, we were told that our coordinator didn't really have anything planned for us to do tomorrow so there won't be much to take our minds off missing Katie. We may go out for Jen and Jesse's celebration dinner (which we thought would be today) and a short walk together, but we'll have to wait and see how things turn out.
After leaving the baby house, we had our second meal out at an American-style cafe. We ordered a wonderful club sandwitch and a gorumet cheese burger. Both were exceptional! Luckily we found that this resturante has menus in English so we think we might be able to brave it on our own in the future.
Our afternoon was finished out by hanging around the apartment. Sarah read a lot and Kevin worked revising part of the website. We'll head out later for a nice walk by the river since the weather is so nice. We hope your day was wonderful as well!