UKRAINE ADOPTION

Tomorrow we are going to the Center for Adoption, a twenty-five minute walk from our apartment. We will have a brief interview with officials to discuss our life in the United States and why we chose to adopt. The year leading up to this has been about Kathy and I, and what kind of parents we will be. The homestudy, the fingerprinting, the background checks. Tomorrow is the first time that a child will be added, not formed solely from our hopes and imagination. There are some long odds to adopting from Ukraine, a country 6000 miles away from the United States, a place with evolving social programs and admitted government corruption. Tomorrow we will be shown pictures of four children, their health information already a year old, and be asked to make our first decision.

Positive changes to the adoption process in Ukraine make our process more challenging. This year is National Adoption Year, a campaign started to encourage Ukrainian families to adopt. With a better economy since the opening of international adoption in the 1990’s more Ukrainian families have the opportunity to adopt the children from the orphanages. A foster care system has also developed. Adoption is open only to Ukrainian families for children up to 18 months, when the children are then available for international adoption. A few years ago, prior to the foster program, there were so many children that the international program was needed to place the overwhelming amounts of children. Now, most orphans diagnosed as healthy stay in the Ukraine. Kathy and I absolutely agree this is the best situation for the children here. The decline in orphans allowed a large orphanage in Kyiv to close recently, quickly converted to business offices. But because of this, the children available for international adoption tend to be considered more challenging due to medical conditions or behavioral difficulties.

This is not quite as discouraging as it sounds. We have always been open to any child we feel we can help. Many times the diagnosed conditions are correctable with surgery or therapy. Conditions like club foot, cleft pallet, or attention deficit disorder. It is the resources for treatment that are missing from the country. In other cases a suspected diagnosis has been placed on the children for their protection to make sure that they receive a government pension. It is possible that a child diagnosed with Epilepsy may have only had a fever induced seizure, or a tantrum. Children with parents that were HIV positive at their birth must wait 15 months to be adopted, to confirm that they did not contract the disease. Because of these issues, perfectly healthy children may have been overlooked and left in the orphanage system.

We will have the pictures of four children and their brief medical summary to decide from tomorrow. If we find a child we would like to visit, we travel to their region on Thursday. If we feel none of the children meet what we are ready for, we set another appointment and are shown four more. We can make a decision based on twelve children total. We completely understand the odds . We are looking at a moment in time, when the right child comes together with the right parents to form a family. It is impossible to know anything until tomorrow.