Julia oozes California girl in her pink-and-gray camouflage
skirt with matching rose-colored tank top, sunglasses propped atop
her head, with long, light brown hair and bright, blue eyes.
Gilroy – Julia oozes California girl in her pink-and-gray camouflage skirt with matching rose-colored tank top, sunglasses propped atop her head, with long, light brown hair and bright, blue eyes.
Throw in her love for the beach, swimming and shopping at the outlets or Target and this Ukrainian girl is right at home.
Rick and Lyn Shute, of Gilroy, are hosting 10-year-old Julia. They are understanding her very well, though the child is too shy to speak English around strangers.
“Her English is a lot better than my Russian,” Rick said with a laugh.
Gilroy and Morgan Hill families have opened their homes and hearts to Julia and six other young orphans from the Ukraine, hoping to help them find adoptive families.
“My heart was just really saddened by the statistics of these children,” Raina Cordich of Gilroy said. “They don’t have any hope.”
Michelle Bignell, executive director of Heart to Heart with Ukraine, a Minnesota-based non-profit organization, felt the same way as Raina after her first visit to orphanages in the Eastern European country in 2000.
“It was my first time traveling international,” she said. “You can’t get those images out of your head.”
There are more than 100,000 children living in government-run orphanages in the Ukraine. Many of the facilities are overcrowded and in disrepair, according to Bignell.
She and her husband adopted a child a year later. The next year, she started Heart to Heart with Ukraine so she could continue helping out with adoptions and mission trips to improve the orphanages.
Plans to adopt the children are not a requirement to host them, said Bignell. However, families are asked to invite friends who might be interested in adoption to visit with the children.
Bignell talked about creating a fostering program when local resident Amy Walker and her husband, Tom, visited orphanages on a mission trip.
Walker approached her congregation at Gilroy’s South Valley Community Church about hosting children for the first “Fostering Hope” visit in October 2004, sharing photographs of the orphanages she visited and the children who would be coming to the United States on the visit. Marian Jackson, also of South Valley Community Church, took over coordinating this summer visit after Walker’s husband died recently.
The children arrived July 26 and will stay for two and a half weeks.
Raina and her husband, John, decided to host 6-year-old Arina for the summer stay, thinking she would get along with their 2-year-old daughter.
A translator and a caretaker travel with the children to and from the orphanage. The host families are responsible for a cost of up to $2,100 for airline tickets, travel visas, passports and medical insurance. Many families also take time off work to spend with the children. Some families even prepared for the visit by listening to Russian language CDs.
The Cordich family put a photo of their host daughter on their refrigerator door so their toddler, Isabella, would get used to the idea of the visitor.
“She’s the youngest one out of everyone that came over,” Raina said of the little girl with long, blond hair and big, blue eyes. “Starting at 7, they start school, learning English, so she doesn’t know too much.”
The translator, Natalia Turovska, stayed with the family during the first week of the visit. After she departed, John got out the Russian-English dictionary to help him understand Arina as she flipped through a coloring book, pointing out the pages.
“She likes the games,” Raina said, of the mazes and connect-the-dot pages in the book.
Though activity books keep Arina happy, swimming is her all-time favorite pastime, according to John and Raina.
Several of the families took a trip to the beach. At first, Arina’s didn’t know what to make of the water on her first visit to the ocean, but after a while she dove into the frothy sea spray with the other children.
Another host family, the Weatherfords, invited the children to swim at their house a few times so they could spend time with familiar faces. When it came time to leave after the first visit, Arina refused to exit the pool, one of her few acts of defiance with the Cordiches.
“I don’t think she understood that we would come back to visit again and she could swim more,” Raina said.
“They are little water babies,” said Burt Weatherford, of Morgan Hill, one of the host fathers.
Burt and his wife, Meg have two children staying with them, 11-year-old Nadia and 10-year-old Ira. The couple is hoping to adopt the sisters, who they met during last winter’s visit. They have already started the adoption process in the U.S. and hope to bring the girls home permanently in December or January.
“We fell in love with them,” Burt said.
He and his wife, who are unable to have biological children, were foster parents for a while with hopes of adopting locally but Burt said nothing ever panned out. Despite the cost of an international adoption, Burt said working with Heart to Heart with Ukraine has been a more positive experience than the Weatherfords’ past attempts at adoption.
Bignell said Ukrainian adoptions can cost more than $20,000. The organization has helped with the adoption of 20 to 30 children since they were founded in 2002, but they only work with families who have participated in the foster program or a mission trip. Burt estimated he and his wife would spend as much as $50,000 per child, including traveling costs and other fees.
Burt and Meg are optimistic that their adoption will work out this time and that their family will double in size.
“It’s more expensive, but what is left out is that through the Ukraine you can directly adopt,” Burt said. “Here the courts try to keep the kids with the family which I agree with, but we were always on the other side of that.”
For information on donating to Heart to Heart with Ukraine or to host children in the future, contact Marian Jackson at 778-7935 or visit hearttoheartukraine.org
