Orphans

In this blog I have talked about some of the more unique and wonderful parts of my travels. One thing I have not told you about was the orphanage I visited on the edge of Moscow. It hit me as hard as a board that Tuesday morning in August of 1995.

The second year we went to Moscow a friend involved in a church in Waterloo gave me money and candy, to help an orphanage if I could, while I was in Moscow. The translator took about a week to find the closest one to where we stayed at the Trinta School. So on Tuesday morning the interpreter led me on an hour and fifteen minute subway ride to the outer ring of the city. When we got off of the subway and walked out doors, it was a beautiful summer day. We walked about a city block and a half to what looked like a 1950 elementary school in rural America. What I walked into was the darkest place I have ever been since.

I was met by a nurse in her fifty’s who started to take me to the different places of the orphanage. The first place she took me was into a room of newborns to about eighteen month olds. The size of that room was that of a classroom. In it were babies in cribs and small beds. Those baby’s were all severely and profoundly mentally handicapped. There was one nurse in there; she was probably twenty years old. The older nurse told my translator that the young nurse made thirty dollars a month at the time. That young lady had tremendous patience and treated those children like they were her own. It was here the tears started falling for me. I could not control myself.

The next room we went into had about ten 10-15 year old children in wheel chairs. Those children had things ranging from cerebral palsy to muscular dystrophy. There was an older woman somewhere between fifty and seventy in charge of this room. I was always bad at guessing Russian women’s ages because they either looked young or old there was no middle age.

It was in the second room that the lady in charge started explaining who brought their children to this orphanage. It about broke me down when she told me the mothers and families that did. They included, drug attics, alcoholics, prostitutes, mothers with AIDS, widowed fathers and mothers, divorced mothers, and families that could not physically, emotionally, or economically take care of them.

By now we were out in a courtyard in the back with a playground and I had become the tree that all of the little kids wanted to climb. I had about an hour to play and that seemed like the quickest ten minutes of my life. For the place that these children were at they seemed like the happiest kids in the world.

I was broken when I left, crying like a baby. My translator and I could not talk to each other on the tube ride back because we were crying so hard. The other people looked at us with sadness and disbelief because they had no idea what was the matter. I have never been as challenged emotionally ever again.

I do not know what ever happened to those children or how to get back there, I do know this, that those people that worked there, and the children in there, were tremendously special.