Chapter Twenty-Five

Home, Home Again

“I never took the smile away from anybody’s face

And that’s a desperate way to look for someone who is still a child…

I’m not expecting to grow flowers in a desert

But I can live and breathe and see the sun in wintertime

In a big country dreams stay with you”

- Big Country

     Reality, our new reality, set in firmly when we finally strolled out of customs back at JFK to meet Daniel’s mother and stepfather ... empty-handed. 

    No baby. No joyous first look at the new grandson complete with pinched cheeks and soft kisses.

    We had never felt so empty in all our lives.

    Sullenly we rode home, on a day in New York that was warmer, but otherwise little improvement over the one we had left in Moscow.

    We spent the first few days at their home in New Jersey, licking our wounds. 

    The only thing we had left of Cyril, Daniel’s stomach bug, gradually improved after a few days with American food and over-the-counter medicine. At length it, too, was gone forever.

    Everyone was devastated. Daniel’s mother had been watching and rewatching Cyril’s referral videos.  

    All she could say was “I knew the way he was flexing his feet was odd. Something just wasn’t right about it.” She had even gone to the trouble of looking up information about the effect of malnutrition on the mental development of children.

    We next did the hardest thing we had to do: return to our own home. Once inside, we wasted no time going upstairs and taking down the crib that had been awaiting Cyril.

    On our answering machine, there were a few telephone calls from a sad and sick-sounding Denise.

    We weren’t up to calling back just yet. We had already decided to maintain a sort of radio silence with the agency, knowing they were in full panic mode.

    At long last we got around to downloading our email, which took two hours at that time. There were two nuggets from the agency.  

    One was the November 1999 BBAS Electronic newsletter, talking about the families traveling. Linda Wright and Daniel and Elizabeth Case were mentioned as being in Perm adopting the children that didn’t make it home as part of the “BBAS Kids.”

    The second was a panic-induced email from Denise, sent out to all BBAS clients on Nov. 29, 1999, the day after we came home. Unfortunately, for us it was too little too late.

    It was titled: “Please Complete and Send Before Your Next Trip.” The attached form was supposed to have been filled out and returned by all families before any of them traveled.  

    Surely BBAS couldn’t have been operating this blindly for so long. And what had ever happened to the email I had sent Wendy before we left with our families’ contact information?

The attached form is an emergency contact form.  Please complete and fax to our office ASAP.  Please use as much paper and write as much Info as you need to write for us to contact your loved ones in case of an emergency or if you need us to contact them for one reason or another.  Please specify clearly who we can call first that can handle emergency situations.

Please advise who cannot handle emergencies or disturbing news.

              Thank you for your cooperation.   Denise and the Building Blocks Staff

    Our next stop was to the Post Office to obtain our held mail. One piece of it really made our day!

    It was a bill from BBAS asking for $84 for a “courier service” to handle some documents that had been authenticated at the embassy for Anguel’s adoption.  The bill had been mailed previous to Cyril’s death.  

    Why had we not been made aware about this courier fee before we had sent Anguel’s documents to be authenticated to BBAS in Ohio? Previously, Denise had been going down to Washington on her own without a courier.

    Was this some extra customer service to rope more clients into her Bulgarian program?  And when had this courier service been integrated into the BBAS paperwork plan? Why weren’t we informed?

    It sent me over the top. As you will see at other points in this narrative, I sometimes let my anger get the better of me. 

    It was time for me to call Denise back. I was in a rage over this $84 fee. After a baby died her idea of a condolence note is a bill?

    I don’t recall what I said, but I was ballistic and used foul language on her answering machine.  

    Needless to say Denise called me back immediately and told me the fee would be waived. I sent the check anyway and it was returned, but BBAS wasn’t above waving this in front of our faces at a later date.

     Linda Wright and I maintained email and telephone contact. She mailed us a few photos of Yekaterina; we sent her photos of Dom Rebyonka No. 2 and a photo of the plaque hanging in front of the orphanage.

    She also went on to the Internet to find more medical information about Yekaterina’s eyes. She emailed Dr. Eric Downing, a Canadian pediatrician who lives in Russia and has often examined children in orphanages at the behest of parents in North America, to see what he would say about Yekaterina.  

    He responded to her saying that the baby should be looked at and what a wonderful, clean, caring place Dom Rebyonka No. 2 was and how well the staff took care of the children.  

    Just another cog in the big lie machine. He was no help whatsoever to Linda or ourselves (or a couple of others, as we have since heard. In fact, two adoptive parents have told us, separately, that they’ve seen him at an hotel in the Russian Far East seriously intoxicated.*

    Meanwhile, Daniel and I struggled to get back to “normal.” We gave away the clothes and baby things we had purchased for Cyril.  

    One item we kept around, however, was the high chair. I left that up in the living room as a reminder that Anguel would be home. It gave us some ray of hope.

    Linda Wright and I were in constant email contact, scouring the Internet for information. We had emailed some of our closest adoption email buddies and told them what happened to us in Russia. There was shock. 

     Linda, began to search for even more information on the health of Russia’s orphans; it was bleaker than we had been previously led to believe.

    We looked for information on what was happening in Perm and what the aftermath was after Cyril’s death. We were not to receive that information from Denise Hubbard. She didn’t know what was going on, nor would she have given us the information if she did. 

     Linda and I began to contact and look into other agencies who had handled adoptions from Perm within the last year. 

    Linda contacted International Adoption Resource in Bloomington, Ind., (an agency whose director, Rebecca Thurmond, would run into her own problems later) because they had a photo of a family who had returned back from Perm in September 1999 with their baby from Cyril and Yekaterina’s orphanage. Linda said to us, “the family’s baby was scrawny and tiny — just like Yekaterina.”

    Upon contacting IAR directly and inquiring about this family and their experience in Perm, something strange happened. The family’s photo was pulled from IAR’s website, never to be seen again.

     Through further research, we found the following other agencies who have or had worked in the Perm region for the years 1996-2002: Commonwealth, Adoptions From the Heart, Alliance for Children (Dom Rebyonka No. 2), Cradle of Hope, Global Adoptions (Dom Rebyonka No. 2), The Adoption Center of Washington (Dom Rebyonka No. 2), Lutheran Social Services of the South (Dom Rebyonka No. 2), Williams International Adoptions (Dom Rebyonka No. 2), Adoptions Forever, Gift of Life, Carolina Adoption Services (Dom Rebyonka No. 2), Crossroads/Amrex, Russian Adoption Facilitation Service (RAFS), A Loving Heart (Amrex) and World Child (Frank Foundation), the Datz Foundation (Frank) and World Partners.

     Now, judging from that small list, wouldn’t it have made sense for these organizations to pool their resources and contacts in Russia to help one another and find families for these children in the Perm region?

    Hardly. All of the agencies mentioned don’t work together, and of all the money that American adoptive parents have generated into the Perm region through adoptions, monetary donations and humanitarian aide, very little seems to have reached the children in the orphanages. 

    Where did that money go? Are agencies that secretive and greedy over their “turf” that they can’t help one another with information about what is happening in the regions that they are placing children from?

    Let me answer my own question: yes they are that greedy and the only information they can gather about the kids are also through their own butt-covering, cutthroat facilitators on the ground in Russia.

    After making sure our house was in order, we drove up to my parents’ home outside of Buffalo for a few days to be with them. They broke down sobbing when they saw us.

    On our way back down to our home, as we were driving along NY Route 17 where it hits the southwestern Catskills, I cried once again. Cyril would never see these mountains that had come to mean so much to my husband ... his father.

    It was just one of so many things that reminded us that we’d been planning on being parents by now.

*Dr. Downing left Russia in 2006 and returned to Canada.  We don’t know why. On June 9, 2008, while on duty at Strait Richmond Hospital in Halifax, he dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 58, leaving behind his wife and five children.

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