Moscow Couple Fights Grim Cycle of Child Abandonment

Settled at a vinyl-covered table dappled with sunshine, Irina Palezhayeva spends the day doling out tasks to her children, tutoring them in reading and writing, and trying to drum through the difference between right and wrong.

“Alik, you march right to the outhouse,” Palezhayeva orders, reading the indecision in a 5-year-old’s big, dark eyes.

“Slow down, don’t run,” she counsels Alyosha, and the frantic creaking of the 10-year-old’s artificial leg quiets into a steady squeak as he makes his way toward the house.

“How many times have I told you not to go near that fence?” she asks 12-year-old Vova. No answer.

The table in the middle of the yard is Palezhayeva’s headquarters, the seat of authority for the 14 children who call her mama. Nine of them are foster children.

Breaking a Tragic Cycle

From here Palezhayeva leads the trivial, everyday battles of a larger war: trying to break the cycle of abandonment that has filled Russia’s orphanages with close to 160,000 unwanted children. More than 30,000 enter the institutions every year.

Many of the abandoned are children of alcoholics and drug addicts, and they carry severe physical and mental illnesses into the next generation.

Only a small number, mostly newborns, have any hope of getting out of the orphanages. Most are too old, too damaged to join families that don’t have big reserves of patience.

“For two years, I literally stood over them as they did the simplest things,” Palezhayeva says. “For three years, we had signs all over the walls reminding the eldest just to say, ‘Good morning.’ ”

Palezhayeva and her husband are a rarity in Russia, one of just five foster families in all of Moscow.

In contrast to people in the United States and other Western countries, Russians do their best to hide the fact that they’ve adopted a child unless they have taken in a relative.

They almost never take in older children, because of both the stigma of adoption and the challenge of treating their illnesses. In any case, most Russian families have at most one or two children.

But Palezhayeva, a 43-year-old with an apparently bottomless supply of calm, is different. She had wanted to adopt ever since she saw two babies abandoned at the hospital where she gave birth to her third child. Her husband, Amar Ayshakh, who had ended up in a children’s home after his mother married a widower with three children of his own, needed no convincing.

However, adopting a newborn turned out to involve more bureaucratic red tape than the couple felt they could face. So when a new law was passed in 1989 providing financial support for Russians who take in at least five children from institutions, the couple started their foster family.

Each month, for working as full-time foster parents, they receive a combined salary of about 1,400 rubles ($225) plus 200 rubles per foster child, which provides them an income comparable to that of a typical working Moscow couple.

They also get special housing. They live in four side-by-side apartments for most of the year and have a city-owned dacha, or summer house, here in Krasovo, about 15 miles southeast of Moscow.

Palezhayeva and her husband found that rearing their own five children did little to prepare them for their foster family. Their biological children did their homework and practiced for music lessons, usually without being asked. The oldest is now a second-year student in philosophy at Moscow’s Humanities University.

The foster children, in contrast, have to be reminded of the most mundane things. The oldest, 17-year-old Marina, has a written list of 39 tasks she must perform each day, beginning with washing her face. Four of the foster children are classified as invalids; all are severely stunted physically, mentally and emotionally and need constant care.

Marina has a seemingly incurable addiction to stealing. Alyosha, the 10-year-old, learned the alphabet just this year. Vika, a tiny 8-year-old whose mother shoved her through a hospital window shortly after birth, has been held back in school so her classmates don’t bully her.

For all their bad luck at the start of life, the children’s future is what worries Palezhayeva most. What will happen when they turn 18, when the state’s financial support ends--as it does with institutionalized children--and they are expected to work and live on their own?

There are no halfway houses in Russia, no arrangements for group living, no safe places for those unable to cope--unless psychiatric hospitals count.

It will be “certain death” if Marina strikes out on her own next year, Palezhayeva fears. She’ll be eligible for her own apartment and defenseless against anyone who offers to buy it from her or simply seizes it.

“Even for a normal teenager, it’s a dangerous time,” Palezhayeva says.

Reams of Red Tape

The present has a big enough store of problems. For three years, the family has been trying to get financing for two African siblings whose father abandoned them at a Moscow train station. Not only have their entreaties to child welfare authorities gone nowhere, the police and immigration authorities have tried to prosecute the couple for giving shelter to illegal immigrants.

“Our struggle with bureaucrats is the biggest drain,” Palezhayeva says.

With so little help from authorities, the family is proud of its achievements: teaching Alyosha, born without a right leg, to walk; coaxing speech from 11-year-old Alyona, who is deaf; teaching the Africans, Alan and Rachelle, to speak Russian.

But like many foreign couples who have adopted children from Russian and Eastern European orphanages, Palezhayeva has found the emotional barricades the children throw up insurmountable. The lack of attention and care during their early years can never be erased.

“It’s not that they don’t love us in particular. It’s just that they have little capacity to love at all,” she says.

Other struggles inherited from the orphanages include trying to instill respect for other people’s property--that is, teaching the children not to steal--and dissuading them from grabbing as much food as they can, whether it’s from the pantry, another child’s lunch at school or the neighbor’s dog dish.

Summoned to a group scolding, the children stare at their feet and mumble explanations. Everyone looks glum except Alyona, who has turned in the others for entering an off-limits zone in the dacha’s yard--a day after she ratted on three of them for eating a salad meant for the whole family. She wears the smug smile siblings can’t stand.

“I can bring them to the point where they understand they’ve done something wrong,” Palezhayeva says. “But in nine years, I haven’t managed to develop the mechanisms to make them change their behavior on their own.”

On her low days, Palezhayeva even wonders whether the children truly benefit from being in her home.

“When we started out, I thought we were saving children who were suffering and crying into their pillows,” she says. “Now I think that for some children, the orphanage is just the right place. Because I make them live ethically. I thrust a different sort of life on them. I want them to develop more than they’re capable of doing. And that’s not their problem--it’s mine.”