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The
cowboy from Kazakhstan
It’s
not uncommon to get a first glimpse of your child while he’s
screaming at the top of his lungs. But not, usually, while
screaming a poem in Russian.
Francine
Blume had long pictured herself adopting a child. “For
a long time, I didn’t want to get married,” she
laughs, “I just wanted to adopt.” She changed her
mind about marriage after she met Capitol Hill economist (and
AU MFA student) Matt Salomon, but the drive to adopt stayed
as strong as ever. That was fine with her husband; after all,
he is adopted, as are his sister and two cousins. It’s
such a family tradition that one relative once asked with
surprise, “You mean you’re not adopted?!?”
But
after the couple decided to take the plunge, Blume, who is
director of experiential education at AU, would get an experiential
education of her own.
Deciding
that older children were in particular need of homes, they
ended up working through an agency in Kazakhstan. Boys, they
learned, were hardest to place, so they asked for a boy and
soon received the first videotapes.
“It felt like video dating in a way. Very strange. You
feel very uncomfortable,” Blume says.
But
not anywhere near as uncomfortable as one boy on a tape. “They
ask him to sing a song. A look of terror came over his face.
He’s shaking his face ‘no,’ they’re barking
orders at him, and he’s trying not to perform like a
trained monkey, but he’s trying to obey his teachers.”
He
won their heart.
The
word from the orphanage was simple: He loved stories, poetry,
and art. The word from a doctor who viewed the tape as part
of the process was less comforting: He seemed to be profoundly
retarded.
Blume
and her husband weren’t convinced. They showed the tape
to a friend, an Argentinian psychiatrist, “and he’s
laughing hysterically. He says, ‘This kid is totally
normal.’ Russian friends of ours said, ‘The questions
[to the boy] are kind of stupid, but his answers are making
sense.’”
Not
knowing what to expect, they took leave from their workplaces
last year and flew to Kazakhstan to meet the boy for themselves.
By the time he spent the night in their hotel room, paging
through a photo album compiled by the career center’s
Heather Fox and disappearing into the bathroom to make experiments
with the soap, they knew they’d found their child.
A
year later finds Maxim in second grade, loving science, reading
at grade level in English, and donning a cowboy outfit to
become his alter ego, “Slick.” His teenaged stepsisters,
one of whom is an AU student, adore their new brother.
“We’re
really lucky,” Blume says. And so is Slick, the cowboy
from Kazakhstan. —SA
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