Until two weeks ago, I had only been to visit the parents of two kids from the orphanage in Komarivka.
One of them actually lives on orphanage property and isn’t too bad because the orphanage staff are trying to help this family. But the home is far from great.
We’ve also been to visit Anya’s home when we’ve picked her up and dropped her off from the hospital. But there I never actually saw inside the house. I didn’t expect much because we knew her mom was an alcoholic.
But there are three kids in the orphanage from one family, Yana, Diana and Artyom, that live just a few blocks from Anya. We went to visit them last week when we dropped off Anya. It is the beginning of summer so everyone was home.
Meisha and Diana. Everyone loves Diana because she’s super sweet.
These kids are really good kids, even though Yana can be a little bit of a pill (She’s a teenager, so that’s her job). But I kind of expected that their living situation wouldn’t be too bad because someone had taught them manners.
Their house is basically one room. Five kids and their mom. There is an entry room that doubles as a kitchen, but there wasn’t anything there that actually made it a kitchen.
We found out that Yana, Diana and Artyom have two younger brothers, one who is six and the youngest who is six months. The baby, had already had three shunts put in his head. He also had a lot of the physical characteristics of having Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. The six of them all slept on three twin beds.
The good thing about visiting was that we could see that the mom cared. The baby cried most of our visit, and she tried to comfort him, but she never gave up in frustration. She seemed happy to have her kids around.
But the house, the condition the kids lived in, the fact that next year the six year old boy would probably be in the orphanage. The baby and all the problems he’s already faced. It was all very difficult for me emotionally. I was wondering what they eat when all of them are there. I started to see that, as much as I don’t like the orphanage, maybe it is the lesser of two evils.
I found out this week that the government gives money to their citizens for every baby. You get a big lump sum and then you get smaller amounts every month until the child is ready for school. So many poor families have a baby when they start needing money. This also keeps the orphanages in business because once the money stops, the families need to have a place to send the kids they can’t take care of.
We were at the house for about 20-30 minutes when Yana came hope. She is 14, and she’s a pretty young lady. But she came in wearing a lot of make-up, high heels and a short skirt. I’m sure that many parents can relate to the sinking in my heart when I saw her dressed like that. I wanted to explain to her that she was pretty without all the other stuff, but dressing like that was a really good way to end up pregnant way too early. Yana’s mom on the other hand brag about how Yana looks so pretty when she dresses like that.
I’ve spent a lot of time wondering if a lot of the kids who are in the orphanage wouldn’t be better off if they just lived at home with their parents. Maybe they were living in poverty, but at least they would get the love of a parent. And how bad could it be really?
Yana, Diana and Artoum have a mom that loves them, and I walked out hoping they wouldn’t have to stay there for too long. I know a lot of parents beat, molest or simply ignore their kids when they are home. Last month I help at a camp for at-risk boys, and at the end of the weekend, I learned that one of the boys’ parents never even knew her son was gone, because she was never sober enough to notice.
We live in a really broken world.
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