Forgive me, if I am NOT impressed with Sochi

I have wanted to write this entry for a few days, but it has truly bothered me how much money President Putin spent on the Winter Olympics in Sochi. Just the cost of the opening ceremony alone was $750,000.  Yes, 3/4 of a million dollars.  But yet, he cannot address the orphan problem in his own country and take care of his own people.

The Olympics are known for showcasing extreme talent in young athletes, some even as young at 15 years old.  But it makes me SICK to think of all the suffering that is going on over there to these innocent babies in "baby homes," which they so-named them.  Why not call them what they are? They are mini-prisons where, even when an orphan ages out of them, they are destined to a life of crime, prostitution and replicating the current trend of orphans.  

My life was forever changed the day I set foot inside the orphanage in Vladivostok, Russia, in 2010 when we adopted our daughter in 2011.  Tomorrow will be the three-year anniversary of the day the judge said we could be Katie's adoptive parents.  This was an extremely emotional day for both Aaron and I, because we were being granted what we had wanted for SO long--our little girl!

I will never forget visiting Katie at the orphanage in Ussuriysk, her birth city, which was about an hour's drive from Vladivostok.  Today, I cannot imagine my life without her.  She is a gift that God gave Aaron & I. I just have to say that I felt for EVERY child in that dingy, dirty, stinky building from which the children were granted asylum from the cold winters in Russia. The children had no possessions of their own.  Not even the clothing on their back was just theirs alone. The day I took my daughter from that orphanage is a day I will never forget.  She was dressed in the same outfit she had worn the day before when we had visited her and the translator told me we needed to bring our own clothes, because she would not be allowed to leave the orphanage with the clothing she was wearing.  

Every time, I walked in the doors of the orphanage number 3 in Primorsky Krai, I wanted to cry because I knew I could only take ONE child and save just ONE baby's life. I remember seeing the room where Katie spent most of her day. It was not friendly and I could smell a stench that was like feces.  There is no nice way to say it, but once I went inside her room, I saw they had potty chairs all lined up in a circle with human waste in them. One of the workers was "bathing,"
one of the other children and their idea of a bath was just DUNKING a helpless child in a metal tub of water over and over again. Katie was two years old. There was this little girl who, every time when I visited, would grab at me...scratching and clawing, repeating over and over, "Mama, Mama.."  It bothered me for a long time and still does to this day. 

There is a wonderful organization called, "Orphans at Play," which a mutual adoptive mother and her colleagues created. The statistics are sobering. One month of cognitive and social development is sacrificed for every three months spent in an orphanage. Currently, an estimated 2 million children live in Russian orphanages, with another 4 million children on the streets. According to a 1998 Human Rights Watch report, "Russian children are abandoned to the state at a rate of 113,000 a year for the past two years, up dramatically from 67,286 in 1992. Of a total of more than 600,000 children classified as being 'without parental care,' as many as one-third reside in institutions, while the rest are placed with a variety of guardians. 

From the moment the state assumes their care, orphans in Russia – of whom 95 percent still have a living parent – are exposed to shocking levels of cruelty and neglect." Once officially labelled as retarded, Russian orphans are "warehoused for life in psychoneurological institutions." In addition to receiving little to no education in such institutions, these orphans may be restrained in cloth sacks, tethered by a limb to furniture, denied stimulation, and sometimes left to lie half-naked in their own filth. Bedridden children aged five to seventeen are confined to understaffed lying-down rooms as in the baby houses, and in some cases are neglected to the point of death." Life and death of disabled children in the state institutions was described by writer Ruben Gallego.^[149][150] Despite these high numbers and poor quality of care, recent laws have made adoption of Russian children by foreigners considerably more difficult. 

Given all that I have just told you about the orphans in Russia, I wanted to puke (pardon the crude and gross terminology) when the coverage of Putin speaking at the Olympics aired. I just don't understand how he can EVEN be OKAY with the plight of those innocent children in his country. They do not deserve to be neglected, abandoned and abused. Babies learn VERY quickly (often within 30 days) that if they cry, no one will come, so they don't cry. They have no language development. The day Katie officially became our daughter, I could not believe how much she weighed at two-years and three months old.  She was a mere 14 pounds and her ribs stuck out. She as eaten up with scabies and had the worst respiratory infection that had to be treated with four rounds of antibiotics when I arrived back in the states. The first night I had her in my care, she had a raging fever of 104! Since then, I am happy to report that she is 34 pounds at age five now. She is now a thriving sweet little 5-year old that exhibits all the behaviors you'd expect. 

What was encouraging is the child I wrote about, I later learned, was adopted to a nice American couple before the ban on Russian adoption was placed. But there are all the children left behind and that were caught up in the political red-tape. Several of my friends were in the middle of adopting and had met their child, but were not allowed to go back to get them from Russia. HOW is this even OKAY?

People will often ask if Americans were banned from adopting Russian children because of Tori Hansen and other notorious orphan abuse cases. This is simply not the case with Russia. It was completely politically motivated. It was in retaliation by Moscow for an American law banning any Russian human rights violators from U.S. soil, enacted after the suspicious death in prison of Sergey Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer working for Heritage Fund, an American private equity firm. There are numerous documented reports of child maltreatment in Russia that makes these American abusers look like angels! 

So, as I settle in watching my favorite Olympic figure skating event, forgive me if I must throw up every time they speak of Putin on the coverage. He is a jerk and a pompous idiot who will most certainly rot in Hell.