For Vika, a Special Summer

When 5-year-old Vika Vladimirova stepped off an airplane four days ago, she didn’t know what it was like to have parents or a home. She arrived from an orphanage in Kazakhstan tired, terrified and wearing the only clothes she owned: two sets on top of each other.

By Tuesday, she wore a perfectly matched outfit while she clung to the side of a woman she called “mamma.” She basked in the Southern California summer day, giggling and shrieking as she blasted other youngsters with a squirt gun.

The organizers of Kidsave International call that a summer miracle, and they hope it will be repeated throughout the United States for the 250 orphans whom the nonprofit group brought to spend the summer with American families with the hopes that they would be adopted.

Vika is one of 15 orphans living with Southern California families as part of the program. So far, the group has focused on abandoned children in Russia, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics in central Asia who are housed in institutions without the resources to provide them with adequate food, shelter or clothing.

Neither Chris Wendoloski nor her husband, John, of Thousand Oaks are fazed by the fact that Vika doesn’t speak English. John has some Russian heritage, and both said they had always wanted to adopt a child from overseas. They found Kidsave after watching a segment on a local news channel.

“It’s hard to do it as an individual, and this was a way to help someone more unfortunate,” John Wendoloski said.

The children will stay in the United States for six weeks, giving the families time to decide if adoption is the right step, said Sarah Stanton of Kidsave. The organization placed 97% of the children in homes last summer, the program’s first year, she said.

But it’s not an easy process, the Wendoloskis said, and the most difficult part awaits. When the six weeks end Aug. 19, they must send Vika back to the orphanage, where she will stay for about three months. If the Wendoloskis decide to adopt her, they will have to complete the process in Kazakhstan.

“It’s going to be very difficult to let her go, especially if we get very attached,” Chris Wendoloski said. “But we signed a paper in the beginning saying we would send her back. We have to, and we will.”

Meanwhile, the immediate problem is language, but the family has coped.

“There’s a lot of charades and pantomiming,” Chris Wendoloski said. Kidsave provides on-call translators 24 hours a day. But so far, attempts to get Vika to reply to the voice on the phone have been unsuccessful.

“We don’t know if she’s just being shy, or if she’s never actually spoken into a phone before and doesn’t know what to do with it,” John Wendoloski said.

Vika also suffers from separation anxiety, sobbing or pouting whenever her “mamma” leaves. Kidsave requires the children to go to a day camp so they get “the full American experience” and interact with other children, Chris Wendoloski said. But so far, Vika has not wanted to stay.

“She’s afraid we’re going to leave her there,” Chris Wendoloski said.

Zandy Wells, director of the Little Folks camp sponsored by the city of Thousand Oaks, said the other children have responded to Vika, despite the language difference.

The Wendoloskis know little about her past.

At the orphanage, the children “had little food or stimulation,” John Wendoloski said. So the Wendoloskis have showered Vika with love and fun. She has been channel surfing on TV, swimming in the backyard pool and shopping.

If she can’t verbalize how she feels, she makes it clear.

When a translator asked Vika by phone if she liked living with the Wendoloskis, she said nothing. But soon a smile crept over her face, her eyes lit up and she reached around Chris Wendoloski for a bear hug.

“I guess,” Chris said, “that was her way of saying yes.”

For more information about Kidsave, call (310) 559-7995 or log on to https://www.kidsaveinternational.org.