Putting it all in perspective

Steve again. Our visit to the baby house was shorter today. Apparently the doctors were doing checkups on all the children today. I went with Anya to bring Aidan back down to the playroom. While they were getting him ready I was watching all of the kids in his playgroup as they were watching me. Most of them had the biggest smiles. It breaks your heart that you can’t take them all home. Aidan came down to the playroom—this time without a crying incident. When we got there Liam was already with Terri. He was in a good mood and was making raspberries for his mama. I took Liam for a little while as Terri took out a small container of banana yogurt for Aidan (which we snuck in). He proceeded to sit in Terri’s lap and let the good times roll. He really seemed to enjoy the yogurt but I think mama enjoyed getting to feed him even more—mama and son together. Liam found me to be entertaining while this was going on as I played with him and generally made funny noises. We switched off for a while as I roughhoused with Aidan and Terri had Liam dancing. The boy was cutting some moves as mama held his hands. Sadly, our visit was way too short.

After our visit, we went with the Woods to a festival over at the children’s home (where the older orphans live). When we arrived we found a number of American families there. It had the makings of a street fair; the kids were performing skits and selling food and hand made items at little tables. And were these kids salesmen! Re-lent-less. We bought several items as it did support the home. I had to laugh when one of the kids (about ten years old) was trying to sell me a portrait of Lenin. I politely told him that I did not think that it would fit in the overhead bin of the airplane. And I had a suspicion that I would end up on some kind of government watch list (my government, that is). The kids had elaborate skits and dances. All the Americans were brought to the front to join in the dances! It was interesting at how much attention we all got as kids came up to talk to us, a girl wanted to get her picture with me and their video camera operator spent a lot of time filming us foreigners. We think this was some sort of festival to say goodbye to winter and welcome spring, as they burned a straw figure wearing a winter coat—we were told that this gets rid of all the bad things. We went inside to see some more performances that were about as well choreographed as some Las Vegas shows. The kids even make their costumes, really impressive. There was even a young man on his way to being a lounge singer. They were big on getting you up to dance during some of the performance. One babushka (elderly lady), who may have been around during Lenin’s time got up and really busted a move, quire hilarious.

 

I felt a sense of sadness being at the children’s house. We had heard that those kids that are not adopted are turned out onto the street with hardly anything once they reach sixteen. The statistics on these kids is staggering—less than 20% of these kids live to see their 25th birthday. It is just unreal. If there are others out there on the fence about adoption, do it. There are so many kids here that need a good home. Yes, it is a grueling process that is sometimes a pain in the ass, but you can give a child a way out… a better life. We ran in to the gentleman who was on our flight who was coming up to adopt one of the older girls. He was quite surprised to see us as we had told him we were going to another region, only to end up here.

Afterwards we went to Pizza Blues to have lunch with the Woods, another American, Laura who flew to Ust the same day we did, and a couple from South Africa, Candy and Steve. We had lunch a got to talk for a good couple of hours. It was a nice little therapy group as we all vented our frustrations with this process as well as talking about our kids. Laura actually had her daughter at the restaurant as she is on her second visit. She was a cute girl, a little shy around us but who wouldn’t be. It was really great to just sit around and talk with people who are going through the same things as we were. We all share a common bond.

We finished our day by going to the supermarket to restock on the essentials (Terri was out of chocolate, Steve was out of beer). We settled in at home to watch some more 24 and talk about our day.