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Above and beyond for children abroad

Ten years ago, Elizabeth Bodine took a trip that would change the lives of herself and many Russian orphans.

By DAN DeWITT
Published November 6, 2005

HERNANDO BEACH - Unlikely as it now seems, a decade ago Elizabeth Bodine worried about the emptiness of her life.

"My parents had recently died and I kept wondering: What am I doing here? I don't have any kids. I'm flying all over the world (as an international flight attendant) having a good time. I need to make a difference," said Bodine, 56.

Then she visited an orphanage 35 miles from Moscow.

"Suddenly I'm standing there with little hands all over me, all these children in their little gray jumpsuits," Bodine said. "When I couldn't sleep for the next four days, I decided I had to do something."

The visit led to her sponsorship of Orphanage No. 7 in the town of Fryazino and to her current, hectic schedule.

She works a weekly nine-hour flight to Moscow on Delta Air Lines, usually taking two large duffels of supplies to the orphanage. After a 22-hour layover, she makes the return flight and commutes by airplane from New York to her home in Hernando Beach. Over the next few days, she shakes off jet lag, then solicits donations of clothes and toys, as well as money for food, medicine and occasional surgeries.

Bodine has done what comparatively few people in wealthy countries are willing to do: directly confront suffering among the world's poor and commit to doing what she can to help.

"It puts into perspective how lucky we are and how lucky I have been to have the parents I've had and the education I've had," Bodine said.

"I had a really good childhood, and these kids don't have that, and at some point it comes time to give back."

Both her family and her education seemed designed to prepare her for her work with Delta and the orphanage.

Her father served as an Army pilot and lawyer, who after World War II received the unwelcome assignment of defending Japanese officers accused of war crimes in China. There, he met Bodine's mother, a native of Siberia fluent in five languages, who was working as an interpreter.

Bodine, an airline attendant for more than 30 years, received a bachelor's degree in Russian literature and language at Saint Mary's College in Indiana. She later studied Russian in Moscow, where both a brother, now deceased, and her sister, Natalie Bodine-Shaw, lived for several years.

It was Bodine-Shaw who introduced her sister to Olga Vokorova, a pediatric surgeon in Moscow who had taken up the cause of disabled children in government-operated Russian orphanages.

"She just told the whole story of these kids," Bodine said of Vokorova, who, like her brother, died of cancer.

One part of the story particularly moved Bodine: "Most of these kids are not orphans," she said.

Instead, they had been abandoned by their parents because of physical or mental reasons, some as easily corrected as a cleft palate or an extra finger or toe.

"A handicapped child: In Russia, that's something that's broken," Bodine-Shaw said while recently visiting her sister from her current home in Canada.

"I think it goes back to the Soviet idea of utopian perfection."

That's only part of the reason, said Golfo Alexopoulus, an associate professor of Russian and Soviet history at the University of South Florida.

Russia has a long tradition of warehousing children, partly because of a history of events during which parents were killed and families shattered: the civil war following the Russian Revolution of 1917, three major famines in the 20th century, the Stalinist blood purges of the 1930s and World War II, in which about 25-million Soviets were killed.

During the Soviet era, most women were required to work while continuing to perform almost all household duties. That social pattern remains prevalent, discouraging adoption and the rearing of special-needs children, Alexopoulus said.

And though the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has allowed some Russians to grow very rich, many more are as poor or poorer than they ever were, she said. Houses and apartments are typically tiny, and most buildings have no accommodations for people with physical limitations.

"In Russia, it is exceedingly difficult to support a child with any sort of disability," Alexopoulus said.

"When you don't have enough living space for one child, much less for two or three, you aren't exactly going to respond enthusiastically to the government call for adoption."

So millions of children in Russia live in conditions like those Bodine found during her first visit to the Fryazino orphanage 10 years ago.

Their surroundings were clean, she said, and the staff seemed capable and devoted. But the orphanage was also barren and smelled overpoweringly of disinfectant, she said. The children were fed little other than a gruel-like soup; they wore gray jumpers that "made them look like little Auschwitz survivors," Bodine said.

In other words, their needs were enormous: mittens, socks, underwear, overcoats, toys and medical supplies.

So Bodine began paring down the weight of her personal luggage so she could take as many supplies as possible and still comply with the airline's weight limit. Sometimes she enlisted the help of other flight attendants to carry goods, including six wheelchairs on one trip and an old-fashioned wooden rocking horse on another.

With cash donations, she buys supplies that are cheaper in Russia than in the United States, locally grown produce and medicines, for example. She has also paid for operations, from minor procedures such as repairing cleft palates to the closure of a hole in the skull of a boy hit by a train.

She does not do it alone, she said. Members of her church in Spring Hill, Our Lady of Fatima, have been especially generous with donations, she said.

The manager of the hotel where she stays in Moscow allows her to stockpile supplies there before she transports them on monthly trips to Fryazino, three hours away on brutally rough roads. And friends, such as her neighbor Frank Mortell, take care of her three dogs, one adopted from the streets of Moscow, while she is away.

Mortell, who has also visited the orphanage, said he is glad to help.

"The work she's done is amazing," he said. "Those people had absolutely nothing, and now the (children) are beginning to live like human beings."

Proof of that is the videotape Bodine played recently on her television, which stands next to a table piled high with onesies, T-shirts and socks for her next trip.

It begins with footage of the neighborhood, mostly soot-coated block buildings with bald, trash-strewn yards.

"It's pretty grim," Bodine said.

So are some scenes from inside the orphanage, including those of skinny, listless children who suffer from severe fetal alcohol syndrome. But even children with severe disabilities, including spina bifida and hydrocephalus and a boy who can only move on all fours with a rolling hop, squeal with joy at Bodine's arrival.

"They call me (Aunt Lizzie)," she said. All the children are dressed in clean, colorful clothes. Mobiles hang from the ceilings over cribs, and toys have been lined up neatly against the walls.

Bodine would like to do more, and has begun to work with a Russian organization, Maria's Children, that helps train orphans to prepare them for the time they are released.

"They cut them loose at 16," she said. "They usually give them a little one-room apartment and a factory job, but there's a very high rate of suicide and alcoholism. A lot of the girls get sucked into prostitution rings. A lot of the boys get sucked into gang activity."

Thinking about such problems sometimes overwhelms Bodine, as does her busy schedule. But she also thinks that, maybe, some of the children will remember the help she gave them.

"I want them to know they are not forgotten," she said. "You never know if you are going to trigger something in a kid's mind that will give them hope. And that's maybe what this is about more than anything: Give them hope because, without that, what do you have? You have despair."

Dan DeWitt can be reached at dewitt@sptimes.com or 352 754-6116.

People interested in making a donation of goods or money for the children of Orphanage No. 7 in the town of Fryazino in Russia may call Elizabeth Bodine at (352) 684-5885.

[Last modified November 6, 2005, 01:58:09]