(Editor's Note - Sergei chose to write a series of smaller stories, some of which tell about life in the orphanages.)
When I was in Russia my dad died and we buried him. Once when I was in school the police came to school and took us, and we ended up in some kind of police kids place and when I was there they were mean people. They would make people read books even if they didn’t know how to read. When we went to eat, we had to go line up and go eat and that’s when we could go to the bathroom and outside. When someone behaved badly, they would lock them up in one of the rooms with concrete walls and a bucket in a corner to go to the bathroom. When we went to bed we all went into one room and they would lock up us and we couldn’t do anything.
After I had been there three months they transferred us to a different orphanage which was better than some kind of police orphanage. After we had been in the new orphanage for about a year my Russian mom came and got us again. Then a few months later the police came and brought us to the police orphanage and from that orphanage we were transferred to a different one. Then we were transferred to the Belagorsk orphanage and my older sister visited us.
When I was in a Belagorsk orphanage, we went to camps and did karate until they sent us to the Blagoveschensk orphanage. The reason we were sent to the Blagoveschensk orphanage was because our mom died of cancer. When I was in the Blagoveschensk orphanage we would go on eighteen day boat trips every year and go to camps in the summer.
When I was eleven I ended up with the wrong kind of friends. I started to use drugs and alcohol. Once me and my friend went picking marijuana and one of the men followed us but we didn’t know that he was a police officer. When we were done picking marijuana that man caught us and sent us to the police station. They questioned us about why we picked but we lied and said we were picking for someone else. Later, I heard they were talking about if we should go to jail but they said we were too young to go to jail, so they let us go but they kept the records of us that we had been involved with drugs.
When I was in the orphanage we usually did fun things in the summer, like go to a little place where there were good trees and start playing tree tag. What we would do is try to get away from one person while we were all on the tree and you couldn’t touch the ground. When we were stuck and it looked like we didn’t have anywhere to go, we usually would jump on different branches to run away from the person who was “it”.
Once when we were playing tree tag, one of my friends jumped on a different branch and he slipped and landed on his head from a fifteen feet height and he didn’t even break his neck but he did go unconscious for a while. When we picked him up and carried him back to the orphanage some people thought he was high on drugs. Then the doctor came and asked us what happened and we told the doctor, “When we were playing tree tag he fell on his head.” After a few days he felt good and he started playing tree tag again.
When I was in an orphanage, every year we had summer breaks and in the summer we would go on eighteen day boat trips. When we took eighteen day boat trips we would stop in different places to refuel and do some fish trading. While they did that, most of the people went around the city and bought things and we stopped in several cities like that. We also would stop on some kind of land where there were trees and a lot of sand and there were no people. When we stopped there we spent about two days on the sandy part. We would swim and do some contests like who could build the prettiest sand sculptures. Then we would do some competitions but since there was a lot of people we would usually separate all of the people into four groups.
We also fished there and once when we were fishing we caught a huge fish and the fish had eggs, so what we did with the eggs was turned them in to caviar.
When I heard me, Zhenya and Jennifer were going to be adopted I was excited. Then the director told me if we went to America they might use us as slaves and my friend told me they were going to break us like robots but I did not believe that.
Then we waited at least for a year, before Mom and Dad came. They put us in a hospital for no reason and when they did that we could not go outside so me and the guy I met there would go out from the hospital without asking because we knew that they would say no to us. The few days we were in the hospital I was thinking of going back to the orphanage but I decided to stay. Then Jennifer’s friend came to the hospital to visit her and she visited me and Zhenya. When she was visiting she smelled that we had smoked cigarettes and she had been saying to us for a while not to smoke cigarettes because they are bad for you.
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