Lena’s Adoption

“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.”
-Charles Swindoll

“Difficulty is the very atmosphere of miracle- it is a miracle in its first stage. If it is to be a great miracle, the condition is not difficulty but impossibility. The clinging hand of His child makes a desperate situation a delight to Him.”
-unknown

The story of Lena’s adoption is one that deserves to be told. It is a story of God’s love and goodness and power. Louis and I have always had a heart for children with special needs. We have five biological children and the youngest are twin boys who have neurological disabilities. When the twins were very young we began considering the possibility of adopting a child with special needs, so when we started going on mission trips to Russian orphanages for children with disabilities we were thinking in terms of possibly adopting one of them. We met our daughter Lena while visiting the orphanage in Pavlovsk, which is home to 500 children with special needs.

When I called Nightlight in September of 2003 and talked to Ron Stoddart about our desire to adopt Lena I really didn’t know the first thing about international adoption, and I had no idea of the extreme difficulty of what I was proposing. The problems centered on two issues, the first being Lena’s age. She was already 15, which according to U.S. law is the cut-off age for an international adoption. The second was her disabilities; Lena suffered from significant cognitive and developmental delays. Ron told me that if we were to accomplish this adoption we would have a miracle that we could talk about. If extreme difficulty were the atmosphere of miracles in the making, this would turn out to be a great miracle indeed.

There is a scripture that I clung to during the adoption process- Zechariah 4:6,7 ” Not by might, not by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of Hosts. For who are you, O great mountain (of human obstacles)?…You shall become a plain (a mere molehill).”

The first hurdle we faced concerned the orphan petition, the I-600, a document that must be filed prior the child’s 16th birthday. Typically, this occurs following the completion of the adoption, but as you will see, absolutely nothing about Lena’s adoption was typical. Lena would be 16 on December 3rd, less than 3 months from the time we first talked to Nightlight- and we did not even have a homestudy done at that point. In order to meet the requirement of filing the orphan petition before Lena turned 16 we got permission from the American consulate in Moscow to file the I-600 at the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS) in San Antonio prior to finalizing the adoption with the understanding that we could adjudicate our I-600 there in Moscow upon completion of the adoption. We squeaked in just under the wire filing our I-600 on 12-1-03, two days before the deadline. We would have one year to complete the adoption and supply the necessary documents.

There were only a handful of people here at home who really understood why we wanted to adopt a child with involved special needs when we already had two children with disabilities. To the Russians it was incomprehensible. From the very beginning we encountered opposition from everyone we dealt with in Russia. The standard attitude there is that people with disabilities belong in institutions and that children like Lena are not suitable for adoption. We were going to have to convince everyone along the way that adoption was the best thing that could happen to Lena and that we were able to properly care for her. The Russian judge who normally hears the adoption cases indicated to Ron that she would not approve this adoption because Lena could not speak for herself and give her consent, as a child over the age of 10 is required to do. Ron said we would have to look for another judge to hear the case. Louis was going to Russia in January 2004 on a mission trip to the orphanages and so it was arranged for him to receive the official referral while he was there. The social worker who attended the referral meeting really grilled Louis concerning our motives for wanting to adopt Lena- she was quite suspicious and it took a lot of explaining to get her to understand why we wanted to adopt this girl. After much discussion she was eventually convinced that our intentions were good and she agreed to submit a favorable report.

Our difficulties with the authorities in the Russian court system were just beginning- by the end of February Nightlight had found a judge who agreed to hear our case, but she made it clear from the start that she had severe reservations about approving the adoption. She had ordered a panel of experts to evaluate Lena and said that our court date would probably be in May. The evaluation given by the panel was dismal. They basically concluded that Lena was not aware of her surroundings and was incapable of interacting. I knew this was not true and I wrote a letter to the judge voicing my observations about Lena and also had a neurodevelopmentalist who had seen Lena on several mission trips do the same. To the judges’ credit, she considered our input and ordered yet another evaluation of Lena. No one but the judge knew the results of the second evaluation when Ron called us and told us that the judge had offered us a court date of June 8, along with an option to withdraw our application. She had all but said that she would not approve the adoption, based on the fact that Lena didn’t understand what adoption meant and therefore could not give her consent to it. Louis and I were agreed that we could not withdraw our application; God had made a way to meet the legal requirements regarding filing the I-600; He had provided a judge who was willing to hear our case and had given us a court date, and we felt that as long as He kept opening doors for us, we needed to keep taking the next step and trusting Him to do the impossible. And so we accepted the June 8 date and bought airline tickets.

Another miraculous aspect of this story is the financial part of it- we did not have the money for this very expensive venture- but all along the way, the money was given by many individuals to make this possible. Sometimes the amounts were small and sometimes they were very large, but always it was extremely encouraging to us to see God providing the necessary finances.

Our court hearing was not for the faint hearted. Absolutely nothing went as planned on the first day – the judge did all she could to unnerve us including denying our Nightlight representative permission to stay in the courtroom with us, so we had to represent ourselves. The doctor from the orphanage, who was in the courtroom, opposed the adoption saying that Lena’s condition was so severe that she could not be cared for properly in our home. The psychological evaluation was grim stating that Lena functioned on a very low level and was capable of only primitive emotion and instinctual responses but that a change of living situation and language would not significantly impact her. A statement was read from the orphanage director, who was not present, saying that she was in favor of the adoption and gave her consent. At this point the hearing was interrupted by another judge and adjourned until the next day. The hearing resumed the following day with the unexpected appearance of Lena’s grandmother who stated that she wanted to apply for custody of Lena. According to Russian law, no foreigner can adopt a Russian child as long as there is a Russian citizen who wants to care for them….so, the judge sent us home saying we would review the case in two months after the grandmother had a chance to apply for custody.

We were stunned! But it was out of our hands and all we could do was go home and wait and pray- we felt that this was just a delay, and it was definitely another opportunity to lay the entire adoption down and ask for God’s will to be done. About this time I came across a quote by Mahatma Gandhi that I thought was surely written with this situation in mind. He said, ” First they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”.

The grandmother’s application for guardianship was denied and she eventually signed a release agreeing to the adoption, but the wait was a long one and our next court date was not until October 26. Back to Russia, back to court- the judge was very tough on everyone and it became clear that she did not want to approve the adoption. However, every other Russian official in the courtroom gave a very favorable recommendation and after 3 ½ hours the judge made her decision and approved the adoption. She refused to waive the ten-day waiting period and we were told to come back on November 9 to pick up the documents finalizing the adoption. It would be several days after that before all Lena’s new documents could be obtained and we could actually pick her up from the orphanage. In the meantime our twins were waiting for us at home along with lots of other responsibilities, and so we decided that we’d have to return to Texas and come back in a couple of weeks when the paperwork was ready. Expensive!

We flew back to St. Petersburg on November 16, just two weeks away from the one-year deadline of 12-1-04, that we had for submitting all the documentation on Lena’s adoption. Before we had a chance to obtain all Lena’s new papers we received a call from head of immigrant visas at the U.S. embassy in Moscow saying, “There has been a terrible mistake; we can’t issue an immigrant visa for your daughter. She is too old to be allowed into the United States.” We assured her that we had cleared this issue with her office prior to filing the I-600, and being slightly compulsive, I had brought copies of all the correspondence with me. Could we fax this to her? She said we could fax anything we wanted to but it wouldn’t make any difference because the I-600 had to be not just filed, but also approved prior to the child’s 16th birthday. This was unbelievable. After all we had been through, after 3 trips, after finally getting everything done on the Russian side Lena was legally our daughter, and then to have OUR government say that we couldn’t bring her home? Time was running out!

Phone calls began flying back and forth from Russia to California- Ron told us to go on to Moscow from St. Petersburg. He believed everything we had done was legal and Nightlight was working on it. So, we picked up Lena from the orphanage and took the express train to Moscow. Now Lena, bless her heart, had been heavily sedated in the orphanage every day for the past 4 years and all that medication had now come to a screeching halt, cold turkey. We had never seen her unmedicated, much less going through withdrawal, so we were having lots of interesting experiences in lots of new places. In Moscow we took her for a required medical appointment, and the following day I went to the embassy to submit our adoption documents. I was sent to meet with the head of immigrant visas, a meeting I will never forget. She informed me that immigration law is vast and complex and subject to interpretation, so she had referred our case to the head of international adoptions in Rome where it would be reviewed by a team of legal experts. The director of the Rome office, however, was in Warsaw and so I should not expect a decision until around December 1. It was now in the hands of the judicial branch of BCIS. She said that we did not need to be concerned about the December 1 deadline for the documents. We had met this requirement, but there was another deadline to be very concerned about; our visas were about to expire on December 3. Russia requires one to leave the country to renew a visa, so she recommended that we try to find someone to care for Lena in the event that we had to depart Russian borders to obtain new visas. I was, once again, stunned. This simply passed belief!

There are times when all you can do is put one foot in front of the other, deliberately place yourself and all your concerns in God’s hands, and remember what He has said to you. Louis and I decided to go back to St. Petersburg to wait it out- we had friends there and it would be much more comfortable and familiar for us. It was a fairly agonizing situation- our other children were waiting for us at home in Texas, we couldn’t take Lena home without an immigrant visa and our visas were about to expire. All we could do was wait and pray. Everyone we knew in Russia and in the U.S. was praying for us.

On November 30 we still had not heard a word from Moscow and decided to go to Finland to get new visas- we couldn’t take Lena out of the country, but our good friend Sasha had agreed to take care of her while we were gone. Then, while Louis was at the train station buying tickets to Finland, we got word from the American embassy that it would issue Lena’s immigrant visa. We were told to immediately come to Moscow. Louis exchanged the train tickets to Finland for ones to Moscow and we were on our way. By this time the whole experience had taken on a very surreal quality. The next day we took Lena to the U.S. embassy in Moscow to pick up her immigrant visa; it was December 1, 2004- one year exactly from the date we filed the I-6oo at BCIS in San Antonio! No explanation was ever given as to how the decision had been arrived at or who had given the go ahead to let Lena enter the U.S., but we know Who gave the word. We flew home with Lena on December 3, the day our visas expired and her 17th birthday.

God doesn’t make things easy for us, He does the impossible. – Zechariah 4:6,7 ” Not by might, not by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of Hosts. For who are you, O great mountain (of human obstacles)?…You shall become a plain (a mere molehill).”

Linda and Louis Fry