Every once in a while it's brought home to me what a hard row to hoe orphans in Russia, Ukraine, and other Eastern European countries are facing.
In December I worked with a woman from Ukraine at Foley's for a bit. She was very kind, offering to translate Svetlana's emails for me, help Dmitry with his English, and so on. She also, though, warned me to expect Svetlana to try and get all she can from us (she's never asked for anything, BTW), basically not to believe anything Dmitry says about his past life ("All those kids have a story") because all orphans are liars, that children from orphanages are grasping and greedy, and I don't recall what all.
Enough to annoy me. Kept telling her our experience with Dmitry bore no resemblance to her dire warnings, but couldn't get through to her. It was apparent she thought I was fooling myself.
Came across this on the net recently, which certainly verifies the opinion held about orphans by Eastern Europeans:
I live in a community with lots of Russian and Ukrainian nationals. I work with several such women. When we were preparing to go to adopt our son, age ** months, in ******, I approached these women about tips, ideas and information. To a person, they each warned me against adopting a Russian orphan and all (separately) quoted a Russian proverb about "taking in someone else's garbage." This broke my heart, because these women are so kind and loving and all work with kids. They truly believed I was doing a terrible thing for my family and it was their moral imperative to stop me. (We are all still friends, and the freely admit they were wrong, although they think it was a fluke that he is so smart).
When in the small village my son lived in, we would walk from the homestay to the baby home. On about the third day we took a break at a cafe and when we came out, were turned around. Since it wasn't a long walk, we had insisted we didn't need anyone to walk with us, so now we were lost. The town is tiny, with one main street and one orphanage and one school. We must have asked 10 people how to get to the baby home (I don't speak Russian well, but well enough for that) and every one of them said *they didn't know !!!* By the fifth day we realized how ridiculous that was - it was about three blocks from where we were and it was the tallest building in that section. It had a big sign out front, yet these people all professed to have no idea where the orphanage was, or even that their town had one. We noticed that passersby averted their eyes when walking by the baby home, and never looked or smiled at the toddlers p! laying outside in the yard, just feet from where people walked. Yet, every baby or toddler out walking with family got lots of attention. They obviously loved children. I can only surmise that people were very ashamed of these orphans and tried hard to keep them out of their minds and lives.
Tell you what, while one has to applaud the desire of the Russian Duma to give Russian families more opportunities to adopt the children in the orphanages by increasing the time the children are on the Federal adoption list to six months, it's obvious the primary problem is not the length of time the available children are listed . . . it's the attitude toward taking in someone else's children that needs to be changed.
How does one do that, though? I can't even begin to imagine how a government (probably comprised of many people who, deep inside, share the same bias against orphans) can set out to eradicate such an ingrained prejudice.
The answer, naturally, is for Christianity to take hold in Russia . . . what can one expect of a country that was officially atheistic for 70 years? Being kind to orphans is not a common hallmark of any atheistic or pagan society.
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