WACO, Texas (ABP) -- Each morning as she walks across campus to class at Baylor University, 18-year-old freshman Angela Weber carries with her the memory of the girl she once was -- Anzhela Anatolevna Tesluk, an 11-year-old orphan living in poverty in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

The two don’t have much in common anymore. Weber is seven years and 7,000 miles away from Anzhela, a skinny little blond-haired girl adopted from an orphanage and given a new life in America. But she wants to remember where she’s from, just as she dreams about where she’s going.

The trip from the orphanage in Kazakhstan to a Baptist university campus in Waco, Texas, hasn’t always been smooth, with stops in North Carolina, Texas Baptist Children’s Home in Round Rock, a remote Montana ranch for at-risk adopted children and a Job Corps training facility. But it started in Kazakhstan.

Angela Weber carries with her the memory of the girl she once was—Anzhela Anatolevna Tesluk, an 11-year-old orphan from Almaty, Kazakhstan. One of the brightest memories along the way was her time spent at Texas Baptist Children's Home in Round Rock.

Anzhela never knew her biological father. Her mother died a week before her seventh birthday, and she was sent to the orphanage in Almaty. Four years later, she was adopted by a family in North Carolina, and Anzhela became Angela. The family later moved to a small town in Texas.

“I was really, really excited that I would have a family in the United States and actually be part of something,” she says. “I knew if I stayed in Russia, I wouldn’t have much of a future.”

While Weber is grateful for the opportunity she has been given in the United States, her journey offers cautionary lessons for parents interested in international adoption. Especially important is the challenge of raising a foreign-born child as an American girl while recognizing the importance of native culture and heritage. It is a balancing act Weber says her adoptive parents couldn’t handle.

“I remember looking in a dictionary one day for words that looked or sounded the same in Russian and English,” she recalls. “When I found one, I took it to my mom and showed her. She got really angry and sent me to my room. They took away all of my books and my music and everything that I brought with me from Kazakhstan, then they let me think I would never get them back.”

Weber remembers her adoptive mother “read a lot of books with horrible stories about international adoptions, and she just assumed I would turn out that way.” When her adopted daughter seemed to resist efforts to become Americanized, her mother took her to therapy.

Eventually she was sent to Texas Baptist Children’s Home. When her parents disagreed with the approach counselors there recommended, they sent her to a Montana ranch that specialized in helping Russian adoptees heal from the trauma of their orphanage experience, using medication and extensive therapy when needed.

“It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever been through,” Angela recalls. “If someone had been in that place because of a bad past, it could help them and I saw some kids who were helped. But I didn’t have those kinds of problems. It just made me mad.

“My parents told me that if I got better I could come home. But I didn’t really know what getting better meant.”

After four months, she was given the choice of going back to her adopted parents, being adopted into another family or going to a Job Corps training program. She chose the Job Corps. While there, she earned her GED and then returned to Round Rock to stay with the young couple who had sponsored her while she lived at Texas Baptist Children’s Home.

College was her dream and despite only having a GED, with scholarship help from the Texas Baptist ministry Children at Heart Foundation, she was admitted to Baylor as a provisional student for the summer session. She did well, and this semester she is carrying a full load of classes -- including astronomy, introduction to music and Russian.

Advice on international adoptions

Based on her own experience, Weber believes parents who are thinking about international adoption need to commit themselves fully to their adopted children, just as they would to their biological children.

“The thing that happened to me was that my parents never wanted to know me. My mom still doesn’t know me,” she adds, noting her mother sent her a letter right before she started at Baylor saying it would be more realistic to think about becoming a hairdresser than going to college.

“She always focused on trying to fix who she thought I was rather than getting to know who I was,” she said. “I didn’t need to be fixed. I still don’t know what they wanted from me.”

While at Texas Baptist Children’s Home, Weber was introduced to Ryan and Abbie Owens, the young couple who became her sponsor family.

“Angela is like our daughter,” Ryan Owens said. “She is family to us.”

It was thanks to their guidance that she accepted Christ, a belief that has provided her with strength and faith in the future.

“If I didn’t go through what I went through, then I wouldn’t have met Jesus,” she said. “I wouldn’t be where I am today. Going through bad things helps me appreciate the good things when they happen.”

Her life today at Baylor is all about good things. When her education is complete, she may even return to Kazakhstan to help give people a sense of the same kind of hope she found. But for now, there is life as a university student.

“It has been my dream to go to college since I came to America,” she said. “Every morning when I walk to class, I look up at all the beautiful buildings and thank God that I made it here."

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Bill Martin writes for Children at Heart Ministries.

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