If you would consider adopting a child with special needs, you might want to look at Reece's Rainbow's lists of children available to single mothers. Reece's Rainbow is not an adoption agency, but a non-profit ministry which advocates for kids with special needs in around 25 countries outside the U.S., and which helps raise funds to off-set adoption expenses for parents, while facilitating the adoption process by providing information and guidance during the home-study/required documentation phase and later, in-country assistance. You can find RR at
www.reecesrainbow.com
Funds are raised through donations to Reece's Rainbow and appear as adoption accounts for each child. Adoptive families do not access these funds until a day or so before they travel, and if an adoption falls through, the funds remain with the child's account, not the would-be adoptive parents.
Reece's Rainbow focuses on children with Down syndrome, but also lists children with a wide variety of other special needs, some very minor and others much more significant. Children are listed under pseudonyms, and in many cases, their country is not publicly listed (depending on each countries' laws about privacy). Around 1,000 children have found adoptive families during the 7 or so years Reece's Rainbow has been in existence. Had these children not been adopted, their futures would have been bleak, indeed, as in many countries in the developing world, individuals with special needs are viewed very negatively and are institutionalized (often in extremely grim mental institutions) for their entire lives.
An aside: there are at least seven orphanages, some of them for children with special needs, in or very close to Sochi. I wonder how many of those attending or watching the Olympics are aware of that, and if Putin and his cronies have visited these children during their stay in Sochi?
Sadly, due to malice towards the United States rather than any real regard for the well-being of the approximately 700,000 orphaned children in Russia, Americans are no longer allowed to adopt these children, many of whom have special needs and who face a sad fate indeed. And due to a very recent change in Russian law directed towards countries where same-sex marriage is legal, it seems that the only foreigners allowed to adopt from Russia at present are Italians. It would be a different matter if Russians would adopt their own, but that remains rare, especially for children with special needs...
So I hope you will consider adopting a child with minor or correctible/treatable special needs. Things like low vision, hearing loss, mild cerebral palsy, HIV, cleft lip/cleft palate, clubbed feet, minor limb differences require treatment and monitoring rather than intensive daily special care, and there are many absolutely wonderful children out there with some of these issues. One of my own dear young relatives, now a teenager, was one of these children, and adoption has made all the difference in the world. Rather than receiving a lifetime sentence to a mental institution because of a very mild special need, my relative will be heading to college in a few years.
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