Adoption: What About the Kids Left Behind?

Posted by: Anne Newman on June 11

Nine years after we adopted our son from a Moldovan orphanage, my husband and I still wonder what happened to the curly-haired little girl with huge eyes we nicknamed “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” after the Shirley Temple character. Haunted by memories of the children left behind, a growing number of parents are giving back to the orphanages where their children spent their early years. But the fragile U.S. economy, weak dollar—even the abysmal housing market—are taking a toll on those initiatives.

“The economy has been devastating,” says Daniel Levine, a co-founder of Children’s Help Net Foundation, a small nonprofit based in Briarcliff Manor (N.Y.) aimed primarily at helping children in Romania, Moldova, and Bulgaria. “People can barely pay their bills, let alone make donations to us. I can’t imagine the average adoptive family can give us much this year at all.”

Strapped donors and the weak dollar hit groups like Children’s Help Net doubly hard. With the euro now worth about $1.55, vs. $1.30 a year ago, Levine says he has to work “that much harder to make up the difference” in the cost of improving children’s health and welfare in a region where the euro has replaced the dollar as the standard. The housing bust has hurt, too. The collapse of the California market, for example, delayed the plans of one major Children’s Help Net donor to boost his giving from gains in the real estate market. “Donations are off, and we’re hurt by the dollar in what we want to do over there,” says Levine, a biochemist at the Rogosin Institute, affiliated with New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical College.

Yet giving even on a small scale can make a big difference to kids who, like our son, couldn’t get the vitamins, medicines, and meals rich in nutrients vital to a child’s healthy development. From Families with Children from China who send money to orphanages there to Texas parents of sons and daughters from Russia and the Ukraine to the globe-trotting Orphan Rangers of the Worldwide Orphans Foundation, adoptive families are finding ways big and little to help kids without homes. FCC’s expansive programs support foster care for 450 Chinese children, 28 nurses for high-risk kids, and schools fees for children in more than two dozen Chinese orphanages, among other activities, while much smaller initiatives, for example, focus on helping children solely in the Ukraine or replacing rotting sewer pipes underneath the building that was home to our son in his first year.

But what about adoptive families now socked by rampaging oil prices and worried about the economy? Will they continue to click onto PayPal to help those big-eyed Rebeccas left behind? Reader, do you have any insights?

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