By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
Staff Writer

What Linda and Fritz Apfel want people to understand is that life in a child care home in Latvia is not the nightmare conjured by movies like “Little Orphan Annie” or news shows filmed in Romania a few years ago.

Latvians are “a very proud people, who want to take care of their own,” explained Linda Apfel. She visited several orphanages as she traveled to the Baltic country to adopt her four children.

“There are not a lot of caregivers but they work constantly with the children,” she said. “They are all very loving, and there's a lot of music, lots of hugging.”

Two of the orphanages were once old hunting lodges. During the Soviet regime, four or five families were assigned to large homes such as these, somewhat as depicted in the book and movie, Dr. Zhivago.

Fritz Apfel described dark wooden beams, curving staircases, crystal chandeliers, 10-foot ceilings. In one, “They basically knocked out old walls, and put in plaster and new wiring, and made it bright and attractive.” There was money “for the kids, but not much for upkeep” after the Soviet system collapsed.

“The money is not going into somebody's pocket,” Apfel said. “Everything they need is available, but it's four times as expensive [as here]. A little microwave we could buy for $60 here costs $300 to $400 there.”

One facility, with 60 to 70 children, had no clothes dryer. In wet weather, laundry was hung around the house. Another had lavish grounds, ideal for children, but with no lawn mower they had no place to play outdoors.

Every effort is made to give the youngsters the advantages of children whose situation is more comfortable, Apfel said. “The older ones got to do all kinds of things: they went to camp, they took field trips, they went to operas and plays and water parks. They know who Robin Williams is; they saw Flubber!

“They went to regular city school, not just an orphanage class, and the whole school was invited to the grand opening of the town's new McDonald's.”

Most of the children in orphanages have one or both birth parents living, Apfel explained. But in Latvia's poor economy it is sometimes difficult or impossible for some families to keep their children at home.

“Their parents give them up out of love,” Apfel said.

“If a family is down on their luck, perhaps unemployed or on drugs, whatever, they can place a child in the child care system until they're back on their feet,” Linda Apfel said. “The state follows up, like DFACS [the Department of Family and Children's Services] here. They look at the home life situation — it's somewhat but not quite like foster care.”

And, as with two of the Apfels' children, it sometimes happens that the birth parents lose their parental rights. At this point, the children may become eligible for adoption.

The problem, Apfel said, is that “In Latvia, once children reach 15, they're out of the [children's] home and on the streets.” Nine years of school is required, and free, but high school or vocational training, for which there is a relatively low fee, may be out of reach in a country where unemployment approaches 30 percent.

“It's slightly better now than when we first went over,” said Apfel, “but you have to at least have a high school education to get a job. In Latvia, if they didn't have money for high school, they couldn't get a job, and they were out on the streets.”

The Latvians “don't want the kids to leave their country,” she said. But since international adoptions have been allowed, three out of four adoptees go to foreigners, most of them Americans.