Not-So-Breaking News: Justin Hansen is Living Comfortably in SOS Village Home in Russia UPDATED

We apologize for not getting this information out sooner. This news was published on December 2, 2011 in RIA Novosti and we just learned of it through today’s Shelbyville Times-Gazette story [that has some of the details wrong]. It certainly generates more questions about the motives of WACAP and the assorted players in the lawsuit aspect of this case.

Our previous posts on Justin Hansen/Artyom Savelyev can be found here.

We strongly suggest viewing the video of Artyom/Justin at
Life in an SOS village: how one mother brought up 17 children [RIA Novosti 12/2/11 by Yulia Okutina and Artiom Belogurov]. He is in an SOS Village home with five other children, not sixteen as the US media story says.  The foster mother had other children previously who no longer live in the home.

“Teacher Vera Yegorova is always ready to hear a distress signal and come to the rescue. She is an SOS mother who raised several generations of abandoned children. Nine-year-old Artyom Savelyev, who lost parents on two occasions – first in Russia and later in America – is the seventeenth child in the family of this wonderful woman.

A Mother’s bliss

“I always wanted to have a big family with many children that would laugh happily and call me mother. But nature gave me no such chance,” she says.

But fate ruled in Yegorova’s favor that she would, indeed, have a big family and a house resounding with the voices of children. Fifteen years ago she came across a newspaper report that Russia was launching a project to build social support villages for 12 or 14 houses, each house intended for one SOS mother and six to eight children.

“Once in 1996, I bought a newspaper for something to read on my way to the office. I usually skimmed the news and solved the crossword puzzles. I don’t know what made me look at the inside page on that day. A story entitled ‘Mothering Is Now a Profession’ jumped out at me,” she recalled.

The managers of an SOS village were recruiting mothers who could also educate social orphans. Even though Vera Yegorova was a trained mathematician and computer programmer and had never taught before, she immediately sent a letter to the address listed in the advertisement. Four days later, Yelena Bruskova, the President of Russian SOS Villages, invited her for an interview.

“They gave me a book, Every Shilling Helps, with photographs of Western villages and children. The captions said how the children were faring and what they achieved in life. It got myself thinking that nothing of the kind was possible in this country. My perception was that orphanages were a totally different thing,” she said.

Firstlings and followers

After several months of training, Vera reported for work as a professional mother. “It was an excruciating experience waiting for the arrival of your first children. I was afraid they wouldn’t like the house or me,” she said.

The American son

Artyom Savelyev was adopted by an American family and lived in the United States for six months, after which his adoptive mother, Torry Ann Hansen, put him on a Moscow-bound plane with a note reading, “I no longer want to parent this child,” in his pocket. Prior to that adoption he lived in the Primorye Territory with his mother who was subsequently stripped of her parental rights. Artyom was confined to an orphanage, where he spent several years.

“Counting Artyom, I have 17 children. He is so exhausted by plane flights and going back and forth between orphanages and parents,” she says.

The boy came to her SOS house two weeks ago. He was accepted as a family member in no time at all and made friends with the other five children. He started attending school and likes it there, and now he’s bringing home his first good grades.

Artyom is very respectful of his adoptive parents. “He called me ‘mom’ on the second day,” Vera confessed.

So far the boy is still afraid of leaving the village. Not even a skating-rink, a water park, or still a children’s theater can lure him away. He never deviates from one path – the one leading from home to school and back. But he is fond of village life as it is. He is reluctant to recall his past experiences in America and says he has turned over a new leaf.

“That he lived in America we learned from his papers. Artyom said nothing about that. He even claimed that he knew no English when we were buying textbooks for school,” Vera says.

Family celebrations and a mother’s woes

Children can stay under their social mother’s wing until age 15, when they have to move to a Youth House, the next stage in the SOS system. The Youth House is a hostel for young people where former SOS villagers can live and master trades.

Children from two of her earlier groups are now educated people with jobs and families of their own. Their SOS mother is proud to have three grandchildren, and a fourth one is coming soon. Her current “third” group is made up of four boys and two girls. But on days-off and holidays the household tends to expand several times over. The “old boys” (and girls) come for a visit, bringing the number of inhabitants to 40 or more.

New children quickly get used to the grownups even though they never lived with them in one family. “It’s important for the new arrivals to see what kind of relations we have with the first children. It becomes clear to them that they won’t be left alone in the future,” she says.

She would never part with her dearly loved pupils, even though they are not blood kin. One year from now she is going to retire, but she hopes to be allowed to look after her 13- and 14-year-olds till they come of age. “I’ll adopt the three younger kids and take them with me. It’s for the best. It’s my fate that I am here,” she says.

The Tennessee article adds “Last year, a court in Russia demanded that the Hansens pay $2,500 a month in child support. Documents obtained by the T-G show that a judge for Moscow City Court asked for Hansen “to pay alimony for the maintenance of a minor amount of 75,000 rub(les).” This supposedly is the reason for the current WACAP lawsuit.

Other source:
Russian boy finds adoptive family
[Shelbyville Times-Gazette 1/10/12 by Brian Mosely]

REFORM Puzzle Pieces

Poorly conducted in this case. Torry Hansen was not ready to take on this older child. Training about postinstitutionalization should have been better. Were local resources discussed in the homestudy?

This case highlights the pitfalls of having an out-of-state placing agency, not having appropriate monitoring and not being aware of local resources.

We need to make sure that what happened to Justin in the US NEVER happens again. Rightly, the adoptive mother should have accountability. That is a loophole in US laws that she is not. But WRONGLY, the adoption agencies who approved and placed Justin are not really being held accountable. Who is that homestudy agency again? That is state-held secret, apparently. That agency gets to completely wash their hands of this case. WACAP was suspended for a brief time from Russia placements, but not from a Washington state standpoint or other-country standpoint. Brief suspensions are a joke. Why should any agency get to continue when major mistakes are made? To think that WACAP tried to install an adoptive parent who adopted from Korea and never met Justin as a guardian in this situation early on shows how utterly ridiculous the adoption industry is. Don’t even begin to argue that no other agency could possibly take its place. You don’t have a right to place children. You are obligated to do it correctly and when you fail, you should be punished or shut down.

At this point, it appears that Justin, now known as Artyom again, has a future. He is back to speaking Russian, is going to school and the foster mother has stated that she wants to adopt him. His citizenship is a mess that needs clearing up–you know, that is what the diplomats are for-figure it out! If over one THOUSAND Haitian kids can sloppily come to the US on Humanitarian Parole after an earthquake, they can figure out how to solve this for ONE child.  He appears to be honest in the video interview about not wanting to come back to the US, so let him have a life. This child has had enough people fail him. He doesn’t need another break in attachment so some adoption agency can place more kids and look like cream.

Update: Pictured happy at last: Russian boy rejected by his adopted mother in America now thriving in his foster home outside Moscow [Daily Mail 3/9/12 by Will Stewart]

“The Kremlin’s tsar for children Pavel Astakhov took a personal interest in the case but despite his efforts, initially the right home for the boy eluded them. Yet now almost two years on from his horror flight, Justin finally feels loved and cared for – thanks to a remarkable Russian foster mother.

Once again, he now lives under the name he was born with – Artem Saveliev – and he is approaching his tenth birthday.

Vera Egorova, 53, is the woman he now calls Mama. She is an ‘SOS mother’ in Tomilino village, part of an unusual and highly effective project to rescue society’s most neglected children.
A former office worker, she has no children of her own yet she now mothers six, all under 18, and has 11 more who have grown up and left her village. To her, they are all her sons and daughters, and she raises them with her husband Vasiliy Tibenko, 46.

‘Artem came to live with us on 25 October last year (2011),’ she recalled. ‘We had a party that day – my daughter Sonya turned 9 – we invited Artem to join us and eat something but he was not so keen. ‘

He was ‘exhausted by plane flights and going back and forth between orphanages and foster parents’, she said.

‘He then walked around our house, met the other children. I went with him saying – ‘Look, this is your home now, you will live with us here, in our family’.

‘I told him there are two more kids of the his age and he would not feel lonely. In the evening our kids talked to him and told about our life – that we are one family here, kids call each other brothers and sister, and here are your mother and father.

‘We don’t say orphanage, and we want Artem to find a good family here, not just another orphanage.

‘Next day Artem began to call me ‘Mama’. He asked me for a notebook and a pen and said he wanted to write a diary.

‘He also went to our local school. Now, almost six months later, I can say he’s coping well. He is a good student in school, not the very best but all is fine. There are a few slight behavioural problems, but this is natural, he’s a typical boy. He went to the winter camp with other kids for New Year and learned to skate. He says he likes it here, especially that we are a family rather than an orphanage.’

Her description of him is far from the label that Hansen and her mother tagged him with before packing him back to Russia.

‘Artem is a nice boy, very kind and responsive. He is also very reasonable, as if he is older than his years,’ said Vera.

‘He likes to help me around the house, to clean and cook. The other day he helped me to clean and fry potatoes.

‘I simply do not see that Artem has problems communicating with other children. I think he is mentally normal, there’s no problem to establish good contact with him. He is just a child with a very sad life experience and our task is to help him. One day if he wants to tell me his story, I’ll listen carefully, but I won’t push him, if he wants to forget it, it is his right to do so.’

‘I was shocked when I heard Artem’s story, who wouldn’t be?

‘Whatever happened in his American family, that woman did not have a moral right to throw him away like a useless thing.

‘I am sure there is a clever legal way to cancel adoption if it is all going wrong so I cannot begin to understand why she chose such an inhuman way.’

She said that Artem now wants to forget his time in the US, so painful was the ending. ‘He does not like to recall anything about America and does not want to answer any questions about it. He openly tells me this.’
She stressed: ‘Frankly, I was also surprised to know that normal healthy kids like Artem can be adopted by foreigners. I was sure before that it was sick and disabled kids can go to live abroad where foreign people have money and facilities to help them and take proper care.

‘I do not think it is right to let healthy good Russian kids to leave our country. We must take better take care of them ourselves.’

‘I am glad that God gave me the chance to work and live here.

‘I became a mum here, I started a family, I just became happy here. I am so proud that I am a mum of 17 kids, can you believe it? Artem is the 17th and he is loved as much as all the others which is as much as any child can be loved.

‘My elder kids come to see me with their children and they all call me grandma. ‘

This way Artem and the other younger children see that they will have a proper family, too, after they grow up.

‘My husband and I now plan to officially adopt all the six kids including Artem who live with us now, so we will be a totally normal legal family,’ she confided.

Astakhov’s determination that right must be done by this child have paid off, and the Kremlin official regularly finds time to visit and check up on Artem’s progress.

Vera spoke as a US judge this week ruled that Hansen, from Shelbyville in Tennessee, must pay child support even though she has not been prosecuted for neglect.

Update 2: “A former Shelbyville boy being cited as one reason to ban U.S. adoptions in Russia is actually healthy, happy and looking toward a bright future, a local attorney involved in his case said Thursday [December 27, 2012].”

“Artyom Saveliev — or Justin Hansen, as he was known in Shelbyville — lives with a foster family that has two other children close to his age, Crain said. While his guardians could draw from the trust holding his adoptive mother’s payments, they’re hoping to save the money for college, he said.”

Former Shelbyville boy happy in Russia, but adoption process has become complicated

[The Tennessean 12/27/12 by Heidi Hall]