A different book jacket and title that translates roughly into “The Car Is Parked At The Bridge. I Am Sorry. A Father’s Search For Answers To His Daughter’s Suicide.”
With over 80 million people, Germany is the largest country in Europe.
Tag Archives: Poland
Adoption and Orphan Care in Poland – Part 2 of 2
First of all, happy Father’s Day to all. It is one of those “family” holidays I’ve avoided since losing my Casey. But I’m slowly emerging from the darkness, so that I can at least tolerate it. Life marches on, n’est pas?
Now to Poland. I’ll start with a little travelogue because I’ve become fascinated with the country of my daughter’s birth. It is roughly the size and population of the State of California. It’s capital, Warsaw, sits at a latitude above Vancouver, Edmonton, Paris, London and Berlin, but south of Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm and Moscow. When we were there in 1991, it was suffering through a grueling transition from communism to capitalism, where the cost of living was roughly at parity with the West yet wages were stuck in the East. It was not a pretty picture.
Fast forward to 2013. Unemployment remains high at about 10%. It plans to join the Eurozone but still uses the Złoty. While much of Europe is mired in recession, Poland is growing, albeit modestly and, fortunately, it’s debt to GDP is a fairly benign 50%. So I’m rooting for Poland!
Onto orphan care. 
After WWII, Poland was demolished and left with an estimated one million war orphans who made their way into the state Dom Dziecka system. Dom Dziecka (the c is soft) means “Children’s Home.” That’s where Casey ended up.
In the course of writing my book, I connected with a couple in Poland – Vic, a South African, and his Polish wife, a social worker named Joanna – who gave me an illuminating view of orphanage care in Poland. They run a charity called Agape-Trust.org. I encourage you to check them out.
As we found in Mrągowo, the children’s basic needs were met – feeding, diapering and so on – but emotional needs were sorely lacking. In Casey’s orphanage I estimated that the orphan to caregiver ratio was roughly 10:1, not uncommon. What blew my mind, according to Vic, was that caregivers were trained NOT to bond with the children, even to the point of holding them face-away. It was considered unprofessional, much like a therapist-patient relationship. To make matters worse, as many as two thirds of the children in Casey’s orphanage were handicapped, so the caregivers’ top priority was protecting them from hurting themselves. The quiet ones, like Casey, were left on their own.
This system is changing, much like it did in the U.S. after WWII. Now with an estimated 25,000 orphans, the Dom Dzieckas are being phased out in favor of foster homes – smaller living units with better opportunities to form healthier relationships with caregivers. Foreign adoptions remain highly discouraged. Vic wrote to me recently about their work, something I always find fascinating. Here is his latest email.
We have registered our Polish charity, the Fundacja Dzieci w Rodzinie (Children in Families). We have been granted EU funds to run a series of workshops called “Creative Parents, creative Children.” This is aimed at disadvantaged families to help parents (mostly mothers) to broaden their vision and build self esteem.
Our focus is now on helping families in this area to prevent children ending up in the orphanage system. We still keep on with meetings for the orphanage children on Sunday afternoon/evening. Some of these children/teens will be the next generation of dysfunctional families. A few of the girls come out of the system already pregnant, and many are pregnant soon after leaving the system.
Unfortunately, young sociopath men have pathological radar that senses these vulnerable young women, and they have such low self esteem that they accept being abused. Even women with a good self esteem can be broken down if they are isolated from their family and friends by their abuser. These young women have no family worth that name and lack friends outside their depressive environment.
Lack of attachment is the primary reason we cannot connect properly with many of these children. Reading on your new website I found it very insightful the difference between bonding and attaching. We are hoping that we will be able to help some of these children, teens, and young adults about attachment with the help of animals.
We were given a couple of goats and bought a couple more. None of these goats were used to people. I tried to connect with these goats as an exercise by, as it turned out, attaching as opposed to bonding. It was done on the goats’ terms. It worked great, but of course these goats had been attached to their mothers, so I was building on something that was there already.
Well, we will see how this develops.
Good luck on finding a publisher. We will be praying for you.
Best regards,
Vic
God bless you Vic and Joanna!
Adoption and Orphan Care In Poland – Part 1 of 2
International adoptions have made headlines over the last few months with the cruel political gamesmanship going on in Russia right now. It’s nothing more than using orphaned children as pawns in a high stakes poker game with the United States.
A fellow adoption blogger in New York, Tina Traster, writes more extensively about the Russian ban on her blog, www.juliaandme.com. She and her husband adopted their daughter, Julia, from Siberia about a decade ago. If you are interested in this subject I urge you to visit her site.
I’d like to talk about Poland because that’s where we received Casey.
Our international adoption journey began in 1990 when there were relatively few channels available – Latin America, South Korea and then Romania. Erika and I believed at the time that our adopted child would have a hard enough time with her identity and self-image – the standing in the checkout line at the Safeway test – so we figured Romania, a European country.
It was only by chance that we learned through the adoption grapevine that a couple in nearby New Haven, CT. (we were living outside of Hartford at the time) had adopted a 2-year-old girl from Poland. That seemed like nothing less than a moonshot to us. Erika was of Polish decent and still had family there. Thus became our journey to Poland, and the rest as they say is history.
International adoptions from Poland are very rare. During the first decade of this century, roughly 45,000 children were adopted from Russia and 69,000 from China. There were only about 1,000 from Poland. There are many reasons for this. First, by comparison to Russia or China, Poland’s population (some 30 million or so) is relatively small, about the size of Canada. It’s a deeply Catholic country with strict abortion laws. Children end up in the orphanage system for a variety of reasons – unwanted pregnancies, shame, a perceived handicap, family dysfunction, substance abuse, or even temporary room and board for some families financially strapped. Poland has worked very hard to find homes for children where they believe they belong – in Poland. Otherwise, they look beyond their borders. It was only through this loophole that we found Casey. She was perceived “special needs” because she was a weak preemie, but there was no data to back that up.
International adoptions have become a political hot potato with accusations of Westerners “stealing” children, bribing local officials with money. That wasn’t the case for us in Poland and for many, many other adoptive parents. But to be fair to all sides, these concerns are legitimate. After all, we’re supposed to be looking out for the best interest of the children. But that doesn’t sit well with an adoptive parent who’s bonded with nothing more than a photo of their (hopeful) child to be. Trust me, we’d been there. Midway through our process with Casey, we’d heard grumblings through our attorney in Warsaw that the Polish Parliament was considering putting the brakes on all foreign adoptions of Polish children. Erika and I went into an emotional meltdown, having bonded with Casey through just a photo and some fragments we’d heard about her. So I truly empathize with those adoptive parents of Russian children now caught in limbo. It’s a terrible place to be, as though your child and your hopes have died.
In Part 2 I’ll talk about what Poland is doing for its orphans.
Parenting and Attachment 