April 19, 2007

  • Here's a depressing fact....

    From the Christian Science Monitor:  Orphanages brim, but Russia thwarts foreign adoption

    This week, the last of 89 foreign-based adoption agencies failed to get reaccreditation.

    A year ago, there were 89 accredited foreign-based adoption
    agencies; this week, the last of them saw their accreditation expire.
    Officials say that 76 agencies have filed documents for
    reaccreditation, and are at varying stages on a treadmill that now
    requires them first to register as nongovernmental organizations under
    a new law. Adoption agencies were previously licensed by the Ministry
    of Education, but now their applications must also be vetted by the
    ministries of interior, justice, foreign affairs, and health.

    "It's a whole new process, based on a government
    decree passed last November," says Sergei Vitelis, an official with the
    Ministry of Education and Science. "We do not yet have a single case
    where all the ministries have given their approval; as soon as we have,
    we'll start issuing licenses."

    Russia has some 700,000 institutionalized
    children, about 260,000 of whom are officially listed as orphans
    available for adoption. Last year alone 140,052 children were placed in
    orphanages, according Russia's official Statistics Service, while 7,742
    were adopted by Russian families and 6,689 by foreigners.

    So as of right this minute, if any adoptions are going to happen, they'll have to be done independently, which makes me weak to even think about.   They do happen, mind!  As a matter of sorry fact, those cases where Russian adoptees wind up beaten or killed by their America families were usually handled independently.  The primary safeguard are proper agencies, yet Russia's setting up one obstacle after another, to the point there are now no accredited foreign agencies in Russia at all. 

    This story came from the CSM last December:  In remote Russia, 'Murziki' bring cheer to orphans

    RYBINSK, RUSSIA –
    Children pour out of Rybinsk's orphanage No. 72,
    laughing and waving, when the Murziki pull up in their mud-spattered
    convoy of cars. The kids know many of these adults from distant Moscow
    by name, and they hurry to help unload the cars, stacked with boxes of
    toys, sports equipment, and coats - as well as cutlery and a new VCR
    with a selection of cartoons, needs the Murziki carefully noted on
    their last visit.

    The Murziki tell the kids that they come from the
    mythical country of Murlandia, a kind of cross between Neverland and
    Santa's Village. In reality, they're something almost as rare in
    Russia, where the volunteer spirit has been dead for the past century:
    a self-organized band of middle-class people devoting their resources
    and spare time to a sustained effort to change hard facts for a few
    hundred children.

    "We decided not to sit around waiting for the state
    to do something about the human crisis we saw unfolding," says German
    Pyatov, a Moscow surgeon who founded the group after the 1998 financial
    crash in Russia.

    It's now grown to about 700 supporters, connected by
    the Internet, and a hard core of several dozen Muscovites who regularly
    make the 300-mile drive out to the chain of poor Volga towns, with
    their teeming orphanages, that they've targeted.

    "I've found that interacting with these children
    charges me with the energy to keep going," says Mr. Pyatov. "It's
    enough to look in their eyes to realize that not enough is being done."

    They have their work cut out for them. Russia's orphan
    population has ballooned in the past 15 years, particularly in the
    economically blighted hinterland beyond booming Moscow.

    Rybinsk, a formerly closed defense-industry town of
    250,000 on the Volga River, had one orphanage in 1991; now it has six.
    This reflects a widespread post-Soviet tendency of impoverished
    families to abandon children.

    Forty out of the 52 inhabitants of orphanage No. 72
    have living parents who won't, or can't, care for them. "Most of the
    factories around here went bankrupt, and people lost everything," says
    Nina Kornyushkina, the orphanage's director. "Many people sank into
    despair and alcoholism, and the children were just lost."

    About 760,000 children are classified as orphans in
    Russia, according to the Ministry of Education, while a further 1.5
    million are thought to be "homeless." Statistics cited by Pyatov
    suggest that existing institutions do little to help them.

    "Roughly 45 percent of children land in prison within
    five years of leaving the orphanage, 35 percent become drug or alcohol
    addicts, 10 per cent die - of accidents and suicide - and just 10
    percent are considered relatively successful," he says.

    "Being sent to an orphanage is a catastrophic route for
    any child," says Sergei Korobenko, the Russian head of Hope
    International, which runs programs in large cities to persuade parents
    not to give up their children to orphanages. "There are very many
    families at risk, and we try to work directly with them, to find ways
    to ease their problems and keep the children in the home setting."

    Doubtless Vitaly, the only one not adopted from the Bright Futures camp that brought us Joe, Zhenya, and Reagan, has "graduated" from Shumerly.  I wonder where he is now and how he's doing?  e-11_confused