Saturday, August 18, 2007

Where does Vlad live?

In a recent email from our adoption agency family coordinator, we received more information about the different regions in Russia with which our agency works. It sounds like there are three main possibilities for the region where our son might be living! I though this map would be helpful to give you a sense of where we might be traveling.

Russia is divided up into seven large administrative districts, called okrugs. This map is of the Central Okrug. (OK, it's a strange map because it shows nuclear power information, but it was hard to find a regional map to put on this blog!)

The possible regions (within the okrug) to which we may be traveling are: Tula (located directly below Moscow), Voronezh (southeast on this map), or Nizhniy Novgorod (actually in the next okrug, located directly east of Vladimir and Ivanovo in this map).

We are excited at the proximity to Moscow that all of these regions have, as this should cut down on our travel costs once we're actually in Russia.

We still don't have word on how long it might be until we receive a referral, and so we continue to pray for our son, wherever he is. We will receive word from our coordinator once our dossier is given to one of these specific regions, and we'll let you know when that happens. It does help us to look at this map and know that he is very likely living in one of these regions!