Moldovan Adoptee Tells Her Story

“Weighing a below-average 32 pounds when she was adopted from a Moldovan orphanage at the age of 5, Sambuilque Swallow didn’t have the strength to close a car door.

Now, almost 20 years after her adoption, she says she has everything she could ever want or need — including a little family of her own.

Two days after Swallow’s second birthday, her birth mother dropped her off at the gate to an orphanage in Balti, Moldova called Casa de Copii, or “house of the children.”

Swallow said she remembers everything from her time in the orphanage — the good and the bad.

However, the good memories are few.

“I was treated, I think, a little bit more fairly than the other kids because I had blonde hair and blue eyes,” she said, choking back tears.

The orphanage rated the children, Sharlene Call said, based on health and beauty.

“They rated the kids. They actually had a number — each child had a number in the orphanage and she was rated number two because of her blonde hair and blue eyes,” she said. “She was the favorite child, so she got a lot of privileges.”

Swallow said her privileges were cooking, cleaning and taking care of the babies — and she loved it.

She was taking care of babies when she herself, was still a baby.

“She was 5 years old … (and) had on a little white hat and a bucket of milk and she would go to each crib, take the bottle, dip it in the milk, put the lid on and give it to the baby and go to the next. Then she would go around and change their wrap … that happened twice a day,” Sharlene Call said.

Life in the orphanage was often filled with fear of getting in trouble. While Swallow said she was treated better than the other kids, that didn’t keep her from getting hit.

One time, an orphanage worker got so mad at her that the worker smashed her head into a brick wall, breaking her nose.

“I think I was ironing clothes and I did something wrong and I got my head smashed into the wall, that’s what I remember,” Swallow said.

Swallow’s father, Leonard Call, remembers dismal conditions when he and Sharlene Call went to pick her up from the orphanage in 1996.

“There were just kids everywhere,” he said, guessing that there were more than 100 kids in the orphanage while Swallow was there.

Children ate once a day and slept on wooden boards for beds.

“That’s why I like sleeping on the floor,” Swallow said.

Children had to leave the orphanage at the age of 8, Sharlene Call said. Then, they could go to a school, which Leonard Call said was just like an orphanage. After they turned 12, they were put on the streets to fend for themselves.

“Most would end up doing something crime related so they could end up in some sort of institution like jail where they could be taken care of,” Sharlene Call said.

If not for being adopted, such a fate could have become reality for Swallow.

“The reality is, unfortunately, of being turned out on the streets in Moldova when you were 12,” Leonard Call said. “The kids had to find ways to survive or they would get abducted by the sex traffickers or they would turn to that kind of stuff.”

And because she’s a pretty girl, she would have been sold, Sharlene Call said.

A dream come true

Sharlene Call said God had a hand in Swallow’s adoption.

Some friends of Leonard and Sharlene’s had been to Romania to adopt a baby boy, and went to Moldova to do a service project. There, they saw Swallow with her little pail of milk and knew she belonged to the Calls.

“They came home and they said, you have a daughter in Moldova,” Sharlene Swallow said. “She looks just like your other daughters, which she does; I have two other daughters and she looks just like them.”

She said that as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she knew her friend was speaking with the spirit of the Lord.

“I knew what she meant,” Sharlene Call said. “I knew what she was telling me was the truth and that we really did have a daughter there.”

In the couple of days that followed, Sharlene Call had a dream about Swallow.

“I was in the Primary presidency so I took pictures of kids at their baptisms,” she said. “I took a picture of this little boy at a baptism and when I got it developed and looked at it, it wasn’t the little boy. It was a little girl — it was her — but I hadn’t seen her yet, and there was a woman kind of standing up in the air, if you will, behind her. And it was my grandma, who had passed away.”

Sharlene Call told Leonard Call about the dream, which then made him wonder how they were going to get the $10,000 it would cost to adopt Swallow. They had a son who was getting ready to go on a church mission, and they had just built a house. Suddenly, money started coming from weird places, she said.

“We just said, OK, we’re really going to do this,” Sharlene Call said. “Then we got the picture, and that was her. It was the little girl. That was one more affirmation that we were supposed to go and get her.”

Meant to be

In December of 1995, when Leonard and Sharlene Call were supposed to make the trek to Romania and Moldova to adopt Swallow, the United States government experienced a shutdown, pushing their journey back six weeks. Then winter got worse, and the weather and roads in Eastern Europe were bad. This caused stress, as spring came and the couple knew their son was expecting his mission call, and they were afraid if they left they might not make it back in time for his departure.

Then, one Wednesday morning in May, they got the phone call they had been waiting for. It was the Romanian embassy, since Moldovan adoptions were done through the Romanian government, saying they needed to be there the following Monday morning. That same day, the Call’s son received his mission call in the mail. Coincidentally, it was to Bucharest, Romania.

“So we all ran around together and got our shots and everything we needed,” Leonard Call said.

Swallow remembers playing out in the sandbox — which Leonard Call said was really just a yard with dried up grass and dirt — the day her new parents came to meet her in May 1996. She was dressed, and taken to the doctors and the head of the orphanage’s office to be introduced.

“We had a Polaroid with us, took a picture and left it with her because we had to leave for a week because we had to go to the court proceedings and had to wait a week before we could actually get her. So she kept that picture and I guess she carted it around with her the whole week,” Leonard Call said.

Swallow said she was telling everybody that they were hers. She was definitely nervous when they left, she said, worried that they wouldn’t come back.

But come back they did.

“When they finally gave her to us they just handed her to us naked. She had no clothes,” Leonard Call said.

He said they had been warned, so they brought clothes and other things she might need with them.

I still have the outfit,” Swallow said. “In fact my daughter wore it last year. She loves it.”

Sharlene Call was nervous to take Swallow away from the orphanage because of a “Babooshka,” which means grandmother in Russian, she kept talking about.

“I said to Octavian, our interpreter, I said, I’m really nervous that I’m taking this child that somebody, a grandma, is still coming to see,” she said. “And how can she be adopted, because you have to be abandoned, and to be abandoned means no family member comes to visit you for more than six months. But this grandma comes every week. And the orphanage workers assured us that there was no one that came to see her.”

After arriving in Utah, the Call family was looking through some family photos, and Swallow was looking in a photo album and pointed to a photo of Sharlene Call’s grandmother and exclaimed, “Babooshka!”

It was the grandmother Sharlene Call saw in the photo of the little girl in her dream.

“But my grandma had died and was gone so I think that my grandma was there, taking care of her,” Sharlene Call said.

An adjustment period

Adjusting to an American life with a loving family wasn’t hard at first, Swallow said, but she began to feel like she didn’t belong when she started to go to school.

“She came in June, and by September she knew enough English to start school, but it was kind of sad because we went to kindergarten round-up, I took her into this school … and she just looked up at me and said, ‘So I’m going to live here now?’ She thought I was dropping her off and leaving her there,” Sharlene Call said.

She said Swallow would tell kids she was an orphan and they refused to play with her because they didn’t know what an orphan was.

“I had to tell her, ‘Honey, you’re not an orphan. An orphan is what you were there. Now you have a family and we’re your family,’” Sharlene Call said.

Swallow would often hide, take or throw away kids’ shoes after getting mad at them, she said. Leonard Call said taking away shoes was a punishment in the orphanage.

“And It’s so funny because I hate shoes,” Swallow said. “If I could go to Walmart without shoes, I’d go to Walmart without shoes.”

She started making friends around the third grade, but kids could be unkind.

“I was made fun of in school because I had an accent, and was skinny and everyone didn’t realize why I was so skinny,” Swallow said.

Despite having depression in high school, she never used her adoption as a crutch.

“She knew she was adopted, and it’s OK to embrace that, I think,” Leonard Call said.

Sharlene Call said Leonard Call would always tell Swallow, especially during her teenage years, that her worst day in America is better than her best day in the Moldovan orphanage.

“One of the things I’ve always said; no matter what happened, or how her life turned out, it was going to turn out better here than it ever could have there,” Leonard Call said.

Where is she now?

Swallow graduated from Weber High School in 2009. She met her husband, Jared Swallow, in March 2010 and they married that November. They have two children, Kirina, 4, and Korbin, 1. She said her proudest accomplishment is becoming a mom, because that’s what she’s always wanted to be. She also has her own photography business and studio out of her home, Swallow Bird Photography.

“I definitely have a better life,” Swallow said. “I’m glad I’m not out in the streets being a prostitute — what if I hadn’t gotten adopted, that definitely is a possibility, or gone with another family, because I love the family I have.”

She said adoption has given her love she wouldn’t have ever been able to have in Moldova, and that she couldn’t ask for anything better.”

Clearfield woman shares Eastern European adoption story[Standard Examiner 8/3/15 by Sonja Carlson]

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