Here's to Hope

Milo’s temporary home is called Ymit Baby House. Ymit is pronounced “ooo-mitt” and it means 'hope.' This is the main entrance, where we enter the building every day. The bonding room windows can be seen just above the sign.

Here is a video of us walking through the front door and up into the bonding room.

When you walk through the halls it always smells good – like potatoes, noodles and sweet onions cooking. I was relieved because I had read about some orphanages always smelling sickeningly of cooked cabbage. The building was built to be an orphanage, probably 40-50 years ago. It is very large and has several wings with different living quarters for the different age groups – I would guess about 6-8 groups total. It’s clean and well-organized with a mish-mash of furniture and décor. The bonding playroom is large and fairly nice. It is located directly above the main entrance. Lace is everywhere. All the doors, indoor entrances to wings and many windows have lace curtains. They are often gently billowing in the breeze. In fact, you see this treatment all over Aqtobe. They like their lace! It serves as screens for bugs and mosquitoes – much prettier than gray screening, although not as effective.



There is one wing of the baby house that is leased to a business. It has a separate entry. Bayanna once said nobody knows what this business is and it all seems very mysterious. We see people coming and going, but we can't even speculate. They don't look particularly seedy.

During our first trip, the halls were surprisingly quiet. We rarely saw children and seldom heard any babies crying. We only got to visit Milo in the playroom, so we didn’t even see his groupmates, with the exception of the 2 times when they let us carry Milo back to the entrance door of his living quarters. As we sat him down in the doorway about 10 children toddled up to us and stared at us wide-eyed. I only saw them for a few seconds, but I’ll never forget a beautiful little Kazakh girl with huge brown eyes and a buzz haircut.


During this second trip we have seen many more children because when the weather is hot they take them outside to play and get some sun. We often see groups of children, including Milo’s group, on our drive in and during our walks around the building. They use these big, wooden cribs to corral the babies, and the toddlers play in the piles of dirt, rocks and the little bits of grass and weeds. A few times we retrieved Milo from his group playing outside and we got a good look at them. They were mesmerized by us. A couple of them seem very curious and precocious, and run after us as we walk away with Milo in our arms. We wave to them and they wave back and smile and squeal with delight until the caregivers have to reel them in.

As far as taking photos of the other children, the staff is understandably very protective of them, so these snapshots I took from afar of them playing outside are probably a rarity:



We won’t be allowed to take a tour of Milo’s living quarters, but we can give our camera to the caregivers to take pictures for us. I think the photos will be meaningful to him when he is older. I will also like to photograph all of his caregivers, and interview a couple of them on video to ask them to talk about their experiences with him and share their wishes for him.

The other day we saw a troop of toddlers walking around the baby house. They were all wearing only underwear, shoes and a hat because of the heat. The vision was unforgettable. Frank said he saw among them the 3-year old blonde girl we met in the beginning of our process and considered adopting. But she was at the other orphanage – the toddler house – so we were confused. Aina confirmed that her group had been temporarily moved to the baby house while they made repairs to her living quarters. The next day, we again passed her group playing outside on the broken pavement. We spotted her and she spotted us. We walked through the pack and said hello to them all. They all stared at us, but this little girl seemed to gaze most intensely. When we looked back several times, she was the only child still watching us. She was motionless, her little body still in the same position as when she first saw us, but her neck strained to turn all the way around. She stared until we rounded the corner and were out of sight. The rest of our walk was done in silence.


Many of the children in the orphanage are not adoptable because they are only there temporarily – perhaps until the parents can get back on their feet and take them back home. Even if a family member visits only once every 6 months, the children will not be adoptable. It’s great that parents have a place to take them when they cannot care for them. Once, upon entering the playroom, we saw a pretty young woman finishing up a visit with her tiny baby girl. She was an educated social worker, but had been out of work and was unable to provide for her daughter. We also once saw 3 people scurrying through the playroom carrying 3 tiny, new babies bundled up tightly. I think they were being delivered straight from the maternity hospital. All in a day’s work at Ymit.

There is a school behind the baby house, with a fence separating the school playground and the baby house grounds. We frequently see the school children playing there, and occasionally they come over to us to excitedly practice their English. I am often struck by the vast difference in the fortune of the children playing on one side of the fence as opposed to the other.


Many people have asked me the reasons why children are put into the orphanages. Kazakhstan is an “up and coming” country, but still is largely very poor. Many people cannot afford to take care of their children, and sometimes children are taken away from their parents because of neglect. Also, unwed mothers are still not very culturally accepted. Kazakhstan is trying to encourage and facilitate more local adoptions and I do applaud them for that. But I also speculate that they are now moving towards holding on to all the “locally adoptable” kids, whether they are adopted or not, and only allowing international adoption for those who are older or have some kind of medical need. This has not been conveyed to me by anyone in the adoption industry – it is just my theory based on what I have seen during the past few months in the Kaz adoption climate.

It doesn’t help the international adoption cause when Kazakhs hear about cases where American parents kill their adopted children, which happened for a second time about 2 weeks ago. I believe a parent left her child in the hot car for many hours. If something like this happens to an adopted child in Kazakhstan (and it does), it is not covered in the news here. The two times it has happened in America, it was a huge scandal. The first child died accidentally from what I understand.

Gulnara said that her friends sometimes ask her how she can do her job with a good conscience. Neither of these families were her clients. She just tells them that she has “all good families.” There are also rumors circulating throughout Kazakhstan that people adopt from abroad only to use the child’s organs for transplants for a family member. Before you say “balderdash” – maybe once upon a time someone needed a kidney and the new child was a match…who knows? But even if it did happen, it would be a rare case.

The staff at the baby house is comprised of all women. They range from very young to middle aged. They are almost all Kazakh. Some are very friendly, while others are more standoffish. I like the caregivers in Milo’s group – especially one named Raigul (Rye-Gool). She is the head nurse in his group. She reminds us of our sister-in-law’s Greek mother, Tula, who is also a nurse, and so we call Raigul “the Kazakh Tula.” I think Milo has 3 caregivers on the dayshift and 3 on the nightshift. We can tell that they have a real fondness for the children. Milo has been through all of the age groups in the other wings, so we often see his former caregivers in the halls and they make a big fuss over him and gasp “Ah!!! DAHmir!!!” and give him lots of affection, which he eats up.


The orphanage director is a very pretty, hip woman who seems to want to keep her distance. She is wearing the blue dress in our court photo from the last post. We met her our first day during the selection process, and we have walked past her many times in the halls since. She barely acknowledges us.

The caregivers have a very structured schedule for the children, which I will find out when I take Milo from the baby house so I can try to stick to it. We visit him during his play time (10am-12pm and 3:30pm –5:30pm.) I believe they awake at 7 am and go to bed around 6 or 7 pm. The rest of the time is filled with meals, pottying, lessons, music and naps. One day we heard happy music blaring from his group – someone told us it was their “music and dancing time.” I wish I could haved seen that! They have already begun potty training, but they put diapers on him during his time with us. Their potty training technique will be very difficult to continue outside an orphanage environment, so he will be in diapers for a while.


Three times we have set eyes on a most memorable figure at the baby house. We believe he is the groundskeeper. He is an elderly Kazakh man who always wears a dusty old, wrinkled black suit – even in 100-degree weather, while he tends the lawn and trims the bushes. He wears tattered dress shoes and a hat – sometimes a fedora and other times a baseball cap. He is portly and his old bones have evidently seen better days. He shuffles around the grounds, cutting the grass and weeds with a sickle. A sickle! In a dusty old black suit and fedora! I swear, it is the most peculiar sight and we are trying to get a good photo of him, but we don’t want to be rude.

Hope Baby House is certainly not the worst place for Milo to have spent the first 2 years of his life. We can feel positive energy in this place, even though at times it makes us terribly sad. I will have many fond memories of it. I am trying to capture as much as I can for our son because this is where our little beansprout grew his first roots.