Why Russia?

The biggest question we have heard about our family is “Why Russia?” I have started to explain in this blog how we came to adopt and also here. When I first started reading about adoption shortly after we got married, I came across advice with regard to choosing a country to adopt from. It said something like “which country do you feel an affinity toward?” My answer was “Jamaica” and my husband’s answer was “Tibet“. Some might think that the first 2 countries that would have come to mind were “United States” or “England” (since I am American and hubs is English). However, our idealistic World view does not have man-made borders…sure, maps have lines that divide, but planet Earth does not. We feel part of a global community and we were already an international family, so the nationality of our children was somewhat insignificant. It has been suggested to us several times that “there are plenty of kids right here in America” and to those people I say “feel free to foster or adopt an American child.” We think domestic adoption is wonderful, although we do not feel that American children are any more deserving of parents than African children, Asian children or European children. ALL children deserve to know the love of a family.

First, we researched adopting from Jamaica and found that it can be a very time-consuming and discouraging process and many families drop out and switch countries after a year or more of paperchasing. Some do make it happen, but I was seeing a lot of discouragement and heartbreak so we decided against it. Tibet does not legally exist as a country from which to adopt so I then briefly started researching adopting from (Xizang) China or (Dharamsala) India where many Tibetans live. We contacted the office of the Tibetan leader for feedback regarding this possibility and got a clear response that it was not the right path.

At that point we started researched adopting from the United States. It would have been great if this option could have worked out for us because my father was a foster-kid and also because it’s free. We went to an orientation meeting and we found that the vast majority of the children in the US who were in immediate need of parents were older than our 0-39 month age range and the younger children had disabilities we did not feel like we could handle (which is saying a lot since we were open to a fairly wide range of medical needs). I know that older child adoption is right for a lot of families, but we were first-time parents without any experience, so we felt most comfortable with a younger age range. Fortunately, there are no orphanages full of young children in the US  We never considered going on a waiting list to adopt a young/healthy child because there are already many thousands of children in the world who are in urgent need of parents. We do not have infertility issues and we want to parent children who would otherwise not have the chance of a family. Next we researched England and we basically found the same exact situation as with United States. There are no children that met our parameters who were in urgent need of families and we were not going to go on a wait list.

My research indicated that some of the post-Soviet countries have orphanages that are full of precious young children in the age range we were considering with manageable health issues we feel comfortable with.  Birth-parents sometimes leave newborns at the maternity hospital if the baby is ‘different’ from the acceptable societal norms. Maybe the child has a cleft lip or crossed eyes or Down Syndrome – those are all reasons for abandonment in Eastern Europe, whereas that is quite rare in the West. This is not a judgement statement. I have no idea what it would have been like to live without freedom behind the iron curtain. I have no idea what it’s like to be pregnant and living in abject poverty with no social support network. I should mention that the foster-care systems in the Eastern European countries are getting more well established now so there is not an abundance of healthy babies as they mostly stay with biological families or go to foster-families. (There are many American families who are on waiting lists to adopt young healthy children from Eastern Europe). However, we found that the number of children that met our criteria who were in desperate need for parents was mind-boggling. I wish I could say that we “chose Russia” because of its fascinating architecture, interesting history or rich culture, but the fact is that we didn’t really “choose Russia”, we were led there because of the enormous need and because that’s where our children were.

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