Chapter Thirty-Four:

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    Don’t think I let my vacation time go to waste. Sure I had a kid way off in a Bulgarian orphanage, but after the last five months I had lived through, I needed an escape.

    So, I finally took Daniel’s mother up on her offer of spending some time with her and her husband at their villas in Jamaica. What a lovely time I had for a week, eating fish, jerk pork, swimming with a ray and listening to Bob Marley blasting from the club next door. It was a welcome break from the stress we had been living under.

    While I was down there, another ray of sunshine fell on us. Just as she had promised (or Valeri Kamenov had promised), Daniel received a video of Anguel, taken in the orphanage director’s office. 

    He first described in an email to his mother so I could hear about it, and of course when I got back it was the first thing I wanted to see.

    The video depicted Anguel, looking healthy but listless, playing in Dr. Sabrutova’s office. He was sitting on the couch, looking pensive. At one point, Dr. Sabrutova says to him, “It’s okay Anguel, you can play.”  

    With that, he got up from the sofa and went to where a toy was by the side of her desk. Valeri’s hand can be seen handing him a set of keys, which Anguel picked up and shook — a good sign. 

    He runs around the office a little bit and matches his ever-present lollipop to a circular toy he’s holding. The video ends with Anguel looking at himself in a full-length mirror. 

    It was a joy to watch, but it was the last update that we were to receive on him.  

    No medical updates, no photo updates, no video updates. Nothing.  Not even another offer to send along some clothes, toys or food with a “traveling family.”  

    We relied upon other clients from AIAA to get things to Anguel who were traveling to pick their children up.

     When I returned from Jamaica, we got some of what should have been good news. On March 30, Denise forwarded an undated email from Valeri saying that our dossier had cleared the Ministry of Health and was now in the hands of the Ministry of Justice.

    This had only taken slightly more than the timeline we were given. Daniel was hopeful that the rest of the process might go relatively smoothly, and that we could have Anguel running around our own house by the end of the summer.

    But all the same my dread continued to grow about the Bulgarian adoption process.  In vain, I called Teri Bell at Americans for International Aid and Adoption (AIAA), the only other agency I knew of who placed children from the Burgas orphanage.  

    They used Assena and Emil of the Charity Organization on the Bulgarian end.  Charity, from what I understood, was a well respected organization, having helped the Spence-Chapin agency set up the “babushka program” in the orphanage in Turgovishte.

    I learned about AIAA placing children, with Charity’s help, from Burgas from the EEAC Bulgaria list. I had been in contact with three other families who were in the process of adopting their children from Burgas using AIAA.

     Teri Bell and her assistant Julie Arza were very helpful to me, quite in contrast to our own adoption agency which we had already paid thousands of dollars to with no child home and no money back. Nonetheless, I was told that there was no way I could complete Anguel’s adoption using AIAA.  

    Since Dr. Sabrutova had “assigned” him to Valeri and Mr. Dobrev the Bulgarian attorney (whom we never met), he would have to remain a BBAS case. It was up to her which children would be placed with which agency.  

    Burgas, they told me, was run like a tight ship and the children were well taken care of. Dr. Sabtutova was in charge and she ran hot and cold about how much control she allowed her facilitators and American agencies over the children’s placements.  

    They, not Denise Hubbard or Richard J. Marco, were the ones to confirm the delays being caused in the ministries and some court case problems.

     Later on, I again contacted AIAA and Jordan Dardov, a Bulgarian attorney, about looking for Anguel’s siblings. We had asked this of BBAS, but to no avail. I promised AIAA and Mr. Dardov that if one of Anguel’s siblings was available for adoption, we would not hesitate to use their services for we would never work with BBAS again. 

    From another source, I learned that it was rumored Dr. Sabrutova requested a $1,000 “personal fee” per child she placed with foreigners. This was unusual for a Bulgarian orphanage director.  

     This source confirmed Sabrutova’s tight control over the place and that there were adequate caregivers for the children and that they were separated into groups by their gender. The children were seldom, if ever, allowed outdoors. The girls seemed to have more hands-on attention from the caregivers than the boys.  

    Once again, this was information we had to learn on our own without Denise Hubbard’s or Valeri Kamenov’s assistance.

    AIAA wasn’t the only Charity-affiliated agency working in Burgas. Later on, I discovered that three other Charity agencies had placed children from Burgas in the last two three years: Voices for International Development and Adoption (VIDA), Spence Chapin and Children’s Home Society of Minnesota.  

    Angel’s Haven Outreach, using the Bulgarian adoption attorney Milena Kuzeva, would place one or two children from Burgas in December 2000. There were some serious “spoils” to be divided under Dr. Sabrutova’s watchful eye.

     Daniel and I didn’t make too many waves that spring   We remained in our “underground” stance.  When posting on the Internet, we avoided naming our agency.  

    At the time, many assumed we were AIAA clients.  

    I wish we had been. It was difficult to read about other clients from other agencies getting their court cases through so fast; BBAS clients were encountering so many “bomb threats,” “courthouse closings”, and “dead attorney’s fathers” when their court cases came around, we began to doubt their effectiveness — and Anguel’s court case going off “without a hitch.”

    On a brighter note, Lori Homeyer and her husband traveled in April to pick M up.  

    But the very next month, she went to work for BBAS. She had gone on record considering Denise Hubbard her “friend.” That meant we could no longer count her as one of ours.

    (However, by early 2001 she was no longer working for them. We don’t know why but we have come to suspect she left on less-than-amicable terms. Our email correspondence became sketchy once M was home anyway. From what I have heard, M is doing wonderfully and has really taken well to family life.) 

     Although we were underground, we did chime in privately to people who were interested in adopting from Bulgaria and requesting information about agencies.

    This was happening more and more.

    In March, Vladimir Putin, after winning election to the presidency of Russia, had signed legislation passed by the Duma several years before making significant changes in the adoption process, particularly as it applied to foreign parents.

    This meant that anyone whose Russian adoption wasn’t legally underway before March 24 was at the mercy of a to-be-convened committee that would write new rules to accredit agencies ... unless they wanted to adopt independently, referral or no referral.    

    So, many PAPs began to look into adopting from other Eastern European countries. Some of them began to appear on the EEAC Bulgaria list asking about the Bulgarian process.  

    They were leery of Russian adoption due to the delays and confusion that the newly-required agency accreditation was causing. Or they were coming to the EEAC Bulgaria list after having identified Bulgarian children on the photolisting sites.

     Russia’s accreditation delays and confusion was a perfect excuse for Denise to get more clients to “switch” or sign up for BBAS’s Bulgarian program. As late as April 2000, she was still telling prospective clients that the “wait” for the Bulgarian program was four to six months.  

    This just wasn’t true! A single woman inquiring in April 2000 on the EEAC Bulgaria list asked publicly about Bulgarian adoption and how “fast” the timeline was.  

    I emailed her privately on April 14 about BBAS and its deliberate timeline lies to lure clients in. I told her that if an agency was telling a prospective client that a Bulgarian adoption could be completed in six months, they were lying. It just didn’t happen that way.

    Shockingly, I received the following response from the lady, leaving no doubts as to the fact that Denise was still operating in “steerage mode” to lure prospective clients in.  

    “I was considering Building Blocks; in fact I spoke to Denise Hubbard this am and was on the verge of sending my application …I spoke to several people who used Building Blocks and they were very happy, but they adopted in Russia.

    “After reading many posts on this list and the newsletter Terry puts out [Terry Mandeville, author and founder of ‘Families with Children Adopted from Bulgaria], I really couldn’t find anyone who commented about this process being 4 months to travel after referral. I questioned Denise about this again today and she said that after the dossier is submitted that the time frame for Bulgaria is about the same as Russia or other EA countries.  

    “But this information does not ‘jive’ with what I’m reading or what parents are saying …I have talked to many agencies and Denise is so available and seems so caring and personally interested in helping you. I can see that they are a smaller agency but didn’t understand how ‘connected’ they are in each country.

    “She told me that she works with about 20 regions in Russia and only 3 orphanages or regions in Bulgaria, but that she is adding more in May and that she is anticipating a number of referrals from Bulgaria in May…Initially I asked her about Russia and Ukraine. But she said that the children are healthier in Bulgaria and seems to feel that country [Bulgaria] would be a good fit for me.”