Armenian Adoption Adventure explores the latest in Adoption news from Armenia. Armenian Adoption Adventure has a network of 40 people worldwide that have adopted from Armenia. God Bless you on this difficult journey.
A family who adopted an infant from Armenia eight years ago recently adopted her 16-year-old brother as well. From left, Erik Petrosyan, 16, Lauren Spiglanin, Tom Spiglanin and Arianna, who they adopted first. (Chuck Bennett/Daily Breeze/SCNG)
A Rancho Palos Verdes family who adopted an infant from Armenia eight years ago recently adopted her 16-year-old brother, Erik Petrosyan. (Chuck Bennett/Daily Breeze/SCNG)
His family’s flight was scheduled to leave in less than 12 hours, but Tom Spiglanin was still standing outside the United States embassy in freezing cold Armenian weather.
He planned to pick up his newly adopted son’s visa from just beyond the embassy’s front doors, but so far he hadn’t received any indication it would actually be issued.
“If we don’t get this visa, we don’t fly home,” he said.
Then, late in the afternoon while his worrying mounted, an email arrived saying the travel document was ready.
The touch-and-go situation at the embassy last month was just one of the final hurdles Spiglanin and his wife, Lauren, overcame to bring their 16-year-old son from Armenia to join their family in Rancho Palos Verdes. The Spiglanins had adopted Erik’s younger sister, Arianna, in 2009. Now, nearly eight years later, they say their family is complete.
The process of adopting Erik began when his grandmother died in late 2013. She had been caring for Erik since his mother died shortly after she gave birth to Arianna.
At that point, his aunt contacted Lauren Spiglanin and asked if she and Tom would adopt Erik.
“And I said, ‘absolutely,’ ” Lauren said.
NEVER FORGOT ERIK
Adopting Erik, who will keep his last name of Petrosyan, had been on her mind ever since they took Arianna home eight years ago. They’d kept in touch with him via Skype several times a year while they were raising Arianna, who was born premature and, because of complications, with a brain injury that left her with a condition similar to cerebral palsy. Now the bright, young 8-year-old gets help speaking via a display that tracks her eye movements. She’s made it clear that she’s happy to have Erik home with her, Tom Spiglanin said.
Even though they’d already adopted Arianna, Lauren Spiglanin said the process of bringing Erik to California wasn’t any easier this time around.
In fact, it was even more difficult.
Because Erik is a teenager and wasn’t living in an orphanage, new hurdles had to be overcome that the Spiglanins didn’t face when they adopted Arianna.
Right off the bat, they hit a roadblock — most of the attorneys they contacted in the U.S. to help facilitate the international adoption turned them away. Erik’s age, and the fact that he was living in a private home rather than an orphanage, were too much for them to take on, she said.
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After working her way through several personal connections, Lauren Spiglanin contacted David Adishian of Palos Verdes Estates, a longtime family friend, for help. He put her in touch with his son, who finally connected her with an attorney in Georgia who said she could help them.
“I was flying high,” Lauren Spiglanin said. “Then we came to a slam.”
UNEXPECTED ROADBLOCK TO ADOPTION
Just as the couple was making their way through the U.S. side of the process to adopt Erik, they were hit with another bombshell — the attorney they’d hired to help them through the international adoption process broke the news to them that she wasn’t approved to facilitate the adoption in Armenia.
One night, shortly after that setback, Lauren Spiglanin decided to take matters into her own hands. After an online search, she sent an email to the Armenian minister of justice. In it, she told the minister that every day since they adopted Arianna she had thought of Erik, and that every single day it weighed on her.
“Basically, I just poured my heart out,” she said. “I guess (the minister) was really touched by my email and the photos I sent of Ari.”
Within hours of that email, the minister gave a special approval for the Spiglanins to adopt Erik, and they were back on track.
In what turned out to be a three-year process, they filed one piece of paperwork after another, conferred with attorneys in the U.S. and across the Atlantic and, finally, after a court hearing in Armenia, received approval to bring Erik back to California with them.
After obtaining Erik’s visa from the embassy in Armenia, the Spiglanins arrived back home Feb. 9, nearly three weeks after they’d left for Armenia.
A FULL FAMILY NOW
During the roughly eight years between bringing Arianna home and adopting Erik, Tom Spiglanin said, it felt like something was missing in their family.
“It was like there was something incomplete about us. We weren’t full,” he said.
Now, Lauren is working to open a memory care facility for patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in Torrance while Erik attends Palos Verdes High. He has a knack for photography and likes his history class. And the Spiglanins said they’ve been contacted by multiple teachers praising Erik.
The only bumps they’ve experienced so far have stemmed from a language barrier. But, with Tom’s limited grasp of Armenian and Lauren’s Armenian family, they eventually find ways to work around that, they said.
They’re looking forward to the future when Erik becomes more acclimated, and the communication barriers become easier to overcome, Tom Spiglanin said.
They’re planning a trip to Hawaii sometime in the future — Lauren is pushing for April, but Tom says that’s not likely.
“There’s an intensity that you’re operating at to get everything done, and this adoption is just a part of what we do,” he said. “So I’m looking forward to relaxing.”
Dr. Sabba and the Kids at Kharberd Orphanage: Making Hippotherapy More Accessible in Armenia
It's spring in Armenia, and the children at Kharberd Orphanage, just outside Yerevan, are excited because they can play with their old friend Dr. Sabba.
Dr. Sabba is an Armenian from the diaspora. He was born and raised in Lebanon, and came to Armenia five years ago. He’s a therapist at the orphanage and unfortunately can only work when it’s warm outside. The winter months are too cold to perform his specific kind of therapy. However, when he can work, the children get excited.
By the way, Dr. Sabba is a horse.
According to one of his close friends Sasun Kosakyan, a therapist and art teacher at the orphanage, the children love Sabba. When speaking tohim, Sasun described a recent encounter between one of the children and Sabba after a long absence.
“Today, one of the kids, when they took them to do the therapy, he saw the horse and he hugged the horse and started kissing it and saying ‘oh, I missed you so much. Oh, it’s been a long time.’”
In Armenia there are two orphanages for children with disabilities. One of which, Kharberd, houses around three hundred children, and is exclusively for children with disabilities. In this orphanage, the staff has introduced a new kind of therapy that is not that common in Armenia. It is called hippotherapy. This is a form of therapy that uses horses, and is manly used with children with autism, down syndrome, and cerebral palsy.
According to the website of Ayo! (the crowd fundraising platform of the Fund for Armenian Relief - FAR) that is trying raise funds for the orphanage, “In hippotherapy, the movement of the horse influences the patient. The patient is positioned on the horse and actively responds to the horse’s movements.”
This was sent to my e mail address by someone with a watchful eye, it seems that our friendly Odar Baby Snatcher of Armenia still is dreaming of days ago when "open" adoptions were common place. To refresh your memories "open Adoption" was when the birth mother or true mother would consent to adoption without a central adoption authority involved. This was common place in Armenia., however after Armenia ratified and adopted (no pun intended) the Hague Convention on human trafficking, open adoptions are not lawful.
Someone should inform this blint Robin Sizemore that trying this same trick in our Serbian brother's land will get her into problems. Open Adoptions are essentially a parent selling their child off in many cases to the highest bidder. Robin still commands high dollars for disabled and special needs kids because she markets her services and the orphanages as the best in Europe (whatever that means)
Alas, Marketing is what Robin Sizemore's degree is in, we all know there isn't any degrees in Child Trafficking 101, so she is in the business of flesh peddling and promotes herself as some sort of professional credible business woman.
Robin the open adoption days are over, you can run to every obscure country like Serbia and Guyana looking for these niche business opportunities. When the country burns through a few hundred kids they close down or ask for more money.
Your attorneys are not advising you very well, you spent oer $200,000 to try and silence me and still you cannot behave yourself when it comes to selling kids you have a sickness. You are not allowed into the orphanages in Armenia and you know it. Robin Sizemore you were fired from Carolina Adoption Services and you will never be able to lie your way into getting any more kids out of Armenia. I warned you it was "shrinking" your money is no good anymore to Armenians, they are pissed at you for selling off healthy children to odars like Beth "Weinstein" Shepherd, who lives in a 900 square foot house, and other Morons willing to wait around for you to purchase that perfect kid for them.
You fool no one, Here it is Armenia have fun with her. she deserves all the ill treatment you give her. You are right to adopt the children out to the French or Italians first, they are great people. Eduard Amalyan is not paying taxes on the cash Robin sends him so please shake him up with the police and get some money for our wounded veterans of Nargano Karabakh.
Poor Serbians they will find out that Robin is a crazy lady who claims to save children.
Now here she is with Cara Helberg or what people call her Cara Switch Around.
Cara worked many years for ATWA, then Partners for Adoption - She even unsuccessfully tried her hand at operating an adoption agency but .....well she is back at work with Lesley Siegel. Not sure why Bennet Kelley had her down as an interrogatory witness as I still have the letter Ms. Helberg sent me congratulating me on my adoption and to bring my daughter by when she gets home. Additionally she does know that HHS forbids her from discussing any case outside the prior consent of the client or former client. Or so Bennet Kelley ill advised her and her some time attorney well actually JD boss Lesley (plastic surgery) Siegel.
Make sure you all look up Reynoso vs. Across the World Adoptions it's a sad case of deceit.
Here they are two little adoption addicts - BFFs (big fucking frauds) or (best friends forever)
Cara Helberg and Robin Sizemore BFF
2 peas in a pod. WHERE IS JEANNE SOBIE?
Wonder what happened to Robin's other BFF Jeanne Sobie?
Oh that's right Jeanne is now the Armenian Adoption coordinator for
Carolina Adoption Services the organization that fired Robin Sizemore.
Relax Cara. Japan adoptions from Mamas n Papas will stay open awhile,
so long as you continue to show clients with a large portfolio. But you can
forget about Russia. It's over.
People in California you should research ATWA before you use them. Ask Lesley Siegel about her
time working at IAC (Independent Adoption Center)
Who needs the Turks to destroy Byzantine Serbs and Armenians We have Robin Sizemore for that
Its very clear, Robin Sizemore has a dislike for the Hague Convention on Human Trafficking and is rebelous on laws that are in place to protect children. Hence she finds those loophole countries that don't quite have an adoption authority with Hague set up. HerE marches in Robin Sizemore to these niche countries like Ghana, Serbia, Guyana, Morocco, setting up deals with these countries before the ink is dry she is purchasing and reserving kids for those evangelical clients that spew out bible verses faster than you can spit out $30,000
Good Luck Robin you will need it. Jeanne Sobie has been blabbing her mouth all over Armenia about your affinity for wanting to bypass the central authority. Old habits die hard.
UPDATE TO THIS BLOG
IT SEEMS A BRANCH OF THE SERBIAN GOVERNMENT
MAY HAVE CAUGHT ON TO ROBIN'S WEB OF MISINFORMATION
THIS BLOG WAS VISITED BY MANY MAIL LINKS TO THIS PAGE
I DO BELIEVE THAT IS THE SERBIAN GOVERNMENT'S BYZANTINE
SEAL (of course, Robin wouldn't know about that)
BUSTED BIG TIME ROBIN
don't say we never warned you Robin Sizemore
you should have thought about that when you
tried to harm me and my family with your paid for
loser buddy Bennet Gerard Kelley
back at you with the truth reaching to the highest levels
of government.
YES ROBIN SIZEMORE was FIRED from Carolina Adoption Services
TIME MAGAZINE weighs in on the low international adoption numbers
What’s more, the developed world has gotten much more sophisticated about spotting and interrupting the pattern of rapidly increasing adoptions from one country, which has often signaled growing fraud and corruption. In fact, these documents suggest that the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa was far more aggressive than had been the case even in Vietnam about trying to prevent another adoption disaster like the ones suffered through elsewhere.
PHASE I: HUMANITARIAN ADOPTIONS
Melissa Fay Greene was correct: When she was there, international adoption from Ethiopia was a welcomed humanitarian venture for the desperately needy few. As she wrote, “It is the first recourse of everyone ethically involved with intercountry adoption to place orphans with relatives, with friends or with families within their home countries; no one imagines or pretends that adoption is a solution to a generation of children orphaned by disease. It is one very small and modest option, a case of families in industrialized nations throwing lifelines to individual children even as their governments fail to commit the money to turn back the epidemic” of AIDS, in the case of Ethiopia.
During these first years of the program, the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa sent cables back to the Department of State in D.C. explaining—praising, really—how carefully Ethiopian authorities were overseeing the effort. The country might have been a repressive totalitarian state, but in this, at least, it was admirable: As of 2003, it had licensed only three adoption agencies, two of them American, all of which were “expert at managing the Ethiopian adoption process.”
As is true in most traditional cultures, the Embassy noted that, in the countryside, children were rarely abandoned. There were two exceptions. First, children orphaned by AIDS were, at that time, stigmatized by their families and communities; and second, families that migrated to Addis Ababa for work could, once there, become separated from their children, who were left homeless. A government ministry took guardianship, checked on whether they were truly orphaned or abandoned, and identified the few who needed foreign families.
An Embassy researcher talked with someone in the Wolayta Zone Administrator’s office who reported allegations that local orphanages were bribing families to relinquish their children, saying, "Parents were given empty promises and did not know where their kids were going."
In August 2003, “the process of identifying orphans, approving adoptions, and processing immigrant visas for them is extremely rigorous here,” the U.S. Embassy wrote home to the Secretary of State’s office, in part because the Ethiopian government knew that “trafficking in children is a big business.” Yet even in that same cable, written less than a year after Greene’s New York TimesMagazine article appeared, the Embassy noted that some unscrupulous individuals were going into villages to “collect children” by persuading parents to give them up.I
By 2006, the Embassy was cabling home that “Ethiopia is the fastest growing source country for adoptions by American citizens, and the rapid growth mimics the troubling pattern of programs that were eventually closed because of fraud concerns.” By rapid growth, the Embassy meant that while there had been 105 adoptions in 2000 and 165 in 2003, there had been 284 in 2004 and 442 in 2005—and the curve was about to go up much more steeply.
At the same time, the world—led by the U.S.—was finally offering help for countries devastated by the AIDS pandemic. George W. Bush’s 2003 life-saving PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) began helping AIDS-stricken nations like Ethiopia in ways that included distributing anti-retrovirals, sponsoring education campaigns designed to reduce HIV transmission, helping grandmothers and family members care for AIDS orphans by offering micro-grants to feed children and pay school fees, and much more. Over time, it would turn out, this is what would most help Africa’s AIDS orphans: preventing them from being orphaned at all.II
But what did most Americans know about children in Ethiopia, beyond what they read in articles like Greene’s or heard from adoption agencies? Very little. Westerners continued to believe that needy Ethiopian orphans were filling the streets and abandoned infants were being found wrapped in palm leaves—and so they kept applying to adopt. In July 2005, Angelina Jolie adopted an Ethiopian baby, spurring vastly more interest. In March 2006, the U.S. Embassy reported so much dramatic growth that it asked for more staff to handle the flood of orphan visa applications. It worried a little about the Ethiopian government’s ability to keep up with the demand, while acknowledging that Ethiopian officials “appear determined to maintain legitimacy in Ethiopian adoption” and “insist on proper documentation before a child is released to a non-Ethiopian family.”
But a February 2007 cable noted that the number of applications to adopt from Ethiopia—and the number of American adoption agencies working in the country—were expanding “exponentially,” with eight times as many agencies working in country than had been there in 2000, for a total of 24. Contributing to that explosive growth was the fact that China was offering far fewer children for adoption, and Guatemalan adoptions were about to be closed to Americans because of systemic fraud and corruption. In other words, demand was being funneled toward Africa. Which is why the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa wrote, very diplomatically, “One agency recently was found to be working with an American facilitator who had previously presented problematic adoption cases,” although that agency dropped contact with the problematic facilitator. Still, there were too many agencies, too many children coming and going, too many people opportunistically looking in the countryside for “adoptable” children.III
PHASE II: THE GOLD RUSH
At last came the crisis that the Embassy officials had feared. By July 2008, the Embassy wrote, more than 70 licensed agencies were referring Ethiopian children for adoption, 24 of them American. There had been only three licensed agencies in 2000. The system was officially overwhelmed. Ethiopian officials wanted to bring adoption to a complete halt to clean things up—which would have stranded both those children who truly did need new homes, and would leave prospective adoptive parents heartbroken and frustrated, clutching pictures of their promised children but unable to bring them home.
IF you attend an evangelical church these days, there’s a
good chance you’ll hear about the “orphan crisis” affecting millions of
children around the world.
These Christian advocates of transnational adoption will
often say that some 150 million children need homes — though that figure,
derived from a Unicef report, includes not only parentless children, but also
those who have lost only one parent, and orphans who live with relatives.
Evangelical adoptions picked up in earnest in the middle
of the last decade, when a wave of prominent Christians, including the
megachurch pastor Rick Warren and leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention,
began to promote adoption as a special imperative for believers. Adoption mirrored
the Christian salvation experience, they argued, likening the adoption of
orphans to Christ’s adoption of the faithful. Adoption also embodied a more
holistic “pro-life” message — caring for children outside the womb as well as
within — and an emphasis on good deeds, not just belief, that some evangelicals
felt had been ceded to mainline Protestant denominations.
Believers rose to the challenge. The Christian Alliance
for Orphans estimates that hundreds of thousands of people worldwide
participate in its annual Orphan Sunday (this year’s is Nov. 3). Evangelicals
from the Bible Belt to Southern California don wristbands or T-shirts reading
“orphan addict” or “serial adopter.” Ministries have emerged to raise money and
award grants to help Christians pay the fees (some $30,000 on average, plus
travel) associated with transnational adoption.
However well intended, this enthusiasm has exacerbated
what has become a boom-and-bust market for children that leaps from country to
country. In many cases, the influx of money has created incentives to establish
or expand orphanages — and identify children to fill them.
In some cases, agencies may hire “child finders” to
recruit children of the age and gender that prospective adoptive parents
prefer, sometimes from impoverished but intact families. Even nonprofit
agencies with good reputations may turn to such local recruiters in countries
where they don’t already have established partners — or where the demand for
children exceeds the supply.
The potential for fraud and abuse is high. Orphanages
tend to be filled by kids whose parents want better opportunities for them,
while the root problem — extreme poverty — goes unaddressed, a Unicef worker in
Ethiopia told me. Worse, some families in places with different cultural norms
and legal systems relinquish their kids believing that it is a temporary
guardianship arrangement, rather than an irrevocable severance of family ties.
In 2006, the family of three sisters adopted from Sodo,
Ethiopia, said they were told that adoption would give the children a chance at
an American education and that they would later return. The adoptive parents,
then living in New Mexico, said they’d been falsely assured by an evangelical
agency, Christian World Adoption, that they were saving destitute children
orphaned by AIDS, who might otherwise have become sex workers.
When the children arrived and were told the adoption was
permanent, they were distraught. And when the adoptive family complained, the
agency maintained that the adoption was justified under Ethiopian law and
counseled the parents to trust in God’s plan. When the adoptive family
complained to the Better Business Bureau in North Carolina, where the agency
was based, it threatened to report the family to child protective services in
New Mexico. (The agency has since gone bankrupt.)
Though most are not as nightmarish, adoption
complications are common. Some adoptive parents have even hired private
investigators to try to verify the stories they were told about their kids.
When scandals emerge, governments lumber into action. But
then the demand just shifts to another country, and the problems start all over
again. In the early 1990s, Romania saw an adoption boom after shocking images
of orphanages — housing young victims of Nicolae Ceausescu’s compulsory birth
policies — became public. But over time, stories
of other Romanian kids’ being coerced into adoption or bought from their
families surfaced. Romania halted international adoptions in 2001.
Also in the 1990s, the number of adoptions from Vietnam
soared, but the outrageous fees paid to child finders — sometimes more than $10,000
— caused the government in 2003 to press pause to reform the system. (But when
the adoptions resumed in 2005, so did the problems.)
At the height of Guatemala’s adoption boom in the middle
of the last decade, nearly 1 percent of babies were sent to the United States,
before stories of child buying and even kidnapping
prompted a shutdown in 2008. Then the boom shifted to Ethiopia and, now, Uganda
and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Of course, adoption problems aren’t limited to Christian
agencies, and they don’t originate with them, but some movement insiders say
that evangelicals — whether driven by zeal or naïveté — have had a
disproportionate impact on the international adoption system. Groups like Unicef
and Save the Children have made clear that millions of “orphans” are, in fact,
not eligible for transnational adoption, but advocates often disregard these
warnings as signs of ideological opposition to adoption — a charge Unicef has
denied.
After some high-profile adoption horror stories, the
number of transnational adoptions to the United States fell to fewer than 9,000
last year, from a high of nearly 23,000 in 2004. Last year, only China and
Ethiopia sent more than 1,000 adoptees to America, and only South Korea and
Russia topped 500. (Russia this year banned adoptions by American parents.)
This boom-and-bust, musical-chairs cycle does little to
improve child-welfare systems in developing countries and has perpetuated a
culture of aid-based orphanage construction — the reverse of the trend in
wealthy countries, which have phased out institutions in favor of foster care.
The United States must improve regulation. There are no
specific limits to what agencies can spend in other countries and little oversight
in the system, which relies on peer reviews from other adoption agencies. And
often there is little political will to investigate agency wrongdoing. While
the United States abides by the Hague Convention
on Intercountry Adoption — a set of standards promulgated in 1993 to
prevent abuses — American agencies can often dodge responsibility for abuses by
blaming local partners. Moreover, many foreign children brought into America come
from countries that have not signed the convention.
Policy reforms, domestic and international, won’t be
enough without a change in thinking, particularly among American evangelicals.
Some Christian groups have begun to heed the call to do good works overseas, by
focusing on aid that keeps families intact or improves local foster care and
adoption. Some churches have backed programs overseas that provide emergency
foster parents, or day care programs for widowed mothers. But many churches
still preach the simplistic message that there are more Christians in the world
than orphans, and that every adoption means a child saved.
For too long, well-meaning Americans have brought their
advocacy and money to bear on an adoption industry that revolves around Western
demand. Adoption can be wonderful when it’s about finding the right family for
a child who is truly in need, but it can also be tragic and unjust if it
involves deception, removes children from their home countries when other
options are available, or is used as a substitute for addressing the underlying
problems of poverty and inequality. We can no longer be blind to the collateral
damage that good intentions bring.
Kathryn Joyce is the author
of “The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption.”
Poor Serbians they will find out that Robin is a crazy lady who claims to save children. 
