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By CHRIS JOHNSON Times Leader Staff Writer
Saturday, December 25, 1999 Page: 1A
The first time Nora Coley cried over her infant son, it was not for pain
or love. It was pity.
Steven was on the floor of an orphanage. It was early May.
“He sat there and instantly started doing that orphanage rock. They rock
themselves (back and forth) because there’s nobody to do it for them,” Nora
said. “I felt so bad, I started crying.
“I picked him up and started rocking him, and he looked at me and
smiled.”
Seven months later, Steven stood in the living room of Nora and Charlie
Coley’s home in Lehman Township. In the warmth of the Coleys’ festively
decorated living room, it was time to eat some popcorn. Nora picked up Steven
and fastened a bib around his neck.
It read, “Baby’s First Christmas.”
As a visitor approached, Steven opened his mouth wide and shouted a hearty,
“Ahhh.”
“That’s his `hi,’ ” Nora explained, tenderly brushing her hand across her
adopted son’s nearly salon-perfect blond hair. “That’s as good as it gets at
the moment.”
But just being there was remarkable enough for the 17-month-old.
Because of a birth defect, Steven had been abandoned and overlooked by
adoptive parents in Nizhni Tagil, a town in the Ural Mountains of Russia. He
came to the Coleys only by the random chance of foreign adoption.
With 4,491 adoptions in 1998, Russia has become the No. 1 source for
foreign adoptions in the United States, according to the Evan B. Donaldson
Adoption Institute of New York City. China was second with 4,206 children.
Nora, 37, and Charlie, 36, said they chose to adopt because they were
unable to have their own children. They looked overseas because they had heard
too many stories about parents waiting years for an American baby or having an
adopted child taken away after the birth parents changed their minds.
When Russian parents give up their children, they have to sign a letter of
abandonment, which forfeits their rights to the child. Steven Alexander Coley,
born Stepan Alexandrovich Kulikov, was the fourth son of a 31-year-old cook,
who wrote that she was abandoning her child because of his birth defect.
Steven was born with a cleft lip and palate – his lip and the roof of his
mouth had not formed correctly. It can be corrected by surgery.
“The parents probably didn’t have any way to get it repaired or take care
of it,” Nora said.
The Coleys never met Steven’s parents.
All they knew of Steven before they adopted him was from his medical
records and a video. It was 32 seconds of someone, presumably a nurse, holding
Steven as if she was displaying a product.
To the Coleys, the gaping hole in Steven’s upper lip didn’t matter.
“Some people want a quote, unquote perfect child,” said Nora, a nurse at
Wilkes-Barre General Hospital.
A few weeks after watching the video, the Coleys were on a plane to Russia.
Everything was arranged through World Child International, a foreign
adoption agency in Maryland. It wasn’t cheap.
Charlie said the adoption process cost about $25,000, including travel,
paperwork and a home inspection by a local agency. He is an operations manager
at Fleet Pennsylvania Services in Moosic. The company gave him $5,000 and two
weeks paid vacation to help with the adoption.
Joselle Lencicki, Fleet’s human resources manager, said an estimated 29
percent of major U.S. companies now offer adoption benefits, up 11 percent
from 1993.
“It just really makes good business sense,” she said. “It enables us to
attract and retain skilled personnel in a tight labor market.”
The Coleys spent about a week in Russia, as arranged by the adoption
agency. The same day they saw Steven for the first time, they had to appear in
Russian court to have the child released into their custody.
“It took a while I think for everything to sink in,” Nora said. “It was
such a busy trip. I think that night (after court) it sunk in that `Wow, we’re
actually parents now.’… He was so cute. Oh, that blond hair.”
Less than a week after he was in the United States, Steven visited plastic
surgeon George Speace. A week later, he had surgery to repair his lip and only
a tiny scar remains. He will probably need six more surgeries by the time he’s
a teenager to repair his palate, and he also needs speech therapy.
“I know what he would have to go through,” said Charlie, who had speech
therapy as a child. “Emotionally as well as physically.”
Some warn that Russian orphans can be developmentally delayed because of
the neglect in which they’re raised. Steven is active and healthy.
He’s quickly bonded with his new family.
On a recent evening, he playfully chased the family’s border collie, Casey,
around the living room. Charlie said the best part of his day is picking up
his son from Steven’s grandmother’s house.
“He wants to be picked up immediately and hugged,” Charlie said. “Every
day, no matter how hard my day can be, I look forward to that.”