Why Russia?

Nobody tells you when you are considering adoption, that some of the side effects are the same as a pregnancy. Ever since our agent said we should be getting our referral in the next month or two, I have lost all ability to focus on a task and find myself walking in circles around our house, forgetting what I was just about to do next! Seriously, it's as bad as an impending birth! Hopefully I'll be able to pull it together enough to get everything ready for her! (I need some of that nesting instinct to kick in! :)

Anyways, I thought I would follow up to my previous post of "How It All Began" and answer the popular question of why we are adopting from Russia.

Once Jeff and I decided we wanted to adopt a 4 year old girl, we started looking at all the adoption programs out there. A domestic adoption would have been much more affordable, but we didn't want to have a child taken away because a parent got their act together or a grandparent decided they wanted the child. One couple we knew raised a 6 week old baby till she was 6 months old, and then had her taken away and given to a grandparent. It was almost like a death for them. This wasn't the only reason we chose international adoption, but we liked the fact that in international adoption the parental rights are completely severed and as soon as the child's airplane lands on U.S. soil they are a U.S. citizen. They actually change the child's birth certificate so it has our names!

As far as the decision of which country, initially it was mostly a matter of time. At first we thought it would be neat to adopt from Colombia since that is where Jeff lived for 2 years, serving a mission for our church, and we both speak spanish, but we didn't want to wait the 2-3 years it required. Russia was more like 6-9 months, and when it came down to prayer, that it where we felt we should go.

After we decided on Russia, we did some research on the situation there, and it blew us away! We had both heard of the "Russian orphan," but we had no idea how terrible the situation was.

Here are a few of the stats we found:

About 15,000 children leave Russian orphanages each year, once they are 16 to 18 years old. Of these, 5,000 are unemployed, some 6,000 are homeless, around 3,000 resort to crime, approximately 1,500 commit suicide, and roughly half the girls are forced into prostitution.
From The CoMission for Children at Risk, 2002.

There were over 700,000 orphans in Russia in 2000. After leaving their orphanages:
50% - fall into a high-risk category
40% - become drug users
40% - commit crimes
10% - commit suicide
From Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation, 2000.

Over fourty million children in the former Soviet Union are living in "genuine poverty".
From European Children's Trust, 2000.

Orphans in Russia - of whom 95 percent still have a living parent - are exposed to shocking levels of cruelty and neglect. Infants classified as disabled are segregated into "lying-down" rooms, where they are changed and fed but are bereft of stimulation and lacking in medical care.

Of a total of more than 600,000 children classified as being "without parental care", as many as one-third reside in institutions, while the rest are placed with a variety of guardians. Thousands more are temporarily quartered in various public shelters and institutions under police jurisdiction simply waiting for an available space in an orphanage.

Thousands of children are abandoned to the state at a rate of 113,000 a year for the past two years, up dramatically from 67,286 in 1992. The evidence gathered reveals several systematic disadvantages imposed on young Russian orphans, which violate their fundamental rights to survival and development, and place them in a underclass.
From Human Rights Watch, 1998.

It's easy to think of these numbers as just numbers, but these are beautiful little children of God, desperately wanting somebody to love them and make them feel special! We knew we could offer that to one, and it made us wish we could help a whole lot more than one.