Becoming a Family
Dawn and Gary Felger adopted four children from Ukraine and quickly grew into a close-knit farming family.
Some moms would have been angry. Others would have been worried. But when Dawn Felger saw her children crying and holding their brother Samuel at the back door, she took a minute to savor the moment and felt relieved that the three older kids had rallied together to care for their younger sibling.
When her four kids had darted out of the door earlier on that blustery day in winter 2004, Dawn had known where they were headed. The family’s Fort Wayne, Ind., property had a spot that was prone to flooding and often froze into an ice sheet when the temperature shivered below zero. The kids enjoyed pounding away at the ice, but that day 3-year-old Samuel broke through. Next thing Dawn knew, the whole bunch was standing at the back door. Joshua was carrying the sopping wet Samuel. Hannah and Luke stood next to them in support.
“They were all taking care of Sam and at the same time making sure Mom wasn’t mad,” Dawn recalls. “It was such a neat moment, especially considering that it happened only five or six months after Sam had been home in the United States.”
Dawn and her husband, Gary, adopted all four of their children from Ukraine: two in 2002 and two more in 2004. Hannah, 17; Joshua, 16; Luke, 11; and Samuel, 10, spent the first few years of their lives in orphanages. The Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking kids initially struggled to understand their English-speaking parents and American culture. But it didn’t take long for them to become tight-knit siblings who enjoy eating together as a family and exploring their nearly 100-acre farm in Lohman, where the Felgers moved three years ago.
Choosing adoption
When Dawn learned she wouldn’t be able to have biological children of her own, she and Gary didn’t automatically turn to adoption. For several months, they stayed in a holding pattern, waiting for the right moment. They wanted kids but not until they were at a point when they viewed adoption as something they truly wanted rather than as a secondary choice.
Then, Gary learned through one of his work clients about a couple, also from Indiana, who had raised four biological children and adopted two more from Ukraine. The family shared their story and pointed Dawn and Gary to ukrainianangels.org, a website for people interested in Ukrainian independent adoptions.
Those are kids we could adopt, Dawn thought, as she looked through the site’s photos. Wanting to share her discovery, she called her mom, who said she had just been praying that God would answer Dawn and Gary’s prayers regarding children. “The combination made it pretty clear that we were meant to adopt children from Ukraine,” Dawn says.
The couple decided to adopt independently rather than go through an agency or attorney. They sought advice from Cathy Harris, a single mother from Florida who runs ukrainianangels.org. Since 1998, she’s consulted with more than 875 families who have adopted Ukrainian children independently. Couples complete their necessary paperwork — including the Immigration and Naturalization Service adoption application, a home study and medical checks — in America and hire a facilitator in Ukraine to serve as their translator. For the Felgers, the process, from sending the dossier to receiving an adoption appointment in Kiev, took about a year.
Dawn and Gary were approved to adopt up to three children, but they had their hearts set on twin boys whom Cathy had seen on one of her recent Eastern European trips. Gary’s father and uncle are twins, so they though the similarity would be neat. But ultimately, they left for the Ukraine without knowing the number, gender or age of the children they would bring back.
“Before we got there, we didn’t know whether to paint the walls pink or blue,” Gary says. “We didn’t know if we needed bicycles, tricycles or cribs. We didn’t know if we were going to bring home one, two or three children or any.”
To Ukraine and back
The Felgers arrived in the capital of Kiev in late January 2002. They then hopped a rickety plane to an orphanage in Simferopol, a city on the Crimean peninsula. There they learned that the twin boys weren’t available, so Dawn and Gary were led into the orphanage’s gym, where five or six boys were brought out for them to observe.
“One kid was riding a tricycle around the room and came close to Gary like he was going to run over his toes,” Dawn says.
Gary smiles. “He wanted to get my attention.”
That was how they met Joshua, a 6-year-old with the Ukrainian name Roman.
As they began the paperwork to adopt Joshua, Gary quizzed the staff about any girls who might fit into their new family. The caretakers mentioned a delightful girl in an orphanage across town.
“They were speaking in Russian, so we didn’t know what they were saying,” Dawn says. “But when they asked this woman about Hannah, her eyes lit up, and we knew that was a big clue.”
Soon after, the Felgers met Hannah, an 8-year-old, named Marina in Ukraine, with brown hair, delicate features and a smile stretched from ear to ear.
“We’ll spend five months trying to find a couch,” Gary says. “It took us years to pick out dining room chairs, but we picked out our daughter in 15 minutes.”
The Felgers spent about 17 days in Ukraine, a country hit with economic hardships and poverty after the fall of the Soviet Union. While there, they saw street children who had been kicked out of orphanages at age 16. Many had turned to drug abuse, alcoholism and prostitution. Dawn and Gary couldn’t help but think about these children’s futures when they picked Hannah up from the orphanage.
“When Hannah gets in the car, there’s 50 to 60 kids waving goodbye saying, ‘Please, take me to America,’” Gary says as he chokes back tears. “Dawn and I and the translator are crying … and there’s Hannah, just happily waving back to them.”
Adjusting to American life
Hannah and Joshua don’t remember much about their time in the orphanages. Joshua says caretakers advised him to talk about the positives of Ukraine. Hannah recalls asking for more to eat and being told no extra food was available. “When I came to the U.S., I thought I was just visiting until I realized I’d be living there for good,” she says.
For the first time, Hannah and Joshua had their own parents, house and family car, but Dawn pulls out their passport photos, which reveal frightened looks in their eyes. “It must have been so intimidating for them to put be in a car with three adults, not knowing who they are with or where they are going,” she says.
The Russian-English language barrier made the first month in the U.S. challenging. Before leaving for Ukraine, Dawn and Gary had learned 20 to 30 Russian words, but it often meant their communication was limited to one or two words, which sometimes led to frustration. Dawn vividly recalls the day she found Hannah and Joshua sitting on the bottom step next to the door, with pajamas stuffed in their backpacks, ready to run away. But overall, Hannah and Joshua were patient, accommodating and rarely defiant.
Dawn, a former elementary school teacher with an M.B.A. from Indiana University, left her marketing job to home-school her children. For Hannah and Joshua, who hadn’t had much, if any, one-on-one attention, Dawn strived to make their home feel like a safe place and their family feel like one cohesive unit. “It was easy on me because they played together a lot from the beginning,” Dawn says. “It was fun to see their imaginations at work. God just put our family together.”
Two more bundles of joy
In May 2004, Dawn and Gary found themselves back in Ukraine and looking through three-ring binders depicting children available for adoption. All along they had planned to add to their family, but none of the photos were jumping out at them.
“You think, I’ll know it when I see my kid,” Dawn says. “We had been approved for up to three kids again and thought we wanted at least one girl and one boy. At first, these guys seemed too little.” Knowing the story is now about them, Luke and Samuel perk up.
Dawn and Gary assumed they might adopt children between the ages of 5 and 7. At the time, Luke, originally named Kyryl, was 4, and Samuel, known as Vladislav, was 3. Although they were young and not available for adoption until two weeks later, they looked like future Felgers. The couple boarded a train to Cherkassy, a city south of Kiev, where the boys were living. Gary describes the journey as a scene plucked from an Indiana Jones movie. As if the bad smells and flashing lights weren’t scary enough, when the couple arrived at the train station around 3 a.m., they were instructed not to utter a word of English. Although Gary and Dawn fondly remember Ukraine’s open-air food markets, wildflowers and fruit drinks, they admit that their Eastern European trips were also nerve-wracking.
“We had to carry close to $12,000 in cash,” Gary says. “We had more money on us than most of the people in Ukraine will make in a lifetime.”
The couple also became concerned after meeting Luke. He didn’t make eye contact and spoke very few words. When they went to pick him up from the orphanage, they braced themselves, thinking he would panic and scream.
“All of a sudden, once we were away from the orphanage, we were his parents, and he was Chatty Cathy,” Gary says laughing.
Wrestling quickly became a favorite pastime of Luke’s after he saw Gary playing around with a stuffed animal.
“All of the kids loved wrestling with Gary,” Dawn says. “I think it had to do with physical contact. They had had little contact and hungered for it. It made wrestling seem like a really important game. At first, Luke heard the words ‘wrestle’ and ‘muscle’ and got them confused. He’d say, ‘Dad, let’s muscle.’ ”
Samuel was still in a Ukrainian “baby house” when Dawn and Gary picked him up, but he’s heard his story enough to tell it himself. “I wasn’t exactly mom’s best friend,” he pipes up.
Gary nods his head. “All the kids were drawn to mom, so it was neat to finally have one come straight to me.”
Gary and Dawn had brushed up on their Russian before this trip, only to learn that Luke and Samuel spoke Ukrainian. The Felgers asked the translator to tell the two boys that they’d be reuniting with their brother. Luke and Samuel have the same birth mother, but they had been separated when they were 3 and 1 1/2. After picking up both boys from their orphanages, Dawn found them sitting on the same side of the car’s backseat floor. They just stared at each other. Something instinctive in their bodies seemed to be saying they were brothers — and soon to be best friends.
The Felgers
In May 2008, Gary moved his family from Fort Wayne, Ind., to Missouri after taking a job with the animal health care company Merial. He works with Missouri and Iowa cattle producers and has about 40 head of cattle of his own. The family’s fixer-up farm in Lohman, is also home to three sheep, two pigs, five cats, four dogs and about 30 chickens and ducks.
“It feels like Indiana 30 years ago,” says Gary of their quiet farming community. The move to Missouri took some adjusting for the kids, but they now spend their free time exploring their 92 acres of creeks, hills and woods.
All of the Felger children have transitioned into public school and blossomed into their own vibrant personalities. Still a smiley child, Hannah has easily fallen into the oldest sibling role, looking out for her brothers, helping Dawn around the house and greeting houseguests. She enjoys reading, playing basketball and listening to music. Although the orphanage described him as a serious child, Joshua went through a silly phase, mixing his applesauce into his spaghetti and making silly facial expressions in photos. With age, he’s grown more focused as well as passionate about pencil sketching and World War II history. Luke and Samuel are fun-loving country boys interested in baseball, basketball and Legos. Luke is the sensitive, overly emphatic child; Samuel is quick to warm up to — and playfully tease — strangers.
Dawn and Gary beam with pride when describing their family. They can’t imagine their life any differently. In their hearts, they hold a special place for Ukraine. In fact, every few months, the same question comes up: Will they adopt again?
Knowing how much love they’ve brought into their four children’s lives, they can’t help but keep it open as a possibility.
