Adults. Orphanages. How to arrange them in families?

The first text from a series of observations of the charity foundation “Change One Life” about how and how boys and girls live now in Russian orphanages ” – is published jointly with the portal Snob.ru. Article Ekaterina Lebedeva.

Lera walked into the room with an angular, slightly tense gait. Uncertainly, she sat down at the table, hunched her shoulders, and looked at him from under her brows. And I saw her eyes. Two shining cherries. Timid yet direct gaze. With a challenge. And with a touch of … hope.

In an orphanage in the south-west of the Moscow region, we came with the operator of our charity fund “Change One Life” to shoot a short, one and a half minutes, a film about 14-year-old Valeria. We really hope that videoanketa will help this already adult girl to find a new family. Although to do this, let’s face it, is not easy.

It is a fact, but most of us think about teenagers-orphanages, if not in the last, then certainly not in the first place. Because most of those who are ready to accept children from orphanages into their families need crumbs up to three years old. Up to seven at most. The logic is clear. With kids it seems easier, more comfortable, more fun, finally…

But in the database of our foundation, about half of the videoankets (and this, for a minute, is about four thousand videos) are children from 7 to 14 years old. Statistics sound like cups on a tiled floor, shattering the dreams of potential adoptive parents to find babies in children’s homes: in the system of children’s institutions, the names of teenagers occupy most of the rows of the data bank. And according to the same hard statistics, teenagers have the smallest response among potential moms and dads.

But Lera doesn’t need to know anything about statistics. Her personal life experience is many times brighter than any figures. And this experience shows that she and her peers are very rarely taken into families. And many of the children after the age of ten despair. And they begin to make their own plans for the future without their parents. In a word, they humble themselves.

For example, together with Leroy, we wanted to shoot a video tape of her classmate. The cute boy with the bright open eyes – “our computer genius,” as his teachers call him – suddenly frowned at the sight of the camera. He bristled. He strained his thin shoulder blades. He closed his eyes internally and shielded his face with a large puzzle box.

“I’ve got to go to college in six months!” What do you want from me already? – he shouted nervously and ran away from the set. The standard story: more and more teenagers, whom we come to shoot for videoanket, refuse to sit in front of the camera.

I asked a lot of guys: why don’t you want to act, because it can help you find a family? They are silent in response. They turn away. But in fact, they just don’t believe it. They don’t believe it anymore. Too many times, their dreams and hopes of finding a home have been trampled, torn, and blown into dust in the yards of orphanages with creaking swings. And it doesn’t matter who did it (and as a rule, everything is a little bit): the teachers, their own or foster moms and dads, from whom they ran away themselves, or maybe they were returned back to uncomfortable institutions with names as dry as snow crunching under their feet: “orphanage”, “boarding school”, ” social rehabilitation center»…

“But I love horses very much,” Lera suddenly begins to tell about herself timidly and adds almost inaudibly:”Oh, how terrible it is after all.” She is scared and desperately uncomfortable to sit in front of the camera and introduce herself to us. It’s scary, awkward and at the same time I want to, how unbearably she wants to show herself so that someone will see her, catch fire and, perhaps, one day become a native.

And so, especially for the shoot, she wore festive high-heeled shoes and a white blouse. “She was waiting for you so much, preparing and very worried, you can’t even imagine how much she wanted you to take her on video!” – Lera’s teacher tells me in a whisper, and she runs past and gently kisses her on the cheek.

– I like to ride horses and take care of them, and when I grow up, I want to be able to treat them. – The angular, confused girl hides her eyes less and less from us every minute – two shining cherries – and there is no longer a challenge and tension in her eyes. Little by little, dash by dash, they begin to appear and confidence, and joy, and the desire to share more and as soon as possible all that she knows how. And Lera says that she is engaged in dancing and in music school, watches movies and loves hip-hop, shows her numerous crafts, diplomas and drawings, recalls how she shot a movie at a special circle and how she wrote the script – a touching story about a girl whose mother died and left her a magic bracelet as a souvenir.

Lera’s own mother is alive and keeps in touch with her. Another seemingly completely illogical, but ubiquitous sad feature of the life of orphaned teenagers – most of them have living relatives. Who communicate with them and who, for various reasons, find it easier when these children do not live with them, but in orphanages.

– Why don’t you want to go to foster homes? – I ask Leroux after she has completely opened up, discarded the scales of her isolation and turned out to be a simple girl-friendly, funny and even a little combative.

– Yes, because many of us have parents — – she waves her hand in response, somehow doomed. “There’s my mother. She kept promising to take me away, and I kept believing and believing. And now that’s it! Well, how much can I do?! I told her the other day: either you take me home, or I’ll look for a foster family.

So Lera was in front of our video camera.

Teenagers in orphanages are often referred to as the missing generation: bad genetics, alcoholic parents, and so on. Hundreds of items. Bouquets of formed stereotypes. Even many teachers of orphanages sincerely ask us why we shoot teenagers on video at all. After all, with them “so difficult»…

It’s really not easy with them. The established character, the depth of painful memories, their “I want – I don’t want”, “I will – I won’t” and already very adult, without pink bows and chocolate bunnies, a view of life. Yes, we know examples of successful foster families with teenagers. But how to attract more attention to thousands of adult children from orphanages? We at the foundation, to be honest, do not know the end yet.

But we know for sure that one of the working ways is to say that these children ARE THERE, and at least draw their video portraits with thin, airy strokes, and make sure to give them the opportunity to tell about themselves and share their dreams and aspirations.

And yet, after filming several thousand teenagers in orphanages across Russia, we know one more thing for sure: ALL these children desperately, to the point of pain from clenched fists, to the tears they swallow, going to their bedrooms, want to live in their own families.

And 14-year-old Lera, who looks at us with a challenge, then with hope, really wants to be a family. And we really want to help her find it. And so we show it to the videoanket.

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