A Very Good Day, On Which Otis Met Roberta and Karina....

A Very Good Day, On Which Otis Met Roberta and Karina....
Originally uploaded by jakeyd.

The day began with the usual Otis food/bottle/diaper stuff, then our regular unscheduled visit from Galina (this time I was in the shower), then a scheduled visit from Max to complete US paperwork. (While the KZ paperwork is endless and must be elaborately beribboned, ours is completely incomprehensible). Max told us more about what's in Otis' files than we have heard to date.

Some of this is blog repeat, some new; of the new to you, some is new to us.

His birth mom was 23; it was her first pregnancy. She is from Ayaguz, a major multi-modal hub maybe 500 miles almost due north. And that is exactly all it is. According to Max, in Ayaguz, you work in the transportation industry, or you don't work. It is, Max says, a very poor area. Otis' birth mom's name was (written in the American style), Arailim Nuralin (AHRR-aye-lim NOO-rah-leen). She was unemployed, and she is a Kazakh.

She came to suburban Almaty, presumably to stay with friends, at some point before Otis' birth. He was born rather premature - by the doctors' in the Maternity Hospital's reckoning - at 33-34 weeks. Under Kazakhstani law, if a man does not step forward to give the child his name, the mother may choose a patronymic, which may or may not be the father's actual given name. The father is then deemed to have relinquished his parental rights and also has no further responsibility for the baby. (Giving the baby a patronymic makes life much easier down the road.)

Arailim said that Otis' bio father's given name was Yerzhan (YIRR-zhan), which means Brave Soul in Kazakh. Names' meanings have great import in Kazakh tradition, so this name may either have been Otis' birth father's actual name or a name that had the qualities Arailim (which means Moonbeams) wished for either Otis or his father.

Arailim may have given Otis the name Rachman, or it may have been given to him by the hospital workers, as Zoya and Galina surmise. Rachman derives from the Arabic "Rahman," which is one God's names in Islam, meaning God the Merciful, and we gather there is a very similar word/name in Hebrew. However, in Kazakh, the name Rachman is associated with the word "rachmet," which means "thank you."

Arailim said that Otis' father was also unemployed, that he was also a Kazakh, that she simply did not have the resources to raise him, and that she was in favor of his being adopted. We've told you the rest of what we know - he was very small at birth, he was given some nonsense diagnoses, he steadily gained weight, he's always been healthy, etc. Considering his premature birth and early life in an orphanage, he's pretty remarkable developmentally. (Of course, we think he's remarkable however-wise.)

So all of this means that the name on his original birth certificate is Rachman Yerzhanovich Nuralin.

* * * * *

So after all of that, Max and his, dad, Vladimir, who was introduced in an earlier post, took us to meet some craftspeople friends of theirs, and I bought a bunch of stuff. (Surprise, surprise.) While there, we met Cathy, Tony, Lizzie, and another adoptive mom, Roberta, and her new daughter, Karina, who are staying in C&T's hotel, and whom, coincidentally, we had met earlier at the clinic where we had Otis certified for travel.