New hope for Russian orphans. 

BBC, Oct. 20, 2003

Jacque in the news.

NKC Tribune; Dec. 12, 2002

A born Nurturer does it her way.    

The Los Angeles Times; Los Angeles, Calif.; Nov 6, 2001

As orphans multiply and languish, Russia 'decrees.'   

Boston Globe of December 10, 2000

New hope for Russian orphans

BBC, Oct. 20, 2003

The BBC's Richard Sargent in Moscow reports on a new scheme to give Russian orphans internships in large companies, allowing them the chance to avoid a life of crime, drug addiction and low-paid work.

Sergei proudly tries on a suit and tie for the first time, He has known a life that few of us could even contemplate. His father died in a car crash when he was three. And then his mother hit the bottle.

Sergei's habitual smile disappears and he lowers his gaze as he re-visits a time he has strived to forget.

"I don't want to remember; I have only bad memories from then," he says.

After five years of neglect and regular beatings, he and his two brothers were taken away from their mother.   He never knew any other relatives and lost contact with his siblings, who were too old to be placed in an orphanage. He refuses to have any contact with his mother.

"But my dad was a very, very kind man," he says.

Bullying

It was a new start for the eight-year-old, a new life. A friend, Nikolai, describes the orphanage as a place without love, without warmth. But it was better than "home" for Sergei.

Life in a Russian orphanage depends greatly on its staff.  Most are working there as a last resort. Bullying by older children is widespread and the over-stretched and under-paid staff simply do not have the time, and often the inclination, to give individual love and attention.

Orphans in Russia must leave orphanages at the age of 17. In Moscow , orphan "graduates" should by law be provided with a flat and a small stipend.  But many of the 700,000 orphans in Russia are unprepared for life on the outside.  Forty per cent of orphan graduates turn to crime, 40% become drug addicts and 10% commit suicide or simply "disappear" within the first year of independence, according to the Russian NGO, Big Changes.  Only 2% enter university, compared with 45% of children raised in families.

Sergei is highly intelligent and motivated. Alongside his regular studies he has been coming to Women and Children First, a Russian NGO which teaches orphans "life-skills" to cope with life outside an institutionalized  orphanage. His favourite class is English.

Paid interns

Like the vast majority of orphans, Sergei is being channeled into low-paid, low-skilled work. However, thanks to a new project at Women and Children First, he may be able to escape construction work and fulfil his potential.

A Chance to Work is a new scheme run by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a World Bank Group member, and is an extension of similar projects in Washington DC and Cairo .  It will give orphans the opportunity to work as paid interns in large companies in Moscow .

Meaghan McGrath Beaumont, IFC's project manager in Washington DC , explains:  "Companies are very excited about the programme. Corporate philanthropy is a new concept in Russia but it's really taking off."

Companies expressing interest in the project include AIG Insurance, Ramenka, owner of the Ramstore hypermarket chain in Moscow , and Austria 's Raiffeisenbank. Negotiations with top British companies are expected to start in the coming months.

As well as Women and Children First and Big Changes, the IFC is working with the Russian Orphans Opportunity Fund (ROOF). ROOF provides educational support to orphans and helps them to make the often difficult transition  from institutional living to independent life.

Training will be provided by the NGOs before and during work placements on aspects such as writing a CV, interview techniques, behaviour at work and dress codes.

Each intern will be given psychological support by the NGO and will also be assigned a mentor within the company.

Merit and distinction

A partner in the project is White and Case, an international law firm with experience in the field. Slava, an orphan graduate, has been working as a courier with them for the past year-and-a-half.  Alongside the full-time job, he has been doing evening classes at ROOF to make up for poor schooling at the orphanage and bring him up to university standard.

"It was not easy," he admits. "At times, I thought I just didn't have the strength to go on."

It all paid off, however. He passed all his final year school exams with merit and distinction and now plans to go to university to study law.

He said he would recommend his experience to anyone.  "It's more than just an opportunity, it's a chance of a lifetime which can  change your whole future."

As he practises his handshake, Sergei is clearly excited at the prospect of a place on the scheme.  He also dreams of going to law school. A Chance to Work could turn his dream into reality.

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The World; A Born Nurturer Does It Her Way; Ukraine: Svetlana Bondareva adopted 15 orphans. Six of them are disabled. Series: One in an occasional series on the former Soviet states a decade after the fall. 

The Los Angeles Times; Los Angeles, Calif.; Nov 6, 2001; ROBYN DIXON; 
(Copyright, The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times 2001 All rights reserved)

When she was 8, the girl's future seemed like a closed book. She would spend her life lying or sitting, unable to move, in a provincial town's home for the disabled.

Then, one day in 1992, something incredible happened. A young woman came and took away her best friend, also 8.

Distressed, the girl, whose name was Sveta, begged the woman, Svetlana Bondareva, to rescue her too.

"I was shocked, to be honest," recalled Bondareva, explaining that Sveta had one arm and no legs. "She couldn't move. I  was not sure she'd ever be able to walk at all."

Bondareva grew up in the Soviet Union, where disabilities and adoption were both highly stigmatized.  They still are in most former Soviet republics.  But Bondareva, a large, soft-spoken woman with a benign smile, is extraordinary.

She adopted a large group of disabled and abandoned children whose lives otherwise would have been bleak and oppressive.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the number of orphans and abandoned children in the former U.S.S.R. has risen sharply.  There are now 700,000 in Russia alone, more than in the entire Soviet Union at the end of World War II, which claimed more than 20 million Soviet lives.

In Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics, the long, tough transition to a market economy has incurred a significant social cost: unemployment, alcohol abuse and crime.  Welfare agencies are alarmed by the sheer numbers of orphaned and abandoned children.  The latter's parents are often alcoholics or in jail.

Bondareva was 22 when she confronted her dilemma about whether to take in Sveta.  By then, she had already adopted six children, three of them disabled.

She did go back to collect Sveta, and that same day took home two other children.  But that wasn't the end.  So far, she has rescued 15 children, six with disabilities.

Sveta is now 17. She is mobile with the help of artificial limbs. She loves to read novels and poems, feed the family pets and teach her younger siblings.  And she wants a job in the medical field.

The idea of Bondareva, a 32-year-old with a negligible income, adopting 15 children would be unthinkable in the West--and is controversial here too.  But in Ukraine and Russia, the children she chose--mostly disabled or well beyond toddler age--had little other chance to be adopted.

She Chose Children Over Her Boyfriend

Bondareva feels her burden.  Before she made her first adoption, her boyfriend told her to choose between him and the child.  They broke up, and she has stopped thinking of marriage.

"I have never met the kind of person who could devote all his life to the children," she said.

A religious woman, she shrugs off the notion that she has done something remarkable.

"It is really hard to say what pushed me to start it all-- probably because I love children very much," she said.  "The reason I have so many children is that I want to help more and more of them."

In building her large and loving family, Bondareva had to push against tradition.  Child-care authorities in the northeastern city of Kharkiv are highly critical because she shunned the preferred model in which foster parents are paid state salaries to care for seven to 10 children.

Although she would receive nine times more money under that system, Bondareva rejected it because her children would have had to move into hostels at 16 to 18 years of age.

"As an expert, I do not understand her," said Svetlana Gorbunova- Ruban, the official in charge of orphans and abandoned children in the Kharkiv administration.  "It's quite evident that financially she cannot bring up such a large number of children. It is like a monastery."

However, Bondareva never had a problem getting approval from local adoption committees, and she only once ran into opposition from an orphanage official. That was because she was single and the children would have no father.

"I told them that in an orphanage, children have no family at all," she recalled. She won the argument.

There is an air of comfortable chaos in the Bondareva household.  The children eat meals in two sittings around a small table that occupies almost all of the tiny kitchen's floor space.

Her oldest, Natasha, has married and left home.  All 12 daughters and three sons, ages 2 to 21, radiate confident energy.  Their rambling apartment is crammed with dogs, cats, toys, bird cages, posters, fish tanks, books and athletic equipment.

The girls love to do one another's hair in elaborate styles.  On family walks, the children look out for one another, singing out when a car approaches, calling to the younger ones not to stray or chiding one another for getting dirty.

They have soaring ambitions, planning to get jobs as lawyers, medical workers or systems analysts.  They study hard, and the six disabled children are capable of looking after themselves.  Bondareva believes that most will find jobs and that all will live independently.

For children in state orphanages or homes, the future looks much more grim.  Some with severe disabilities face life in adult institutions.

Orphans and abandoned children are discharged from state care and are supposed to get a job and an apartment.  But few do.

According to the Russian prosecutor general, 15,000 orphans in Russia leave orphanages annually.  Within five years, one in 10 will have committed suicide.  One in five will have a criminal record; one- third will be unemployed; 40% will be homeless.  Equivalent figures are not available for Ukraine, although the problems there are similar.

When Bondareva was 12, her father, grandfather and two grandmothers died within a few months of one another, leaving her alone with her mother.

"I felt it very acutely. I thought, 'How can other children live without any parents?' I decided when I grew up I would take in orphans," she said.

So at 14, she began collecting addresses of orphanages. At 16, she began writing to children in orphanages.  At 20, she adopted her first child, Marina, then 9, who still lives with her.

She Realized It Was Up to Her

She never set out to adopt disabled children--just to write to them and send gifts.  But once the letters started, she decided--with the encouragement of her mother--that if she did not adopt them, no one else would.

So in her early 20s, with trepidation, she visited a home for disabled children.

"I was so scared I walked around the building twice before going in.  I didn't know what awaited me behind those doors. Ordinary people don't go into those places," she said.

When Bondareva at first brought home children with disabilities, many people teased and pointed fingers.
 
"People are not used to seeing invalids. They are kept out of the public eye.   At first, it was hard.  But in order to live in the society, you have to learn not to pay attention to these things," Bondareva said.

Bondareva's children are typical of "orphans" in Russia and Ukraine, 95% of whom have one or two living parents.  They end up in state care because of parental alcoholism or neglect, or because one or both parents are in jail. It is usual to give up disabled children.

Some orphanages in poor regions have as little as 5 rubles a day (17 cents) to feed each child.

Conditions in homes for disabled children also vary sharply.  A 1998 Human Rights Watch report cited cases of humiliating punishment, neglect, and physical and sexual abuse.

Many in the West would be uncomfortable with the fact that Bondareva has concealed from the younger children the fact that they are adopted.

Yet she is a product of her culture.  Secrecy in adoptions is fiercely protected by Ukrainian law, and parents here rarely tell children they are adopted or reveal the details of their past.

Fake Baby Pictures Put in Albums

Bondareva pasted fake baby photos into personal albums for each of the children, convinced that every person must have a baby picture.

The older children remember their institutional lives.  But none of the children have any contact with their birth parents or siblings.

"We completely avoid discussing the past.  The children don't want to remember something unpleasant.  They don't want to remember that they were adopted, and they don't want to be reminded that they are disabled, not like others," Bondareva said, firmly ruling out any questions to her children on these subjects.

The older ones made a decision not to discuss the past at a family meeting, she said.  "We don't have adopted children here. I tell them they are my birth children.  The older ones know the truth, but they hide it from themselves."

However, several of her children mentioned the sacrifice their mother made in adopting them. To them, she is a hero.

"What distinguishes her is that she took us all in," said Tonya, 14.  "She devoted all of her life and health to us."

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By David E. Powell and Heidi A. Holzfaster

David E. Powell is the Shelby Collum Davis Professor of Russian Studies at Wheaton College and an associate of the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University. Heidi A. Holzfaster is a senior at Wheaton who has written on Russian orphanages.

With Christmas and Hanukkah just around the corner, it is natural to think of ways to pamper our children, or at least to do our best to make them happy and healthy. But what is ''natural'' in a comfortable, middle-class American existence is all but impossible in many parts of the world - Russia increasingly among them.

Except for the offspring of the richest or most corrupt segment of the population, the children of Russia have fallen on hard times. With the nation's Gross Domestic Product having declined by roughly 50 percent and rising unemployment having weakened family bonds, it has become increasingly difficult for adults to care for their children.

Obtaining food, clothing, and shelter have become so arduous that some parents have given up hope: The number of abandoned children has doubled over the past three years and is now more than 650,000.

Even those who are not abandoned pay a price for the country's withering nutritional standards and poorly financed public health system; more than half of all newborns who leave maternity clinics suffer from some sort of chronic illness or disease. Indeed, a mere 10 percent of babies are deemed healthy - a figure that sounds impossibly low, but that is affirmed by the most authoritative government and medical bodies in the country.

In early October, the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences announced that the number of ''normal'' births in the Russian Federation had declined from 45.3 percent in 1992 to only 30 percent in 1999. The Academy blamed this situation on the spread of alcoholism, the growing use of drugs, sexually transmitted diseases, and a more general decline in the health of adults - especially among women of child-bearing age.

But the poor health of Russia's babies has another consequence:  When an infant is born with any type of mental or physical defect, doctors often try to dissuade parents from caring for the child. Indeed, stories of physicians telling parents that they will be perceived as socially inferior if they choose to care for an impaired child are a staple of Russian newspapers.

The end result is a growing number of ''social orphans'' - or ''sotsialnye siroty''- who are abandoned or put up for adoption by their parents. They are, as their name implies, made orphans by social factors; only 5 percent are actually without living mothers and fathers.

Once institutionalized, these social orphans - whose defects may be as minor as a skin abrasion, bronchitis, or pneumonia - are provided with little or no care by poorly trained and indifferent personnel. A lack of nutritionally balanced meals and a shortage of pharmaceuticals have given rise to further medical problems among these youngsters; in fact, pervasive neglect leads to thousands of deaths every year. { While I would characterize some of the vospitateli at Svir Stroi as poorly trained, I would not characterize them as necessarily indifferent or uncaring. Tired, malnourished themselves and extremely frustrated by their collective condition seems more like it there. In fact, there are a number of examples of Svir Stroi vospitateli going way out of their way to supply things the children need - material as well as emotiona.}

A visit to an orphanage, whether in Moscow or in a provincial city, is heartbreaking. The premises generally are crowded and dirty, most children sit or lie listlessly, there are few toys for them to play with, and nurses rarely, if ever, hold the boys and girls, or interact with them in anything but the most perfunctory way.

The wages of orphanage personnel average less than $15 a month; as a result, they seldom offer their charges anything more than custodial care. {While the wages are low and payment sporadic, the caregivers at Svir Stroi are not like this. That's why I feel so strongly that we *can* make a difference in the lives of these particular children - we'll have the support of their caregivers.} Earlier this year, one journalist described the children he saw as,''straitjacketed, lying naked on linoleum floors, cowering miserably in corners, or penned up in outdoor wooden shelters.'' Approximately 20 percent of the children, he was told, never get out of bed. {The children at Svir Stroi seem never to be *in* bed!}

According to Boris Altshuler, a Russian who heads the nongovernmental organization Children's Rights, the cost of keeping even one social orphan is roughly $300 a month - an enormous sum in a country where 36.7 percent of the population live below the official poverty level of $42 a month. {The average monthly wage for someone in the private sector is $82, while those who work for the government earn about 20 percent less.}

By law, the Russian Federation is required to pay a monthly stipend to all sotsialnye siroty. This money is supposed to go directly to the orphanages to cover costs of food, clothing, and medicine. But the government routinely fails to distribute the stipends, due to its own financial difficulties, and the little that is actually given out rarely reaches its intended recipients. Orphanage staff often appropriate the money for their own personal use; currently, more than a billion dollars in payments authorized for welfare-dependent families still has not reached them. {I am confident that this doesn't happen at Svir Stroi. In fact, I'm sure that Joanne and Rob would be willing to affirm my opinion that Nina

Despite this grim picture, orphanages are absorbing an increasing number of Russia's children. ''I can tell how bad things are by the way families are starting to ask us to take their children,'' said the head of one agency. ''Families in Russia are falling apart.''

''Abandoned children in Russia are condemned to a life without a future, especially if they suffer from a disability, no matter how minor,'' says the head of the Down's Syndrome Association. ''The problem lies not just in the appalling state of these orphanages. It also lies in Russian society and in its prejudice. These kids are looked down upon as second-class citizens." {My experience in Russia has been that prejudice always should be spelled in capitals whenever referring to Russian society in general.} Indeed, in a cruel, self-fulfilling prophesy, second-class citizens is what many Russian orphanages all but guarantee. For children who survive to age 18 and are released, the odds are better

than 1 in 2 that they will commit a crime, become alcohol or drug addicts, or join the ranks of the homeless - who number in the hundreds of thousands. {If we can keep this group of children from that fate, we will have done wonders!}

Many might be saved from such a fate if they were made available to foreigners who are willing to adopt them. Russia has long been the country of choice for Westerners, especially Americans, wishing to adopt. The number of Russian children adopted by foreigners rose from 3,251 in 1996 to 5,604 in 1998. Altogether, some 15,000 Russian children were brought to the United States between 1992 and 1999.

According to the US State Department, last year Americans adopted 16,400 foreign children, almost a third of whom were from Russia. But in April, Vladimir Putin, only a month after having been elected president, promulgated a series of decrees aimed at tightening controls over foreign adoption. The decrees were, in part, a demonstration of his nationalist credentials - although their stated purpose was to put an end to bribery, the sale of babies, and other illegal activities that have long been an inevitable concomitant of placing Russian orphans in foreign homes.

As Western commentators have pointed out, the process of acquiring a child necessitates that thousands of dollars be paid to judges, lawyers, orphanage employees, interpreters, ''consultants'' and others who could expedite - indeed, make possible - the adoption process. {If only all that money had gone to feed the children!}

Whether President Putin's changes are short term or permanent remains to be seen. For the moment, he has banned intermediaries (including more than 160 US adoption agencies), permitting only nonprofit and accredited organizations to function, requiring each to open an office in Russia, and demanding regular reports on their work.

While awaiting government publication of the requisite guidelines implementing the law, agency activity has virtually ceased. Adoption efforts that had begun before the new policy was instituted are proceeding, although individual judges seem to have discretionary authority to permit or prohibit the process.

While the new policy takes shape, most individuals wishing to adopt have no choice but to wait, while potential adoptees remain institutionalized, where they do little more than vegetate. Virtually all Russian and American specialists agree that children who remain in these tragic conditions experience emotional trauma and fall behind their peers who have been placed with a family.

It is just one more way in which Russia's children are being emotionally scarred - but rather than be the inevitable consequence of the country's poverty, it is a situation that can be remedied. That is a reminder that Western governments, as well as private adoption agencies, should send to the Putin administration. They can think of it as a holiday gift to Russia's children.