Driven

In Russia: Day 5

On Tuesday, we set out with Yelena’s husband. He leaves us at the second orphanage. After the visit, several Lighthouse alumni awaiting their families walk us down a wooded driveway to a nearly abandoned road, where Faith begins thumbing it. The first car down the road is a severe, two-door communist holdover; its driver stops for us. With three more bodies, we aren’t in a minute before the windows fog. I’ve never ridden in a Russian car with a sufficient defogger, so a towel is standard equipment. When we mention the fogged-over windows, our driver makes a futile attempt to reassure when he claims that in winter, he drives with only a small square of ice chipped off the windshield. The implication is if he can drive with that handicap, this one is child’s play, but the message I actually receive is that his judgment is irreparably seared. On a serpentine road slicked with driving rain, our driver takes an unseemly interest in his cell phone. The death wish Russian drivers exhibit in lane changes paralyzes me: charging up on the next car’s bumper and tailgating until oncoming traffic passes, they swerve out immediately into the opposing lane, pass, then veer back into the right lane. When you’re lucky, you’re not rounding a bend or on a hill, or both, as the stunt occurs. Time not spent praying is spent marveling there are not more crosses roadside. Faith sees I’m board-like, with bulging eyes. “Don’t look,” she counsels. Sitting in back, on a trip of unknown duration with a stranger driving who speaks no English, I’m struck by the parallel between my current predicament and the experience of the Lighthouse kids going home with their host families from distant airports after arrival. I conjure up new empathy for them, incredulous that their circumstances in Russia are so austere that such a risk becomes a good one.

Two days later, we’re at our second-to-last orphanage. We pick up Alexander, Elena, and Larisa for the trip to Moscow. They’re abuzz as they get in the car with their small cache of belongings; they’ve never before been on a train or to Moscow, they tell us. The car we’re in is a Volga; we rode in this same car, with this same driver, when we picked up our own kids from the orphanage three years ago. The recollection is sufficient to jar me as snowflakes begin their descent. With seven people now in the car, Elaine rides in front with a seatbelt and more space, though the tradeoff is a better view of the driving. Faith, the three kids, and I are crammed in the back. It’s boring at first, but the kids snap to attention as I write their names almost correctly in Cyrillic in the omnipresent fog on my window. Elena sits on my lap, and our window tic-tac-toe is a cat’s game. Midway through our trek, we pass a horrendous crash, surprisingly the first we’ve seen; there’s no way the driver could have survived. I doubt our driver takes the crash to heart, because within a mile he’s fumbling with his MP3 player in a protracted ordeal that makes me grab the front seat with one hand, and dig my nails into the door’s armrest with my other. I finally heed Faith's advice and close my eyes.

We stop at another orphanage, interviewing fourteen-year-old Nadia, who wears a “Jesus” necklace. She dreams of adoption and becoming a veterinarian, but her biological mother is imprisoned and must first relinquish her parental rights. Nadia wrote her yesterday, confessed she yearns for a chance at life, and begged to be released to go to America. She prays her mother will sign the document, but if she won’t, this demure girl is truly hopeless. Someone in our car is completely smitten with her, but without relinquishment papers, it hardly matters.

We pick up Dmitry, Alexander Z., Nicholas S., and Yulya at this orphanage. A van brings us all to the train station, along with the chaperone, a caretaker here. These four kids look so expectant as they board the van I suspect they don’t know there’s no host for any of them in Moscow.

At the train station, we de-van in a drizzle and meet the rest of our group: Nikolai V. and Anton, both from two previous trips, and Denis, in America last March. Denis is being adopted, but his family is here to meet another child, too. They want to see him, and Hope has been kind enough to let him join our group. Our band complete, we wait inside the station. I have been coveting a photo of the perfect babushka for my blog. I finally find her inside the station. She is heavyset, wears an ancient coat, wraps a scarf around her head, and clutches a plastic bag with one hand and a branch for a walking stick in the other. As I discuss with Elaine how to discretely snap a photo, my new camera falls hard on the terrazzo floor. I pick it up, but it’s clearly broken. Elaine lends me her camera; the memory card is full. While we fumble, the prototypical babushka slips into the darkness outside the station when her train arrives. I berate myself for missing the shot, but derive slight consolation in skirting the photographic propriety quagmire.

We cross the tracks to our platform as the light of our train approaches us too quickly for comfort. Traveling with ten kids is daunting, and is exacerbated when another train charges by on the neighboring track without stopping. It forms a deafening wind tunnel, and we race through the rain to board our car on time. Once situated, I talk Elaine’s ear off, trying to make sense of what we saw in the orphanages this trip. I have a mountain of compelling blog material, and I settle in to work when Elaine is too tired to listen further. Finding my computer’s battery is dead, I reluctantly succumb to my need for rest, and, for the first night since I left home, get more than three hours of sleep.

Morning dawns and I awaken to our train lurching into the Moscow station. We reunite with the kids and chaperone, who rode in three, four-bed compartments several cars behind us, and join the tapestry of passengers from trains arriving from far-flung reaches of Russia. Taxi drivers solicit us, but Dima, Faith’s brother, awaits us with his van. Fifteen of us scrunch in with our luggage; Dima wants to hire another cab, but Faith, the senior sibling and unfailingly frugal, overrules him and says we’ll all fit.

Combating rush hour traffic on the drive to the hotel we’ll stay at, Dima leaves us sitting in the common area since our rooms aren’t ready yet. The kids wile the time watching scandalously trashy music videos. Their chaperone seems not to notice, and I derive from this omission further motivation to get the kids out of their orphanages. Meanwhile, Dima hurries Elaine to the airport for her return flight home, and I am distraught to see her go. When Dima returns, he’ll have my host families in tow; I’m anxious to meet them. They’ve been warned this is an inaugural trip. All have agreed to be flexible, and I believe them, since they’ve already been very gracious. After forty-four trips to the United States for the Lighthouse Project, that trip is quite streamlined. But this version will be a learning experience, and statistics I take for granted at home are out the window now. Everything is new.

Everything, that is, except my prayer that in all my trips, each of the kids entrusted to me find their families.

Sent Packing

I’m an avid traveler, priding myself on efficient packing. I depart for Russia Sunday, with plans to visit several orphanages prior to the host families’ arrival in Moscow next week. In the throes of packing now, my spatial reasoning is sorely stretched; toys, games, food, aid for the orphanages, and packages from adoptive families to their waiting children all jockey for position in my bags. While I’m never certain until I’m in country, with my travel experience, the likelihood is on any trip, I’ll have everything I should.

Seventeen children were scheduled to travel on the October-November Moscow Lighthouse Project trip. On previous trips to new areas, it is a massive effort to get people to sign up as hosts. The early stages of this trip were typically slow going, so last week seven kids, including Elena and Lidia (Hopeless?, 10/6/09), were cut for lack of families. It left ten kids, only five of whom had identified hosts. Needing several new travelers so these others would avoid the disappointment of arriving in Moscow, only to find no one waiting, I failed to convert any leads to hosts. The sign up deadline slipped by Monday, and travelers no longer have time to receive visas. I am grateful that five kids have hosts, but haunted by the equal number who don’t. The Russian government expects to send all ten, eliminating the option of further cutting. My heart aches for Yulya, Nikolai S., Alexander Z., Alexander M., and Dmitry B., without families preparing to meet them. While I despise cutting kids from trips, how I yearn now for that option, rather than bringing them, to no one.

Seven kids stay behind in their orphanages for want of a host. Five more come, equally in want of a host, but publicly exposed that no family would take a chance on meeting them. I’m missing kids, and I’m missing families. Dutifully packing my bags, conscientiously double- and triple-checking my mental list, it’s a sobering realization that no matter what else I remember, what’s most important is already left behind.

Hopeless?

Misery loves company, or so they say, not that shared misery has helped Elena and Lidia lately. The girls, sisters, have a story like most of the orphans who seek families with the Lighthouse Project: biological parents who put the bottle before their kids, ultimately shrugging off their parental rights rather than sobering up.

Elena, 14, and Lidia, 12, have been devastatingly close to coming to America before. Scheduled to travel to Missouri in July, an anxious family I believed would adopt them readied for their arrival. Shortly before departure, a passport issue struck them from the trip, and their host, a teacher, had summers-only availability. Since I planned they’d travel instead on my August Tulsa trip, I didn’t worry. Then the swine flu travel moratorium kept the kids in Russia. Our new “Plan C” is less ambitious: the girls stay closer to home on our October Moscow rendition of the Lighthouse Project.

Lidia, the younger, is hopeful and smiley. She likes skating, and befriends smart, kind, good girls. Asked about America, she admits she’s not heard much. The sixth grader excels in school and enjoys music class, especially when composing is on the docket.

Elena, the elder, seems more affected by her past, less willing to trust the future holds promise. In her interview, she never cracks a full smile, though she tries when Lidia joins her. She praises her friends for their understanding and helpfulness; she disdains dishonest liars. Asked what rules she would make as president, she says she’d decree drinking and smoking illegal; this is a popular orphan response. She sounds ashamed confessing that after three years of orphanage life, she’s gotten used to it. A stellar student with high marks in English, she says she wants to be a lawyer, but quickly qualifies the aspiration, “I don’t know if it will happen.”

Elena turns 15 in mid-October. As long as her younger sister remains available, Elena is eligible to enter the United States on an orphan’s immigrant visa until her eighteenth birthday. But should something render Lidia not available, Elena’s fate is sealed at sixteen, since she cannot enter the United States alone at that age. And if she’s not adopted, Elena’s more likely future is on a corner than in the courtroom. I have no leads on a host for the girls; if the trip happened tomorrow, they’d be left behind. Again.

It troubles me that so many of our Lighthouse kids have Pollyanna-like idealism bearing no resemblance to the likely future that waits in Russia. But the true travesty is Elena, with potential in spades, has aged out of her idealism, with good reason.

I never thought the world needed another lawyer before. Now, I do. Elena’s other option is much grimmer, but without a family, more likely. I recoil envisioning this sad girl forced into prostitution, and lament how impotent I am to stop it.

Swine Before Pearls

Nine-year-old Anna’s dream of having a doll hit a roadblock Thursday. Her eleven-year-old sister, Anastasia, aspires to be a rescue team member someday, though now she could stand rescue herself. The sisters, having faced unusual difficulty in life measured even by the low bar of orphan expectations, were scheduled to travel on the August Tulsa Lighthouse Project trip. Tragically, the past tense “were” is operative here.

Two decades removed from the Cold War, the powers within Russia still seek to capitalize on any perceived flaws of the West, gleaning a grim self-satisfaction in construing facts to suggest things are worse elsewhere than at home. The current Western trouble du jour is the so-called “swine flu," claimed by the Russian media to have consigned Americans en masse to sick beds and hospitals. Never mind no one I’ve met knows anyone ill from the disease: to hear the Russian media tell it, the West is in its death throes, crippled by the flu’s virulence.

My good friend Hope, director of the Lighthouse Project, lived in Russia for eight years. She calls this most recent exaggeration of the woes we Americans navigate a different chapter of the same playbook used daily during her Russian sojourn. In a misguided attempt to redirect focus from the rather blatant problems within Mother Russia, a spotlight is beamed on other, more prosperous, parts of the world, magnifying their relatively inconsequential hobgoblins. The insinuation is existence elsewhere is even more precarious than within the motherland. That facts demonstrate otherwise is less material than is seemly.

This coping mechanism propagated by the tradeoff of reality for fantasy might be politely overlooked were the ramifications of such cultural pride less pernicious. On Thursday afternoon, I received most unwelcome news when Nadia told me my August trip was cancelled due to, of all things, swine flu. A resolution passed by the regional government forbids group travel by children to several countries, the United States included, until the pandemic subsides. It matters not that host families were eager to share ten days with the children, or that several of said families expressed intentions of adopting the child they planned to host. In its wisdom, the regional power hierarchy has protected the orphans, not by sending them to American families who might love them and want to adopt them, but by keeping them at “home” in their orphanages.

While exact numbers depend on the source consulted, most agree the statistics for Russian orphans who age out of the system without families are grim. Kids leave the orphanage by age 18; lacking productive alternatives, many girls turn to prostitution, many boys to crime. Life expectancy on the street is brutishly short and measured in months. Aged-out orphans are as likely to commit suicide as to become productive members of society: 10% of kids fall into each category. Meanwhile, I must dutifully derive comfort knowing these orphans are securely cloistered in their orphanages, safe from the pervasive ravages of swine flu, though at the expense of their one realistic chance of a family.

Alexander, 12, described by his orphanage director as needing a family “very much,” gushed, “The whole orphanage is my friend!” when asked about his friends. He’ll make do without American friends for now. Evgeniy, 12, speaks a little English and hoped to practice in America. His dream of making the world a brighter and happier place is on ice, and I’m less a cynic than a realist believing it will be longer, if ever, before the world is a brighter and happier place for this effusive boy. Sisters Elena, 14, and Lidia, 12, had a potential adoptive family in Missouri for July. When a passport issue kept them off the trip, Missouri coordinator Elaine and I solaced ourselves thinking they’d be on the August trip. Elena, a very good student, would like to be an attorney, but she doubts she'll be able to. If she stays in Russia, she’s probably right.

The Lighthouse Project exists because few families set out to adopt older children. For adoption purposes, kids even two years old are considered “older,” and therefore, harder to place. Most families will not go to Russia to seek out an older child, and a majority of the hosts I’ve found in my nine completed trips hosted without the intention of adopting. Typically, adoptions have occurred when people met children already here and then realized they wanted an older child. During this travel embargo, people could still travel to Russia to meet kids, and I’ll be encouraging them to do so. But for this to happen, I’d have to improve my record of finding families committed enough to meet kids overseas.

I skew optimistic and generally find silver lining in any situation, but my Pollyanna-ish outlook is strained by this state of affairs. Since acceptance is our only option, I suppose my spurned host families and I will have to find our peace knowing Anna, Anastasia, Alexander, Evgeniy, Elena, and Lidia won’t catch swine flu from you, or me, or any of the other Americans like us wallowing in swinish contagion.