When Valentina Poda visited Kyiv for independence day last year, she had ample time to reflect on the irony of her situation as she tramped the streets through the night. Good citizens of the state, she and her husband had fostered six abandoned children from an orphanage under a government program named after Lenin.
Eight years on, she found herself as homeless as the children she had taken in might now be without her intervention. Because the state had failed to officially recognize the status of her foster family, she did not have the residence registration she needed to check into a hotel for the night.
‘It was clear to me that the government had just abandoned me in the street,’ she said.
Valentina and Boleslav Poda from Zhytomyr were among the first Ukrainians to participate in a 1989 Soviet program of ‘family children’s homes,’ whereby families would take in children from orphanages to bring up.
The couple had five children of their own, a five-room flat and good wages; Boleslav worked as an ambulance doctor, Valentina in the offices of the provincial Communist Party. They had already considered fostering Armenian children, orphaned in the earthquake of 1988, for a period of time before returning them to homes in Armenia.
The new project seemed a breakthrough in theory. It was the first alternative in the Soviet Union to orphanages or internats (boarding schools for wards of the state), where children were separated from society and given no idea of what family life is like. Poda was so horrified at the regime of bullying she saw there she called them ‘gulags,’ after Soviet prison camps.
‘The idea of family children’s homes was a good one, and the whole world does the same,’ Poda said.
The practice, Poda says, ‘was an unimaginable nightmare.’ The couple had to take a minimum of five children – in fact they took six, as the authorities asked them to re-unite a brother and sister – and keep them until they were 17. All the children suffered from major psychological and physical illnesses.
The Podas received no training and no support other than financial. After three years Valentina lost her job because she was so often absent attending to the children’s illnesses. With inflation following independence, the money given by the government for taking care of the children was never revised to match new prices.
The Podas had been promised a nine-room flat within three months of fostering the children; they finally got the promised accommodation after six years. For three years after that they were without a ‘propiska,’ the stamp of registration that all Ukrainians need to be legal, while the government debated the registration of family children’s homes.
Thus, close to a decade after Poda’s act of generosity, she found herself on the streets of Kyiv, unable to check into a hotel for the night.
A decade on, the family children’s homes program, which established 75 such families in Ukraine, is considered a failure by many participants and observers.
Regional authorities, who were to provide funding, soon evaded their responsibility, said Lyudmila Volynets from the Ukrainian Institute of Social Research. Parents, who sometimes ended up having to take up to 20 children, were woefully unprepared for the life-time job it turned out to be.
Their role, whether as loving parents or as social workers and educators, was never really defined. As a result, Volynets said, public opinion often decided that the parents were only interested in the money they got from the state.
Poda now admits that she and her husband were wrong to take on such a responsibility without thinking what it would entail.
‘I saw these poor unhappy orphans and I took them in, I didn’t think what would happen in five, ten years, how people would come to despise me,’ Poda said. She said her name was vilified in the local press when she ran for mayor this year.
‘We thought we could treat these children’s illnesses, try and give them a better life for a while. I thought I would need my hands and my head for this, I didn’t realize they would be such a weight on my soul.’
Nearly ten years on, Ukraine has more orphans and abandoned children than ever before. Conditions in internats are often as isolated and brutal as they were in 1989, and many of the children living on the streets have run away from custodians, most often elderly relatives who are unable to support them.
Reformers want to introduce a new and radical system of foster families in Ukraine. But they are finding that the old family children’s homes program gets in the way.
‘Because of this system, its hard to explain the Western concept of fostering,’ said Chris Gardiner, who is co-ordinating a United Nations Children’s Fund program to transform state institutional child care in Ukraine.
Alongside reform of state institutions, the UNICEF program, which is led by the Ukrainian Institute of Social Research within the Ministry of Family and Youth, envisages a network of foster families based on those in many countries in Europe.
Parents will be able to take one or more children into their own families and keep them as long as they can, with the aim of eventually returning them to their own families or placing them with adopted parents. Parents will be carefully chosen and trained, and a support service of social workers will assist at every stage.
This is a major shift from the ill-defined work done by the first parents of family children’s homes. While the popular view saw them as simply mercenary, in fact most were well-meaning amateurs who thought they had to love all the children in their care like their own. Gardiner, a foster parent for many years, knows better.
‘You don’t love them all,’ he said. ‘That was a revelation for Ukrainians.’ In preliminary discussions of the fostering program, he said, the Ukrainian group agreed that perfect children and model parents were the only candidates for foster families.
‘That’s because they see it as adoption,’ said Gardiner. In fact, he said, the children who would most benefit from fostering are those least likely to be considered desirable by adoptive parents, and parents who have led exemplary lives themselves are unlikely to be able to understand children from crisis families.
The team working on the project includes researchers and social workers, and three parents from the original family children’s homes project.
One is Nikolai Gorelkin, who has fostered 18 children in Simferopol since 1989, and is now a proud grandfather of two.
Gorelkin spoke of the lack of training or preparation for the job, which he saw as a kind of emergency measure rushed through without adequate legislation or methodology.
‘These children had to be saved,’ said Gorelkin. ‘Our principle for selecting children was the ‘ambulance’ principle. If there was a child the internat didn’t know what to do with, they would ask us and we couldn’t refuse.’
The new project participants, with the help of trainers from De Montfort University in Great Britain, are drawing up careful guidelines for both parents and social workers, as well as a press campaign to avoid the kind of prejudice the Podas suffered from.
Most important, they are working on a law that will regulate funding (which has to be from the central budget, Volynets says) and responsibilities, so that parents will escape the bureaucratic nightmares faced by the Podas.
The new program ‘is what we dreamed of,’ Gorelkin said. The system will be flexible as to the number of children and the fostering period, and eventually the project authors hope to set up a two-tier system of voluntary foster parents who take one child for a short term, and professional families taking many children more long-term as a paid service.
Parallel to the UNICEF project, the Ministry of Family and Youth has already begun conducting an experiment with five foster families in Zaporizhya. Volynets expects the two projects will begin working together in December.
Poda, however, fears the Zaporizhya program will be a repeat of her own experience.
‘I’m very happy for the children but I really feel for the parents,’ she said. ‘God forbid that they have such a hard future as I predict.’
Fresh from a visit to the European Foster-Care Conference in Hungary three weeks ago, members of the UNICEF project are now ready to start training foster parents in Odessa and Kyiv. Proceeding with care and caution, they expect to have the first families set up in January next year.
‘We are not hurrying with this because children are not toys,’ Volynets said. ‘If just one fostered child returns to an internat, it’s a tragedy.’
