I remember reading this news story in 2001 and I just stumbled across it again. It is a wonderful story because it so clearly expresses many different issues.

• Why are children in Ukrainian orphanages?


• Plight of disabled children



• Secrecy in domestic Ukrainian adoption



• Large adoptive families are rare in Ukraine



• Ukraine foster care vs adoption

November 2001

Svetlana Bondareva adopted 15 orphans. Six of them are disabled.

When she was 8, the girl's future seemed like a closed book. She would spend her life lying or sitting, unable to move, in a provincial town's home for the disabled.

Then, one day in 1992, something incredible happened. A young woman came and took away her best friend, also 8.

Distressed, the girl, whose name was Sveta, begged the woman, Svetlana Bondareva, to rescue her too.

"I was shocked, to be honest," recalled Bondareva, explaining that Sveta had one arm and no legs. "She couldn't move. I was not sure she'd ever be able to walk at all."

Bondareva grew up in the Soviet Union, where disabilities and adoption were both highly stigmatized. They still are in most former Soviet republics. But Bondareva, a large, soft-spoken woman with a benign smile, is extraordinary.

She adopted a large group of disabled and abandoned children whose lives otherwise would have been bleak and oppressive.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the number of orphans and abandoned children in the former U.S.S.R. has risen sharply. There are now 700,000 in Russia alone, more than in the entire Soviet Union at the end of World War II, which claimed more than 20 million Soviet lives.

In Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics, the long, tough transition to a market economy has incurred a significant social cost: unemployment, alcohol abuse and crime. Welfare agencies are alarmed by the sheer numbers of orphaned and abandoned children. The latter's parents are often alcoholics or in jail.

Bondareva was 22 when she confronted her dilemma about whether to take in Sveta. By then, she had already adopted six children, three of them disabled.

She did go back to collect Sveta, and that same day took home two other children. But that wasn't the end. So far, she has rescued 15 children, six with disabilities.


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