Today is Tuesday, September 6th, 2005; Karen's Korner #627
This is an email that we received yesterday from Murray Wise, a former Clarion resident, who now lives in Florida. A while back, I wrote a Karen's Korner about the Wise family and their interest in, and work with, bringing Russian orphans to America and helping them to be placed in to homes here. Even though the Wise's are beginning their trip through the 50s, they have added two elementary-aged kids to their "family collection".
The story below is one written by a friend of theirs; it is heart rendering. There seems to be numerous needs everywhere we look in the world today:
MY MAX
It was a gray day in April of 1999 when Dmitry Yurievich Demchenko and his little brother Maxim Yurievich Morozov were taken for the last time from the cold little shack which they had known as home.
For months they had been left without food, warmth and love fr om anyone except each other and somehow they had survived. Their survival had depended on their own courage and willingness and so they had found food enough “picking through the garbage” and warmth enough clinging to each other. Being four years apart, Dmitry became the provider and today he can very vividly recall what that responsibility entailed.
The boys were taken to a temporary asylum (unknown to us) where they slept together and Dmitry again was told to take care of his little brother. He will tell you that it isn’t all fond memories of the months spent there but the cruelest memory that haunts him to this day is “one day I woke up and my Max was gone.”
Details of exactly what happened next are a bit sketchy but Dmitry ultimately ended up at the V.P. Stavsky Orphan Boarding School of Nevel which would be his home for the next three years. After two years went by, the offer of a summer camp program put some hope back in to the empty blue eyes. He had been chosen to go to America where he would enjoy American life and culture and unbeknownst to him, meet his forever family.
When my husband and I were introduced to Dmitry, it was as if it was always meant to be. He jumped up into my arms as if to say, “I pick you” and we never looked back. That began the one year battle of forms, paperwork and legalities that lead us to a court date in Pskov, Russia in January. A time of year that would scare the fainthearted into rethinking the reality of what was in store. But with enough warm gear for all three of us, we made the journey of a lifetime that would change three people’s lives forever. On that freezing cold day in a toasty warm little courtroom, we stood before the judge and prosecutor and listened while our future was handed down. Dmitry would be our son from that day forward.
Dimitry Joseph Mossman took on his American name and his American life as if he had been entitled. The only mention of his former life would come in our goodnight talks when he would cry and say, “why did they have to take my Max away from me?”
What a joyous gift it would be to be able to tell our son that Maxim has been found and that they would have the opportunity to re-unite and begin a real relationship of getting to know each other through letters, emails, phone calls and summer holidays together.
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