Hidden in a big granite building huddled a group of women dreading the hours to come. The prognosis was dreadful, this decided after hours of debating, reviewing, remembering, and profiling. The judge was viewed by all as hard and unyielding—a man whose heart could not be touched. A nationalist from the old Soviet school, our judge was esteemed as anti-American, anti-Christian, and a bit over the top in male chauvinism. And here I stood, Elizabeth—a single female, American Christian Missionary—proposing to adopt one of his proud nation’s children. Placing my profile up against his, and adding my complete powerlessness in the face of his complete authority, things didn’t look good for the Salisbury’s. At one point I asked God why He had chosen this judge for our case. There is another judge that oversees international adoption cases, a woman who is much more lenient and understanding. I’d seen God remove obstacles before, but this time He chose to place one in our path. So I knew He had to have a plan.
Already reports were coming out of the judge’s chambers indicating that we were in for a rough ride. A week earlier we’d convened for the scheduled hearing, only to have it immediately postponed for a week because of the absence of someone from the Ministry of Education, the governmental administration that oversees the children’s home programs. This ministry was the only one that knew Tanya’s complete story and was also the office which gave approval for all we had done on her behalf over the past nearly three years. The judge had many questions—questions that, if not answered to his satisfaction, would destroy our chances of becoming a legal family.
I was shocked, really, at some of the things I was hearing. One was that the judge suspected that Natasha, my dear friend and Tanya’s legal guardian for the past two and a half years, had engaged in a criminal black market scheme where I was “buying” a child from her. The fact is that Tanya had lived with me from the very beginning while Natasha was her legal guardian. This was planned at the very first because the Russian law did not allow for a foreign national to be the legal guardian of a Russian child. There was no law that opposed such an arrangement, but because there was no precedent, it would have taken time to challenge the law and establish a precedent—this would have been a long drawn-out process, most likely doomed to fail, and during this time Tanya would be forced to return to the orphanage. This was the one thing we were trying to avoid at all costs… well, almost all costs. Natasha and I both agreed that we would always tell the truth, be completely open and transparent about our intentions and our activities, and follow the letter of the law. This Godly position would be greatly rewarded in the end.
