From Kazakhstan to Long Island

A friendly nurse at the orphanage in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, first demonstrated how she wanted Patricia and Wayne Resnick to feed 6-month-old Benjamin and Nadya. They had to rest the babies in their arms and spoon-feed potato soup to them. If the babies would not eat, they would not be allowed to leave the orphanage. That possibility worried the Resnicks, who had traveled more than 10,000 miles to adopt the children, stopping off in Moscow for a 13-hour layover along the way.

It was October 2000. Nurses watched constantly as the couple played with Benjamin and Nadya to make sure that they would be good parents. The nurses were pleased with what they saw. But the Resnicks still had to feed their babies. Another couple who had come to adopt struggled to feed their child, so the would-be parents gulped down the bland soup whenever the nurses left the room. The Resnicks wondered if they would have to do the same.

Fortunately, Benjamin and Nadya fed nicely in the Resnicks’ arms, so sneaking soup was unnecessary, recalled Wayne, a Nassau County police officer who is now 40. Adopting a child from overseas, he said, is “like taking a leap of faith.”

The Resnicks, who lived in Baldwin at the time and now make their home in North Merrick, had spent months filing paperwork with an adoption agency and the U.S. government and undergoing a series of interviews simply to be allowed into Kazakhstan, a wildly beautiful, oil-rich former Soviet republic that, at the time, had endured nearly a decade of political and economic strife since it gained independence in 1991.

In the end, the Resnicks adopted Benjamin and Nadya, and in 2004 they adopted two more children from Karaganda — James, who was 2 at the time, and Anya, who was 14 months. Their own child, Daniel, came along in 2006. With their dog, cat, lizard and four fish, the seven of them now make one big, happy, very American family.

The Resnicks said they knew that the adoptions would stretch their budget. The fees and expenses alone totaled tens of thousands of dollars, which the couple had to carry with them in cash to Karaganda. But both Wayne and Patricia said they wouldn’t have it any other way.