When I read this story in 2001, it inspired me. A single Ukrainian woman, Svetlana Bondareva, adopted 15 children. Her mother supported her decision, but most other people (including Ukrainian government officials) didn't.

I have no plans to adopt 15 children. I have never felt called to have a large family. (I am hoping to parent 2 or 3 children. Right now I just have 1 child.) But I love reading these types of stories.

Sveta [adopted at 8 years of age] is now 17. She is mobile with the help of artificial limbs. She loves to read novels and poems, feed the family pets and teach her younger siblings. And she wants a job in the medical field.

The idea of Bondareva, a 32-year-old with a negligible income, adopting 15 children would be unthinkable in the West--and is controversial here too. But in Ukraine and Russia, the children she chose--mostly disabled or well beyond toddler age--had little other chance to be adopted.

She Chose Children Over Her Boyfriend

Bondareva feels her burden. Before she made her first adoption, her boyfriend told her to choose between him and the child. They broke up, and she has stopped thinking of marriage.

"I have never met the kind of person who could devote all his life to the children," she said.

A religious woman, she shrugs off the notion that she has done something remarkable.

"It is really hard to say what pushed me to start it all-- probably because I love children very much," she said. "The reason I have so many children is that I want to help more and more of them."

In building her large and loving family, Bondareva had to push against tradition. Child-care authorities in the northeastern city of Kharkiv are highly critical because she shunned the preferred model in which foster parents are paid state salaries to care for seven to 10 children.

Although she would receive nine times more money under that system, Bondareva rejected it because her children would have had to move into hostels at 16 to 18 years of age.

"As an expert, I do not understand her," said Svetlana Gorbunova- Ruban, the official in charge of orphans and abandoned children in the Kharkiv administration. "It's quite evident that financially she cannot bring up such a large number of children. It is like a monastery."

However, Bondareva never had a problem getting approval from local adoption committees, and she only once ran into opposition from an orphanage official. That was because she was single and the children would have no father.

"I told them that in an orphanage, children have no family at all," she recalled. She won the argument.

From: The World; A Born Nurturer Does It Her Way; Ukraine
The Los Angeles Times
Nov 6, 2001
By: ROBYN DIXON;

To be continued....

Special Needs Domestic Ukrainian Adoption
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4