Baбyшka нaшa, Mother's Day, Russian babies, mommogram

June 1, 2007: Charity concert on Child Protection Day

Can musicians and singers bring health, love and attention to more than 100 000 street kids who drift from city to city looking for a better life?
International Child Protection Day, a Great Charity Concert «Classics & Jazz» will gather popular Russian and international singers and musicians to break down the wall of incomprehension, fear and lovelessness against children living on streets. They will remind us of the problem which, to our regret, still exists in Russia. http://www.unicef.org/russia/media_6518.html

Babushka-mama (бaбyшka нaшa) - thoughts on Mother's Day and June 1 birthday coming up

• Oy!
• To each his own.
  
• That you know.
• My best friend is Johnny Walker.
  
• Sugar makes you smarter.
• Finger sandwiches make life better.
• It's just water and ice with big, big orange.
• It's not weather, it's suicide.
• And I hang...
• You made my day.
• Is only one way.
• All America crazy about it.
• He looks like a Micky Mouse.
• Ricky will fix it.
• We all have the same God.

Mother's Day (or thereabouts)

• B's yard beds, dark chocolate with ginger
• Beacon Brunch, Corcoran (Modernity), FilmFest, and Sac visit
• mommogram (May 11)
• Thank You for Smoking, Bobby, Control Room
  

Thank You for Smoking (2005)
Tobacco industry lobbyist Nick Naylor has a seemingly impossible task: promoting cigarette smoking in a time when the health hazards of the activity have become too plain to ignore. Nick, however, revels in his job, using argument and twisted logic to place, as often as not, his clients in the positions of either altruistic do-gooders or victims. Nick's son Joey needs to understand and respect his dad's philosophy, and Nick works hard to respond to that need without compromising his lack of values. When a beautiful news reporter betrays Nick's sexually-achieved trust, his world seems in danger of collapsing. But there's always one more coffin nail in Nick's pack. Written by http://www.imdb.com/SearchPlotWriters?Jim%20Beaver%20%7Bjumblejim@prodigy.net%7D

From Wikipedia - This movie got a seven minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival. Lou Lomenick of The New York Post gave the film "Bobby" one (out of four) stars saying that it was just another rip-off of a much better film, 1975's Nashville

Ah, how did this get in here?

Mother's Day is a good time to be reminded of thebreastcancersite.com.

Morning Edition, April 25, 2007 (NPR report on adoption in Russia)

Russian authorities have suspended the work of foreign adoption agencies. That has put into limbo the plans of many Americans waiting to adopt Russian children, even as human rights groups say a growing number of institutionalized children in Russia are living — and dying — in wretched conditions.
Most of the nearly 800,000 children called orphans in Russia still have living parents.

Thirteen-year-old Sasha says he ran away from home at the age of 6. He now lives in a Moscow boarding school called Internat No. 8."I left because my parents behaved badly," Sasha says. "They drank and took drugs and didn't take care of me."

Another Internat No. 8 resident, Tatyana, 12, was abandoned at birth. She says she likes drawing and sewing, and wants to become a doctor.

Compared with most children like them, Tatyana and Sasha are lucky. Their dorm rooms are clean, teachers are dedicated, and the children appear genuinely happy.

But director Vadim Menshov says that's not good enough.
"Children are traumatized even in the best orphanages because they have no time to themselves," Menshov says. "Even this school is too crowded. It needs to be bulldozed. Children shouldn't live in such places."

The government has only recently started to encourage Russians to adopt. But very few Russian families want to adopt orphans because they're often seen as sick or somehow damaged. Half of the 15,000 children adopted in Russia each year are taken in by foreigners.

Americans adopt more children from Russia than from any other country except China and Guatemala. But now the government has suspended the work of all foreign adoption agencies. Officials say it's a temporary measure, part of the new registration requirements for all non-governmental organizations.
Still, Education Ministry official Sergei Vitelis says Russian children should stay in Russia.
"Adoption by foreigners probably isn't entirely right," Vitelis says. "Any normal state should create conditions for children to grow up in their own country. That's what we're aiming for."
Children's rights advocates say the official crackdown on foreign adoptions is more about national pride than concern for child welfare. They say it condemns children to a system of Soviet-era institutions desperately in need of reform.

A baby lies crying in a decrepit, wooden maternity hospital in Russia's poverty-stricken Far North. Many child advocates say places like these are where the problems start. Hospital staff often try to persuade parents of babies with disabilities to give them over to state care. Poverty and alcoholism also drive parents to abandon their children.

Sergei Koloskov, head of the Down Syndrome Society, says that contrary to government figures, the number of orphans in Russia is growing — and overloading the state's orphanage system.
"Healthy babies are lying in hospital beds all day as if they were sick, sometimes for months or longer," Koloskov says. "They're completely ignored. No one plays with them or provides any kind of stimulation. That happens because orphanages where they're supposed to go after birth are full."
Experts say that the lack of attention at an early age seriously harms a child's development. Elena Olshanskaya started a group of volunteers to help children in hospitals after noticing abandoned babies in rooms at the hospital where she gave birth.

"I was stunned," she says. "They were completely alone. They were fed several times a day and that was it. After a while, they just stop crying."

Last winter, another patient in a central Russian hospital noticed a room of abandoned babies with their mouths taped shut to stop them from crying. Her cell phone video shocked the country when it was played on national television. Reports of babies tied down in their cots are common. Many believe that's because hospital staff are seriously overworked.

Boris Altshuler of the Child's Right group says it's often immediately clear to visitors that abandoned babies are left to "rot alive."

"First of all [there's] the smell — [the] smell of unchanged linens or even children lying on just plastic. And [a] terrible smell because nobody changes, nobody cares," Altshuler says.