I have written a lot about what happens to children with severe cognitive or physical disabilities in the orphanages and institutions of Eastern Europe (and elsewhere). How children who are deemed unworthy are left to waste away in cribs.
But what about children who have only mild or no disability? Or who have been abandoned to orphanages due to poverty? How do they fare as wards of the state?
Renee and her husband have just completed the adoption of 3 children from Ukraine, less than a year after adopting a little girl with Cerebral Palsy. Two of the children were adopted out of the "Baby House", but the third had already been transferred to the older child orphanage. This is not a mental institution. The children go to some kind of school, get to play outside, and develop basic competencies.
But it is NOT a good place.
PLEASE READ this account of what Renee learned about her son's experiences in the few months after transfer once she brought him home (and took him straight to the Children's Hospital....).
One of my younger brothers was adopted from Leningrad, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The orphanage was awesome, well equipped, great staff, lots of volunteers, sponsored by a local factory.
ReplyDelete20 years leater he was back there... such a big contrast to the lively, lovely place it had been.