Like far too many foreign adoptions, the development of this website just kept taking longer. Beginning with Elizabeth’s drafting of our first ODHS complaint in early 2000, a couple of months after Cyril’s death, it took over a year to late summer 2002 when we finally finished laying out the last few pages.
Through it all there have been many people, mostly those we know (but some we don’t) who have been inspirations and encouragements during this process.
We never could have done it without them, and here’s where we’d like to give our profound thanks.
First and foremost are our families, of course, who have been so delighted with Anguel. They may not have fully understood why we went to the extent of telling our story on the web, but they never dissuaded us either, understanding perfectly well why we believed we had to go the lengths we did.
Next comes our virtual family — the many present and former BBAS clients we have met over the course of time. Among that group, Sue and Rob Corrigan and Linda Wright deserve special praise for having been there when we really, really needed someone.
Beyond that group are the many people in the international adoption reform community who have been infinitely helpful — Mary Mooney and her Adoption Guide site, who was there for us from very early on; David Kruchkow and his family, who know all too well what it’s like to be in the middle of an international adoption gone horribly, nightmarishly wrong, and have never given up the fight for full justice through their own website; Joe and Mary Wynman, who were the first to put up a website discussing the shadowy side of Bulgarian adoption (and have, in the process, taken on an agency with much more resources than Building Blocks, showing cojones we could hardly have imagined in ourselves. Both of these people showed leadership by example and the international adoption community could scarcely be richer if there were more people like them.
We also want to mention the people at the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services who have responded to our and other complaints, and patiently collected and collated documents we requested. To Linda Saridakis in particular, who has to deal with Denise Hubbard every time a new complaint comes in as well as biannually, we extend our sympathies.
In the department of people we will probably never meet and don’t know of this site’s existence but deserve our thanks anyway, two names deserve mention.
First is the Conrad family of Annapolis, Maryland, whose Fishing Creek Farm site we only learned of well after we had started work on this site. While it isn’t about adoption at all, when we saw it and looked it over we knew exactly where these people were coming from and what they were trying to achieve ... and what we had to do, too. They were willing to go the extra mile to get accountability from those who had wronged them when they were denied justice.
Much further away is Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize-winning author of (among other fine works) The Gulag Archipelago, whom we have quoted a few times.
It may seem a little absurd, at first, to compare the monstrosities of the Stalinist prison-camp system with the rapacity and negligence of the international-adoption industry.
But Cyril might differ, if we could but ask him.
Over and above that, Solzhenitsyn’s quest for historical justice for a wrong done both to him individually and his (and Cyril’s) nation collectively, his thirst for detail and his passionate telling of the tale, we could not help but borrow. We, too, took as a moral imperative that “everything will be told.”
We also should remember that despite Solzhenitsyn’s pessimism about the impact of his work in his lifetime, it is at least partly due to it that he is once again living in Russia. We can only hope, in our naive American way, to be so fortunate in our impact.
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