James Wadsworth

For most people in the world the option of choosing the family they want to live with is never presented to them. But this exact scenario was put in front of me when I was only five years old. And at the time I thought nothing of the strangers that “bought” me, but just wanted to get out of the orphanage that I unwillingly called home. The word unwillingly sounds a lot uglier than the reason I ended up at the orphanage. My first memory from when I was younger was an empty pitch-black house. My birth parents were never home, so I was taken to a place that could give me a chance. As a five-year-old though, I didn’t know the difference. When in the process of adopting a child from an orphanage, the requirements are long and strenuous. But these struggles are amplified when the child is born in in another country, let alone Russia. This simple factor increased the amount of hurdles my parents had to get over to get me. My father traveled around the world twice, and went through multiple background checks from both the US and Russian governments. My parents went through months of stress just for me to have a better life. And I’m thankful for that every day.