From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 10/27/2005 5:47 PM

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Russian Orphans Left Behind

Created: 27.10.2005 16:14 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 16:14 MSK > document.write(get_ago(1130415255)); </SCRIPT> , 12 hours 31 minutes ago

Antonina Frolenkova

The Moscow News

According to Moscow ZAGS (Citizens Status Registration Department) statistics, 1,034 children were adopted in the past eight months, which is 200 kids less than in the same period of the previous year. This annual reduction in the number of adoptions has been the trend for the past 10 years.

Some believe that Russians don’t want to take children into their families due to financial difficulties, while experts say that reason is important but not decisive. After all, the most active adoption period in the city’s latest history was in the mid 1980s, when Muscovites were definitely poorer than today. “People’s reluctance to help orphans is a myth from which some officials profit,” Maria Ternovskaya, director of Children’s Home 19, asserts.

The process of adopting a Russian child by a Russian adult usually takes up to two years, and when the child finally comes to a new family, the new parents are left alone with their inevitable problems. Nobody guarantees even psychological help. So it is not surprising that 13 out of 100 adopted kids are sent back to the orphanages.

Ten years ago, the foster system (which was widespread in this country after World War II) was reestablished first in Moscow and then in 30 more Russian regions. The system was recognized as an alternative to adoption because of its relative transparency and simplicity. Under the Russian foster care model, a parent is employed by the orphanage as a child’s educator. The orphan thus gets a real home while retaining the status of a children’s home ward, which grants the child some benefits like getting a municipal apartment on attaining majority. On their part, the children’s home specialists provide psychological, medical and educational support to the family.

Foster care is not supposed to last forever but until a child’s parents or some relative can take care of him or her properly. The experience of Moscow shows, however, that most biological mothers and fathers, having got rid of the ’objectionable burden’, don’t return to a proper lifestyle, and children stay with their foster family till they come of age.

Natalya Zobova is one of the first new foster mothers in the city. She found out in a local church that a neighboring children’s home needed help. At the time Zobova didn’t think of foster care as she had two kids of her own, aged seven and eight. She came just to assist in routine activities. After a while she received foster training, passed the necessary tests, and met little Dima. “He was very small for four years, a thin boy with reddish hair. Dima’s diagnosis was dystrophy, and he had difficulty speaking. I convinced my husband to take the child,” Zobova recalls. “When he came to our family he eagerly tried to become understandable and repeated every word several times.”

When Dima started to call Natalya “mama” she found out that he had a brother, Sasha, eleven. Sasha had been separated from his alcohol-addicted mother some time before. The family decided to take care of both siblings. Natalya left her job and became a professional mother with a salary of about $80 paid by the children’s home and a cash benefit of $70 for each child from the state budget. Dima, 13, currently gets on (not brilliantly, but well) at school, while Sasha, 20, lives independently in his own apartment and is studying to be an electrician.

“Their upbringing was definitely a hard job. No doubt, I paid less attention to my ’first’ kids. Who knows what would be better though. My daughter, 18, studies in the Moscow State University; my son, 17, is also a student at a prestigious college,” Zobova says.

Children’s Home 19 has been helping abandoned kids to find foster families for 10 years now. According to its statistics, 97% of the children have found new parents. Foster organizations were initially planned to appear in each of Moscow’s 10 districts, but the plans haven’t materialized. The unique children’s home has received about 7,000 telephone calls from Muscovites willing to foster a child. Over 600 prospective foster parents have attended special training courses, while only 300 kids have been fostered so far.

Currently, 16 children are still waiting for new parents in the children’s home; eight of them are teenagers, another eight are very sick, including three mentally disabled. Needless to say, their chances for a speedy placement into a family are very low, which can be theoretically explained: “Traumatic break of attachment” is a common diagnosis among teenage children’s home wards. Due to a long experience of negative relationships they forget how to trust people, they don’t perceive a new family as a family and need long-term psychological rehabilitation before starting to live with foster parents.

“Just five years ago kids of all ages came to our place directly from wardship organizations. These days, however, all information about the children separated from their parents is first directed to the Regional Data Bank, where kids are ’assorted’. For some incomprehensible reasons they fail to deliver young children to the place where they can more rapidly find families,” Ternovskaya says.

Meanwhile, 3,000 kids are kept in Moscow orphanages. Founders of the foster system suppose the main reason for such an absurdity is a lack of professionalism in the wardship sphere. “Nobody will tell you what was done for a certain child, whether his biological family was restored or — if it didn’t work — new parents were found,” foster parents stress. “What we have are careless administrators choosing kids for ’profitable’ adults although according to common sense, professional educators must seek compatible parents for every child. Only a revision of the whole system can change the situation.”

http://www.mosnews.com/column/2005/10/27/adoptedchildren.shtml