Kids from another country, with a past
International adoption is never easy, and can cause pain that lasts a lifetime.
Irina's surname may be Spanish, but that's little more than a legal nicety. She has no home, and no family. She did for a while, but it didn't work out. Hers is one of the untold stories of failed adoption. In this case, Irina rejected her new family, although she insists she is not to blame. She was just 11 when she was brought to Spain with her sister from a Russian orphanage.
"I didn't know that I was coming to stay forever. I thought I could go home, where my mother lives," she explains, adding: "The authorities had taken us away from her because she drank too much, but we used to see her every now and then." Her first words in Spanish were "I want to go back to Russia." They would be the start of a long, sad story that would end in a Spanish children's home, surrounded by other children like her.
Over the last decade, Spanish families have adopted some 35,000 children from Eastern Europe, China, Nepal, Ethiopia, Congo, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. Most of the time, the children make a new life for themselves in a caring, safe home. But not always. While the number of adoptions that actually fail is only around 1.5 percent, Ana Berástegui, who teaches at the University of Comillas, and is one of the few academics to have carried out a study of the problem, estimates that one in five families with adopted children "faces very difficult situations" that will bring them close to returning the child to the authorities.