Good Morning everyone! I hope everyone has something fun planned for the weekend.
We’ve been hearing a lot about all of the hurtles surrounding international adoption, and the treatment of the children in the orphanages lately, but here is a story of two identical twins who were adopted from Russia at two years old, and recently went back to Russia with their parents for a high school graduation gift.
The twins, Jennifer and Jessica, even visited the orphanage they lived in 16 years ago and met the woman who worked in the orphanage and took care of them.
The AP article said that there are over 250,000 children in Russian orphanages and “as many as 80 percent of Russian orphans end up in jail, become drug abusers or turn to prostitution or other crime.” As the number of Russian orphans continues to grow, the number of American adoptions of Russian children continues to decrease.
The article stated that according to the US State’s Department’s Bureau for Consular Affairs, there were 5,826 US adoptions of Russian children in 2004. This number decreased rapidly to 1,586 in 2009 and than to 1,079 in 2010.