Lifetime orphan

When we adopted Bobbi, she was at the very end of the window of eligibility for adoption. Every country's limits are different. Some make the cut-off as early as 14 years. Some, like Bulgaria, allow the commitment documents that begin the adoption process to be submitted up until the day they are sixteen years old. When we first met Bobbi a few months before she turned sixteen one of the things we told her is that our adopting her meant that she would be our daughter for life - "family" isn't just something she would have until she was a legal adult at age eighteen. We told her that she would be provided for and cared for, and that for any child that was born to us, we intended to spend at least eighteen years ensuring they had a safe place to live, food to eat, clothes to wear, and that she was no exception.

Hard to believe this was almost four years ago!

Being adopted means that you are not just no longer a child with no parents, you are no longer a person with no family. Because, for better or for worse, a family is something that you have for life! And children don't stop needing their parents just because they're 18 (or 30 or 40!) and parents don't stop caring for their kids when their children reach legal adulthood.

On the flip side, though, NOT being adopted means that you are not only a child with no parents, but are destined to be a person without a family...for life. Once these kids hit fourteen or sixteen, or whatever the cut off is, they are, for the rest of their lives, orphans. Orphans aren't just cute (or not-so-cute!) little kids. Orphans come in all shapes and sizes and ages and races.

I remember having a phone call with Toni, our adoption lawyer, a few months after Bobbi came home. There were a couple things we wanted to chat about, but one thing that was heavy on my mind was the other young adults living in Bobbi's home. I knew that in the past at age 18 they were either sent off to make their own way in the world, or, in the case of a more significant handicap (either mental or physical), they would be transferred to an adult mental institution. We learned from her that with some of the reforms happening in the system that included the new smaller scale group homes that Bobbi had been living in, some of the children would have the ability to stay there for a few more years of transition into young-adulthood. But the reality of the statistics was sobering: of the young women who "graduated" from state care, 70% end up living a life of prostitution. Of the young men, a slightly higher percentage end up in jail. It's not a pretty picture.

And really, how could it be? For those of you who have kids or have parents who cared at all for you, think about how much time and effort parents put into preparing their kids for life? They encourage them in their education, they help them think about and plan for the future, they help them get their first jobs, learn how to manage money and manage a household. Your family is where you first learn to trust and what it is to love and be loved. Yes, some parents/families do a better job than others, but as a general rule, this is a big part of what parents do. And after you move out at eighteen (or later!) your parents are still there for you.

Born six months after we brought Krassimir home, every interaction we had with Evania carried with it a depth of importance that I hadn't really thought about with my other birth-kids. There's serious life-preparation going on here! (Besides that photo being a serious old-timer! I think Owen's only nine years old there!)

To put it bluntly, the post-communist type orphanage system is NOT one that excels at raising kids in a way that prepares them for adulthood, and there's nothing like putting an unprepared eighteen year old kid out on the streets with a small chunk of cash to make a recipe for hopelessness!!! Suddenly they're out there, with no experience, no support system, no one to turn to if things are rough. If you add to that the additional complications of attachment disorders, institutional delays, institutional behaviors, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster.

We have a friend named Lili who I introduced briefly a few days ago. She is roughly my age. She was abandoned by her parents to a Bulgarian institution at birth. She has limb differences (she wears a prosthetic leg and has abnormal digits on her hands), but is able to get around independently despite her odd gait. She always has a smile on her face. She loves animals - dogs, pigeons, cats - you name it! She is Roma, which, if you know anything about Bulgarian culture, is in itself a tremendous disadvantage. (Here's a current article outlining a bit of the discrimination the Roma people experience - you can find many more if you're interested.) She was, and still is, and always will be, an orphan.

After growing up in the same orphanage that Bobbi spent most of her years in, Lili hit that magic age of eighteen, but by some stroke of luck was allowed to stay as one of the staff at the orphanage helping to care for the younger children. Bobbi has quite early memories of Lili working with her and the other kids. Lili is the one that Bobbi credits with teaching her how to read.

At some point along the way, Lili's time at the orphanage came to an end, and she made her way to Sofia where she found a job working as a preschool teacher for Roma children. However, she also found "friends" who got her into situations where she made foolish mistakes that ended her up in a huge pile of debt. They used her, and then they left her. So now she's alone, friendless, and with substantial debt looming over her that she doesn't know how she will ever escape. She's got so many counts against her, and nobody to turn to!

She is one of the caregivers that Bobbi connected with on facebook after coming home, and about a year and a half ago, she kind of poured out her heart and her troubles to Bobbi (which I would agree, yes, is not the appropriate channel to do so, but what were her options?) and through an interesting turn of events, we arranged to start sending her a small chunk of money each month so she could rent a tiny apartment. She had been homeless for some time, living at the school where she'd been teaching, and living in constant fear that she would be found out and kicked out. Because she's got these loans against her, the bank skims off most of what she gets from her small paycheck, leaving her in a truly hopeless situation.

When this first came to our attention, we weren't sure what to do. It sounded like a classic take-advantage-of-the-rich-Americans kind of scheme, and yet...the plight of orphans is one that has long captured our attention - a calling that God has put on our lives because HE is a God who cares about widows and orphans, and he is also the one who has told us to give to those who ask (Matthew 5:24). She told us roughly how much she thought she would need for rent each month; we told her we would find a way to get that to her each month. She did some more looking, and guess what - rent was actually going to be about a third again as much as she'd originally told us AND she needed a chunk extra for a signing fee. And, oh yes, a bit more for a hot water heater for the bathroom. Boy did we feel like we were just maybe being taken! But you know what, we decided that was God's deal, and we were going to continue moving forward with it. Would you believe that very week we got a letter from our health insurance company telling us that our premiums for the upcoming year were going to be about the amount Lili needed less than the current year? Have you EVER heard of such a thing from an insurance company??? Nope. Me neither. And so onward we went, knowing that the next year's premiums would probably more than make up for this decrease, but not missing the timing of these two events right now.

Last summer when we made our trip to Bulgaria, Lili offered to let us stay in her apartment for the days that we were in Sofia. We agreed to do so for some of our stay, knowing that she would want us to, and also enjoying the experience of NOT being in a hotel. (We've had a few travel opportunities when we've gotten to do that in the past - a classmate's uncle let six of us crash at his house during a three-day field trip to Chicago when we were in graduate school, or a visit to my sister's when she and her husband lived in Amsterdam.) We enjoyed our time with Lili so much. She was so proud to show us around her tiny apartment, and she made a point of showing us the hot water unit in the bathroom!

She joined us on some of our exploring excursions, showing us some of her favorite places to spend her days and just chatting happily with Bobbi (because her English is about as limited as our Bulgarian!) She wouldn't let us do *anything* for her - not even treat her to a snacky breakfast sandwich at the little outdoor vendor across the street. (A sausage/bread concoction was the equivalent of about $0.75. She wouldn't take it. But she DID happily take Bobbi's leftovers later to feed to the local pigeons in her favorite park area!) We told her we wanted to have her join us for dinner on our last night, and had a time and place all set...and then she messaged Bobbi a few hours before and told her that she wasn't feeling well with an upset stomach and had to cancel. I'm sure it was just too hard for her to accept anything else from us, and that she had no concept of how little it would cost to treat her to something special.

I love this dear woman. I admire her so much. The way she toughs through her disability with a constant smile on her face, the gentleness and concern she shows for the animals living in her city, the delight with which she talks about the children she works with. But she is heavily burdened by the weight of the debt she's under, and even though through us she's provided with the basic necessity of a place to live, she longs to live free. A few weeks ago she unburdened her worries onto Bobbi again and asked her to ask us if we knew of any way to help her. I've been messaging directly with her via facebook (and the infamous google translate) and gotten details on her loans - she's got three different loans against her, two to two different banks, and one to an individual. Our hope was that we could perhaps use the money we've been saving up for the garage next summer to help her get back to ground zero and push our project out another year, but honestly, what we have saved is not enough. In some ways I'm glad, because it means that we, too, are left leaning on God to solve this problem, if he so chooses.

So I'm going to do something on this blog that we have not been comfortable doing for ourselves. I'm going to ask you who are reading if helping this woman is something God would have you do. I really don't think I've currently got enough readers that even with your help we're going to erase her debt entirely, but wouldn't it be amazing if she could get a small sense of what it is to be part of a family and know what it is to have a group of people rally around her to help her out?

She shared something with me this morning [well, the morning I started this post!] that I'm going to (via the aforementioned infamous google translate, so bear with some of the awkwardness) share with you:

"Hello, dear dear family! I want to THANK you again for everything you do for me and for my existence in the big city of Sofia. I grew up in an institution without parents since I was a child and I had not prepared myself for the real reality of life, despite my advanced age and long years of loneliness and only loneliness. I made mistakes in my life that I want to correct and be filled again with a smile on my face...I haven't received a clean salary for a very long time because I have a loan...I want to be independent and not have any loans and credits. To pay rent and everything - electricity, water, food..."

She continued, sharing her dreams of someday being a wife and mother, and living a responsible life. But she feels trapped by the despair of the weight of this debt that is over her and she has no way of paying it back. On her meager salary (and I don't believe she's able to be working at all now with the pandemic, which I'm guessing is why this is coming to a head again with her), her debt is slowly growing as she just does not have the means to pay it back, so she sees no way out. So much in her note from this morning grabs me. First of all, her "I had not prepared myself for the real reality of life." I read that and I think, first of all, I admire the way she takes full responsibility for where she's at. She's not blaming those who took advantage of her. And second of all I think, we humans weren't designed to have to prepare ourselves for the reality of life - we were designed to have families to help us with that! And communist-era Eastern European institutions have never been known for their great skills in preparing handicapped, ethnically persecuted children with the tools they need to be successful in life! And the loneliness - I have blogged only tangentially and superficially about the ugliness of what abandonment and neglect does to a baby, toddler, young child, teenager because I don't want to dump all of Bobbi's junk out on the internet for everyone to see, but let me tell you it is UGLY what it does to a human being to grow up without someone to love them!!! It damages so many fundamental things about what it is to relate to those around you - who to trust and how to trust and even the ability to trust, and then, as in Lili's case, she tried to trust - wanted to trust, wanted to love, but with no skills whatsoever, got burned, and everything nasty that you've ever believed about your own unworthiness and unloveableness gets thrown back in your face. Lili amazes me with her ability to keep on, to NOT be afraid to dream, and that's why I'm going to use this connection that I have with those of you who read this blog to ask: would you be willing to share some of what you have been given to make a difference in the life of this orphan for whom it's too late to have a "real" family, but to whom we have been given the opportunity to be a family to her?

Matt and Bobbi with Lili last summer as we were leaving Lili's apartment for the last time. Yes, this is the apartment on the seventh floor with the elevator that sometimes works...and sometimes doesn't. YOU try walking up seven flights of stairs with a prosthetic leg! Lili is amazing.

Walking through Lili's favorite Dog Park by the European Union building.

As we've mulled this over for the last few weeks, we've decided to not go with a formal fund-raising platform. In the spirit of being family I'd rather go about it in a more personal way and through that avoid the fees associated with using internet fund raisers. Please see her, and ask if this is something you are supposed to be doing. If you want to help her out and have our address, you can send a check, or drop something off at our house. You can use paypal (glewwes at gmail dot com). If you don't have our address, but would prefer that method, send me an email. Matt and I were able to send enough extra with our last transfer to her to pay off the smallest of the three loans and part of what she owes the individual. Whatever we collect between now and the end of August I will send to her at that point when we send her rent.

The pain and loneliness of being an orphan doesn't stop when you turn eighteen. We have a chance to do something about it for this one! Will you help us be Lili's "family"?