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Dasha’s story - A story about love

Every child who lives in a children’s home sincerely believes that some day his mom will come to see him and take him home. But there are some children who cannot even dream about it. Their mothers, HIV positive themselves, abandoned them in maternity hospitals with their HIV status unknown.

There are some 4,500 children aged between one and five-years old abandoned by HIV infected mothers living in Russia today. It usually takes doctors about six months to confirm the HIV status of a child born to an HIV-infected mother. According to existing regulations such children have to live in an isolated hospital ward up to the age of 18 months. This means that the only person a child can see during this critical period for mental development is a nurse. At 18 months they should move to a baby home but half of these children continue to live in hospitals unofficially as baby homes refuse to accept them due to their HIV status.

    HIV-infected infants are almost never adopted either in Russia or abroad. But there are some women in Russia who have adopted HIV-infected children. Such families are off limits for mass media. It is for this reason that so little is known in Russia about families who have adopted HIV-infected children, but it is a great thing for the child and the new mother.

The moment HIV positive children leave the hospitals their lives become different, The children are literally dying from loneliness and lack of love until they are adopted. The transformation is staggering. These are really stories about love.

Dasha, a girl of 13 months

 Little Dasha was lucky. Vera, a 34-year-old woman from St Petersburg, found herself in the same hospital where Dasha lived. Vera saw the lonely little girl accidentally while Dasha was babbling to herself in her hospital cot. Vera found out that Dasha’s HIV-status had just been confirmed and her mother had abandoned her. By a great chance Vera had been thinking about the possibility of adopting a little girl as she already had two boys of her own and was unable to conceive again.

 “We were already putting together a package of documents required for adoption but for various reasons couldn’t bring the procedure to an end,” Vera explained. “While staying at hospital, I spotted a chubby little girl named Dasha with huge eyes and long lashes. She was 6 months old when I saw her for the first time”.    
 They were not happy to hear about Vera’s decision to adopt at the regional child welfare department.  “You should’ve heard the words they were saying,” Vera explained. “What are you doing? You must be crazy! You are an enemy of you own children!”  The staff proposed other children. “They were not interested in having Dasha adopted by anyone. They were trying to talk me out of it.”

Vera used to work at a children’s home and understands the importance of a mother for a child. “Dasha will have many problems in her life as it is,” she explained. “How can she deal with it without my help?” Her husband too is fully supportive and loves the beautiful child.
 
However there are difficulties.  Her mother stopped visiting her when she found out about Dasha’s diagnosis, and Vera is wary about enrolling her in the kindergarten, not because of her HIV status but because she is adopted, “they may terrorize her just for the fact that she was adopted.”  Even a nurse at the medical centre asked her to leave on learning the HIV status of the child, though the doctor apologized for the incident. 

Despite this terrible ignorance towards her, Vera feels an unbreakable bond of love for the child and it is through her example that the violently negative attitudes towards children with this disease, which does not transmit easily among children, will slowly ease.


By Anastasia Kuzina, Moskovsky Komsomolets

 

 
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