Grisha's Story
Grisha was born the year the Soviet Union fell, in 1991, in Perm, Russia. His parents were swept up in the social disorder that affected many families, and the authorities placed Grisha and his older sister, Kseniya, in an orphanage where he would live until he was eight years old.
|
The prospects for Grisha and Kseniya were grim. One in three former orphans in Russia is homeless; one in five commits a crime, and one in ten commits suicide. They could only stay in the orphanage until the age of sixteen.
In the summer of 1999, an organization called Kidsave International came to Perm. They wanted to give Russian children in orphanages the opportunity to spend some time in the United States with a host family. Grisha and Kseniya were chosen to participate. Some orphans ended up being adopted, but Grisha and his sister were not, and they returned to Perm.
Thousands of miles away, a California couple saw a video of Grisha and Kseniya, and decided to adopt them. Six months later, on a freezing February day in Perm in the year 2000, two Americans and two Russians became a family. Grisha was speaking English within a month, had made friends all over the neighborhood, and his favorite restaurant was McDonald's. He was very active, and played soccer, basketball, and baseball, and even tried gymnastics. The outdoor sports in the Southern California heat gave him bad headaches, and he ended up in the emergency after landing on his head tumbling too enthusiastically, so his mother decided he should try a nice cold sport, like ice hockey. She purchased a pair of hockey skates on Ebay, and bought a pair of figure skates for $10 as an afterthought. She then took Grisha to the rink on a warm October day in 2001, and watched him try out the figure skates and never pick up the hockey skates again.
By his second year of skating, he had earned national ranking at the Juvenile level. He did the same at the Intermediate level in 2005 and 2006, and qualified for the 2007 US National Championships as a Novice, and is currently ranked 12th in the nation.
Grisha is now fifteen years old, and loves his life in America. He dreams of representing the United States in the Olympics someday. He is proud of his Russian heritage and hopes someday to return and learn more about his homeland.
Birthday Grisha's first competition, Spring 2002
|
 |
| |||||||||||
|
|
|
|
