Aching for the Right Soul

At the last orphanage on our last day in the region, my relief at our completed task engendered an unseemly inertia. We’d interviewed the kids on our list and were just killing time before heading to the train station. With our ten Lighthouse charges, we readied for the overnight journey to Moscow, anxious to meet the host families arriving for our inaugural Lighthouse Project trip to Russia. Rain had been falling all day, and darkness now hid its slide into snow. Lounging on the floor in the girls’ living room, my gumption had set with the sun, my journal burgeoned with notes, and I’d long ago reached empathy overload. Katya, fourteen, stood by herself, longing to be noticed and chosen for an interview, but sans the panache to solicit one.

Faith drew her in when I wasn’t even looking. Emerging unwillingly at first from my emotional lethargy, Katya swiftly mesmerized me with her needy profundity. In the orphanage just six months, she lived with her biological mother until the woman vanished two years ago; only recently, Katya, then living with a grandmother, learned she’d died. Now, even her grandmothers don’t visit, since their ages preclude travel to the orphanage. Queried about her dream, she confided, “A family,” in one of her quickest answers; most of the others were occasion for pensive reflection. Katya attended a music school for six years, learning to play the piano. Famous for her last name, meaning “haystack,” she dislikes both the fame and the name. She believes peace and good communication would make the world better, but doesn’t believe in God, adding her mother never told her He existed.

Counter intuitively, most orphans report they like their orphanages, though I consider this more an indictment of their previous circumstances than an endorsement of institutional life. Katya, still trying to get adjusted, was emphatic she dislikes the orphanage. “It’s difficult to find the right soul for you,” she lamented, meaning the hardest part of orphanage life is finding a soul mate. Faith encouraged that with patience and persistence, she would find that kindred spirit. Asked about her desire to go to America, Katya shook off her melancholy deportment with a spirited, “Yes, with all my heart!” and demonstrated her suitability for American life by reciting a few words she knew in English. At the end, she motioned she wanted to hug me, following the lead of another girl who had latched on to Elaine. As she squeezed me, I felt the hypocrite in allowing my exhaustion to excuse my apathy.

Pondering our orphanage visits on the ride to the train, I knew I’d found in Katya the child whose outlook could most be improved by having someone take time to really care. While her orphanage was the best appointed of the nine we visited, her ache for a soul mate witnessed that the comforts proudly exhibited there were vain window dressings shrouding barren, hopeless souls.

I can find her a soul who will care. With God’s help, I can, and I must.

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Solid Gold

Vasily, Daniil, Vladimir, and Sergei stood in the orphanage office. As alumni of Elaine’s July Missouri trip, all were summoned when Elaine, Faith, and I arrived in late October, bearing gifts for the boys with families. As each boy accepted his present, he received an all-important promise that someone in America remembered him, and was working toward his return to their family. The gifts handed out, Vasily stood there empty-handed. He didn’t have a family, and was mistakenly called. Faith mined in her bag and found a trinket, a sorry afterthought without a family's well-wish. As the other kids beamed, I could not begrudge them their elation, but there was something amiss as Vasily politely smiled alongside, small, alone, with nothing and no one.

It wasn’t meant to be this way. Vasily had a family a few weeks after the Missouri trip, but a child they had been waiting for subsequently became available, and he was selected, rather than Vasily. While it was a reflection on the Russian system rather than on either Vasily or the erstwhile family, reality is no one waits for him, or readies for his return.

I loved Vasily when I met him in July; in this space months ago, I proclaimed him my favorite child on the trip (Rolla, 7/11/09). With his never-say-die spirit, he won my heart the moment we met. Newly arrived in Missouri, I was waiting at the hotel when he and his host mom drove up. I greeted him in Russian, and instead of assuming a condescending air toward my Spartan command of his language, he grinned, assured me he was well, and offered the firmest handshake a ten-year-old could muster.

All the other kids, save one, found families.

After he’d returned to Russia, Elaine and I brainstormed, but were hard-pressed to recall specific anecdotes about him. There was nothing flashy or obnoxious in him, leaving us void of a storyline. But we mutually retained memories of his omnipresent smile, cooperative spirit, unfailing positivity, willing participation, and verve for everything he tried. “How can you argue with solid gold?” Elaine reckoned, when we realized we remembered character traits, not stories.

While our first adoption from Vasily’s orphanage occurred only a year ago, several are now complete, and more pending, from this hamlet far in the region’s southern reaches. Staff there is anxious; too many adoptions on our part spells unemployment on theirs. It happened before in this region; my kids’ old orphanage closed this June. The exodus of children for America rendered the orphanage and its personnel obsolete. That’s success for the Lighthouse Project, though workers who eke out their meager existences on the backs of orphans take a less congratulatory view. Ten days ago, Hope, the Lighthouse Project director, informed me no kids from Vasily’s orphanage would be on our January trip, the result of unrest and ill-ease begotten by our recent spate of adoptions there. I e-mailed Elaine the news, noting only how devastated I was for this boy.

Days later, Hope told me our gem of a Russian coordinator, Love, had appealed the decision, asking if Vasily could travel, one more time. After he’d believed he had a family, it was unfathomable he not get a second chance at a future. Love’s sweetness is irresistible, and her request was honored.

So the final obstacle between Vasily and Moscow is finding his host family.

And how can you argue with solid gold?

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