From Russia, with love

Editor's note: This report by veteran journalist

Jon Basil Utley is a first-person account of the trials and joys of American parents adopting orphans from Russia. Utley was recently on a flight to Moscow to cover

Russia's historic election for WorldNetDaily, when the following story took him by surprise.

by Jon Basil Utley
© 2000, WorldNetDaily.com, Inc.

There were 13 babies and infants on Delta's Moscow-to-New York flight March 31. I'd been told that every direct flight out of Moscow carried orphans being adopted by Americans; the flight attendant told me they were all baby Russians. They all looked healthy, alert and curious.

One couple told me their baby girl's father had been killed in Chechnya and that her mother, too poor to support her, had delivered the infant to an orphanage. There's little in the way of public assistance in Russia.

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A young Russian woman sat next to me. She was heading to Indianapolis for a conference about her business of printing greeting cards.

"We don't do that," she told me, looking at the kids in the row across from us, waiting for adoption. Many people later confirmed that few Russians adopt, except from within their families. Most children are left until the age of 16 and then put out on the streets with little education, support or hope for the rest of their lives.

And, yet, some 5,000 Russian kids came to America last year, to middle-class families, for lives unimaginable to those who are left behind.

The people

On my flight to Moscow, I was surprised that a couple in the next seat, Rick and Chris, told me they were flying on to Siberia to adopt two children, a five- and six-year-old brother and sister. Their adoption agency,

Plan Loving Adoptions in Oregon, had provided them with videos of the children and medical history. In Moscow, they would transfer to an Aeroflot flight for Irkutsk on the Sea of Baikal. Once there, they would have to remain for up to two weeks, meeting the children and getting judicial approval for the adoption.

"The orphanages do well with the few resources they have," Chris told me when I called after her and her husband's return to Oklahoma, saying that as many as 10 to 12 children are cared for by just one or two adults. "Certainly, they try to care for the kids -- our two are wonderful -- but they're so naïve. They'd never ridden in a car or been around pets; they didn't know how to sit on our laps."

"We expected the poverty but not the hopelessness," Chris said about the conditions in Russia. "Anyone above 30 -- you could see in their eyes, the way they walked -- people wouldn't look you in the eye. But the students -- younger adults -- had hope, looked better. Also, there was the silence, uncomfortable silence."

Despite the level of despair, Chris said not all was bad.

"People weren't hungry," she said, "lots of root foods. We joked to ourselves that in Russia everyone ate health foods: yogurt, beans, cabbage, black bread."

This summer, two of Chris' daughters are going for several weeks with their church group to help care for street children in Haborovsk, on the Chinese border.

"Children there live in the sewers to stay warm," she said. "They really have nothing."

Russian people are very generous, Chris said. "They try to reach out, but they have so little. If I could say something to any parent, get your kids involved in helping. My 16-year-old daughter, who accompanied us, said it would be so depressing but I told her that she would be giving them hope."

Another couple I met on the return flight were Mike and Maryanne from Pittsburgh, who adopted two one-year-old babies from Krasnodar, near the Black Sea. I called them six weeks after their return.

"It's so wonderful," said Maryanne. "They're our first kids; they're very healthy. ... They've grown five pounds and two inches."

"We were impressed how stylish people dressed," Maryanne said about their one-week stay. "There were nice restaurants, nice cars. It's a fairly big city, a million -- mainly agricultural. Our translator was a young university student; she wanted so much to talk about politics."

After expressing how happy she is with the outcome of the trip and adoption, Maryanne said she and Mike sadden when they think about how fortunate their children are when compared to "all those who are left behind."

The Process

On the flight, Mike and Maryanne introduced me to Kathy Rukenbrod, director of

International Family Services in Pennsylvania, the agency that arranged their adoptions. She told me she'd helped bring out 153 babies and children.

Explaining the adoption procedure, Rukenbrod said the process takes four to nine months, beginning with an approved "home study" of prospective parents by a social worker in their home state. Russia requires four yearly post-placement visits as well. Prospective parents are given videos and medical reports on their proposed adoptees and then spend at least a week with the court procedures in Russia.

While it's typical for American media only to report bad stories about adoptions, according to Rukenbrod, she said that many of her clients have gone back to Russia for second and third adoptions -- compared with America, where adoption is extremely slow, costly and difficult.

Russian adoptions are also permitted for single women and older couples -- something not usually permitted with American babies.

Though Rukenbrod and everyone I interviewed said that most parents tell their children of their Russian heritage and that they should be proud of it, adopting can be politically sensitive for many Russians who don't like the idea of Americans taking away their children.

Easing this and other difficulties, the American Embassy in Moscow has been very helpful, according to Rukenbrod.

At the Moscow embassy, Jon Mennuti, the assistant cultural affairs officer, told me how there used to be rumors in Russia that the kids were being mistreated or even sold for body parts. He said the embassy has used its funds to fly several directors of orphanages to America to see for themselves how the kids were living and that the visits had calmed the stories.

Mennuti said it costs about $15,000 for an adoption, including the U.S. agency fee and their Russian correspondents. Others told me that some of the money stays with the orphanages to help them improve conditions for the remaining kids, although much goes to the authorities for their permissions.

The Potential

There is a tremendous amount of giving from America by many individuals, churches and organizations sending help to Russian orphanages. Just from Oklahoma, I learned of two: Jeff Jackson Ministries, which every year sends a 40-ft. container of supplies to some 20 orphanages in Kaliningrad, and

Mercy Medical
Missions, which sends aid to Irkutsk and Perm in Siberia, including medical equipment, hearing aids, wheelchairs and construction supplies.

Mercy Medical Missions' director, Don Hawkinson, told me he'd visited Russia 18 times since 1992 and now takes medical teams of American volunteers to help, including equipment training for doctors over there.

Speaking of the Russian schools, Hawkinson said there was a wonderful new generation, very teachable, great young people who haven't been spoiled. Visiting the schools reminded him of what American youth was like in the '40s and '50s, he said.

His group's

website includes write-ups of experiences by adopting parents.

"We adopted our only child Sergei from Sludanka, Russia, when he was three-and-a-half years old, on July 14, 1997," writes one new parent, Rhonda Clary. Sludanka is on the southern tip of Siberia's Lake Baikal.

Clary provides a list of topics containing things she learned from her adopting experience in hopes of aiding potential adopters. Because the orphanage children sleep with bed partners, she writes, "Sleeping alone was a very hard adjustment for (Sergei) because he gets lonely. Now, we keep his bedroom door open."

Other little adjustments proved difficult. Sergei, for instance, cried when his new parents brushed his teeth. "I assume that this was the first time that he had had his teeth brushed," said Clary.

Dealing with food also proved interesting. "They were not given milk, just juice and hot tea made with tap water. Sergei likes his tea dark. The children were not given beef to eat and he had to acquire a taste for it in the U.S. They did not have hamburgers or peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

"What they were used to eating was buckwheat, borscht soup, cabbage rolls, raw carrots, cucumbers, boiled russet potatoes and bread without anything on it," she said.

Many U.S. corporations contribute to the costs of adoptions and there is a $5,000 tax credit during the first year of an adoption. Also, some airlines help. Northwest / KLM advertise an adoption website with low fares and no penalties for cancellations or travel-date changes.

Russian adoptions depend very much on local officials. Most are done outside of the major cities where local authorities are faster and easier to work with. To further expedite the process, agencies have established relations with many orphanages and maintain representatives on the sites.

Only babies whose mothers have given written permission, or who were found abandoned, are allowed to be adopted abroad. The fear is that the government might clamp down on permissions, but that doesn't seem likely now. However, the Russian government does plan to control the proliferation of agencies by accreditation limited to those that are already established and proven.

As more Americans adopt babies, it is becoming more acceptable for Russians to do the same. All told, however, every year at least another 100,000 new infants enter the orphanages.

See the following websites for more information:

U.S. Government: International Adoption in Russia

RussianAdoption.org

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Jon Basil Utley mailto:[email protected] is the Robert A. Taft Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and works with the Atlas Foundation project to support and offer training for free market think tanks in Russia.