Growing up in the late seventies and early eighties, I spent Monday nights of my formative years with TVs Little House on the Prairie. As I stared in traumatized disbelief, Caroline Ingalls labored to give birth, birthing my desire to adopt in the process. Envisioning myself the next James Herriot, I attended veterinary school, graduating with a DVM degree. Months before commencement, it was evident I missed my calling; regardless, I practiced veterinary medicine seven years, enjoying most of them. Eventually I left the profession to raise our daughter, a charming, curly-haired pixie we welcomed from Guatemala; four years later, our Chinese daughter arrived. We had no business being at an adoption fair only six weeks after returning from China, but it didnt deter us. Browsing booths in the exhibit hall, my encounter with the Russian Orphan Lighthouse Project was as inadvertent as fortuitous. There, at an inauspicious booth, I stumbled across both my lifes mission and the circuitous path leading our family to a new son and daughter.

In the six years since that November meeting, our family gained two older Russian children. What I saw in Russia and learned in the process was Exhibit A of the gravity of the orphans plight. Newly armed with a righteous sense of urgency, disengagement was never an option. With the tireless support of my husband and children, Ive now coordinated nine Lighthouse Project trips to Michigan and Oklahoma, bringing seventy-three different Russian orphans aged 5-15, some of them more than once. As coordinator, I seek families willing to host an orphan for ten days, run a Russian-language Vacation Bible School, and give the bushes a thorough beating in search of forever families. Such a succinct description of my duties belies the thousands of hours invested in them, and the phones Ive worn out in the process.

My task is formidable, since most potential adoptive families desire babies. When I succeed, the fulfillment is more than adequate to the effort, as finding families for kids literally saves their lives. Fifty-nine children, including sibling groups as large as three, kids as young as six and as old as seventeen, and children with sundry special needs have forever families from my trips to date. Motivating my Russian work is knowledge that no safety net surrounds the kids who age out; in America, orphans without families have opportunities available to them of which Russian orphans could only dream.

While exact numbers depend on the source consulted, most agree the statistics for Russian orphans who age out of the system without families are grim. Kids leave the orphanage by age 18; lacking productive alternatives, many girls turn to prostitution, many boys to crime. Life expectancy on the street is brutishly short and measured in months. Aged-out orphans are as likely to commit suicide as to become productive members of society.

A few weeks ago, especially bad news from Russia dropped a whole bushel of lemons in our laps. A new resolution passed by the Russian government smacked a moratorium on international travel by all childrens groups to several countries, the United States included, until the swine flu pandemic subsides. Making our lemony windfall more sour, the news arrived a few weeks prior to the kids, quashing a trip I had planned for months. It mattered not that host families were eager to share ten days with the children, or that several of said families expressed intentions of adopting the children they planned to host. In its attempt to curb flu, the powers protected the orphans, not by sending them to American families who might love them and want to adopt them, but by keeping them at home in their orphanages.

Faced with an obstacle, our director is wont to encourage, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Epiphany followed advice when she realized if Lighthouse cannot bring the kids to America, it can take the families to Russia in a mirror image of our past forty-four trips. Thus inspired, she crafted something potable from our citrus bonanza.

So this fall the Russian Orphan Lighthouse Project will bring a group of Americans to Moscow to visit with orphans available for adoption.  While in country, travelers will spend time with an orphan and sightsee together at some of Moscow's most famous landmarks. Travelers need not be interested in adoption, though they will have the first option to adopt the child they host. Families planning to adopt will complete the requisite paperwork in the States, returning to Russia to finish their adoption six to nine months later. Happily, kids will continue to have chances at a family while the swine flu scare rages, so Im falling in love with this "Lighthouse in Reverse" just as I did our old trips.

On the coattails of the Lighthouse Project, Ive met people whose beings brim with the same compassion for orphans; some of these kindred spirits are as dear as sisters to me. God willing, there are many more children, and a few friends, to come. My training for this quasi-volunteer position has been as rigorous, expensive, and all consuming as veterinary school, provided by three girls and a boy who work to keep Mom on her toes and seventy-three kids whose would-be futures have provoked me to repeated and frenetic action. A full-time position as a veterinarian would be less time-consuming and more prestigious, but since finding my true calling, I've never looked back.

If you would like to travel to Russia as part of this special project, please contact Rebekah DeNooy or visit Lighthouse Project today.