We express gratitude to Lesia Szwaluk for all support received over the last ten years! Lesia was a president of UAS board of directors and played a crucial role in agency operation, thank you!

We also would like to welcome a new board member Alysha Buck!

The great bake sale was organized by University of Manitoba Students’ Association on Wednesday, October 29th.

We would like to thank everyone who organized and supported the event!

To view more photos please visit our Facebook page here

P.S. Don’t forget to like our Facebook page.

While the unset in Ukraine was escalating during the summer of 2014,  UAS families received 4 child referrals and 3 adoptions already completed! One more adoption to be finalized in September.

The adoptions are not taking place in two Eastern parts of Ukraine (Donetsk and Luhansk)  as well as, the Crimea region to ensure the safety of the adoptive parents and their children. UAS is constantly monitor the situation and provide updated information to our families.

We are glad to serve families and children in need during this political instability, every successful adoption  make a difference for the Ukraine!

In 2005, Maurice Mierau and his wife, Betsy, travelled to Ukraine to adopt two small boys, ages three and five. After weeks of delays while navigating a tangled bureaucracy, they returned to Canada as a proud new family of four.

Now what?

Does fatherhood begin the moment that the adoption papers are signed? Is family something that is created in an instant? And what happens when everything seems to be on the verge of falling apart?

In Detachment, Maurice Mierau probes not only the process of adoption but what comes after—the challenges of becoming a family, the strain on his marriage. While his son acts out and gets in trouble at school, Maurice feels removed, detached, thinking instead about his own emotionally distant father. Also born in Ukraine, Maurice’s Mennonite father has a traumatic, mysterious past of his own. If Maurice can come to understand his father’s life, perhaps he can start to make sense of his new sons…

Detachment is a moving, darkly funny, and searingly unsentimental memoir about learning to become a father and a son.

 “Detachment is a startling portrait of a real Modern Family–cobbled together across continents, haunted by old wars and buried trauma, held together by the stubborn human need for love and connection, for belonging. Maurice Mierau’s attempt to understand the people who made him what he is, while holding his own invented family together, is completely compelling: brutally honest, harrowing, and compassionate.” – Michael Crummey, author of Galore

“In the first half of Detachment, Maurice Mierau tells a fascinating story of working through the byzantine bureaucracy of the adoption industry to bring two boys home from Ukraine. In the second half, he recounts the hardest part of the journey, learning the emotional language of being a dad. Maurice Mierau is a smart and unsentimental storyteller, and I loved this book.” – Joan Thomas, author of Curiosity and Reading by Lightning

“With wry honesty, Maurice Mierau surprises the reader again and again with the failure, the vulnerability, the surprise, and the tenderness of relationships. For all its coolly detached tone, this story has incredible heart. And the children. Oh, the children.” – David Bergen, author of The Age of Hope and The Time in Between.

Information about the book on Maurice’s web site at, including upcoming events in Winnipeg and Toronto, at:

http://www.mauricemierau.com/

The events page is here:

http://www.mauricemierau.com/events/

There’s also info about the book on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/Detachmentanadoptionmemoir

Congratulations to Maurice Mierau for a new book!!

THANK YOU to everyone for your input and participation, it truly was a great event!

Photos by Norbert Iwan

It was so great to see the families and kids again!!!

Currently, there are no information on delays in the intercountry adoption process in Ukraine following recent changes in the Ukrainian Government.  Based on the information provided by Bureau of Consular Affairs at the U.S. Department of State the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs ‘remains open and that delays are not currently expected in the issuance of Ukrainian passports to adopted children beyond the normal processing timeline’.

UAS had already registered  two adoption dossiers at the Ministry of Social Policy of Ukraine between February – March 2014.

Please contact our office for further information.