On the portal “Snob” there was another article by Ekaterina Lebedeva, the head of the program for shooting videoanket children in our foundation.
Two-year-old Masha lives in a children’s home in the Kurgan region. She has soft skin on her round cheeks, like two tiny apples, a tuft of straw-colored hair, and blue, deep, far-away eyes. The eyes that never once in the entire one-and-a-half-minute questionnaire, taken by our charity foundation “Change One Life”, did not smile…
And here is a first-grader Sasha from the Chelyabinsk region. He has a piercing look, a confident voice, and an even handwriting that he writes on the blackboard: “MOM + SASHA = LOVE.”
These and about a dozen other guys, whose videoankets were filmed by the operators of the Change One Life foundation for two years all over the country: from the Rostov region to Buryatia, the Urals and the Khabarovsk Territory- “fell” like a recent snow in May-instantly and unexpectedly-to my request to find orphans like me. This can now be done thanks to the new project of our foundation “Children like you”.
The idea is simple. You upload your current or childhood photo to a website and find a child who looks like you in the country’s largest database of orphaned children. The matches are not perfect, but they are quite real.
I sit and look into the face of little Masha, listening to Sasha share his dream: to live in his own family. For two years of working in the foundation, I have reviewed several thousand video questionnaires of orphaned children and listened hundreds of times to them tell me that they very much want to have moms and dads. And each such story still touches me very individually.
But never-NEVER! – before, I did not feel so strongly my personal connection with some children, I did not seriously think that somewhere out there, in Buryatia, Kaluga or Yekaterinburg, there lives a child unknown to me, who has something very much in common with me. And the realization of this in some unknown way, on the level of instincts, on the wave of the heart rhythm, changes my attitude towards these children. Brings me closer to them.
We do not in any case call for the fact that a child from an orphanage should be taken into the family just because he looks like you in appearance. But most of the prejudices of potential adoptive parents are connected precisely with the fact that the child, if it is not blood, does not become “our”, native. And this feeling that he is “not our”, “not native” grows like a weed in the subconscious of parents, becoming a real barrier to their decision to take a child from an orphanage into their family.
And after using this service comes the realization that all orphans absolutely, to every cell, to every gesture, every thought or dream – ordinary children, reminiscent of ourselves in the past or similar to our blood children.
We know for sure: videoankets WORK. We have more than 9500 of them on our site, and more than 1,600 of the children shown by us are arranged in families. Just because it’s arch-important-to see the blue, far-away eyes… to want to touch the soft cheek… To hear the timid, ” I want to live with my mom and dad.”
We are often asked: “How to find MY child?” We used to say: “Look, the heart will respond.” Now we have a service “Children like you”. We came up with it to bring together people who are still completely unfamiliar, but already somewhat close to each other: children in orphanages and their future parents.
Participate in our project yourself or tell your friends about it-and suddenly you will find familiar eyes, recognize yourself in someone who needs help now.
And as for little Masha with a fluff of blonde hair, first-grader Sasha, and also lop-eared Dima and modest Natasha with two huge bows – and it seems to me that they were the most similar to me – I can’t take them to myself. But I can help them find their parents, so I share their profiles here.