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A true believer in second chances

Vodičková fought for a new way to house (and love) orphans

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
March 28th, 2007 issue

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
State authorities tried repeatedly to close her down, but Marie Vodičková defended her Klokánek homes in court — and won her case.
When Marie Vodičková first saw Věrka, people said the girl wasn’t good enough to be her daughter. Věrka had learning problems and, at 7, was too old for someone like Vodičková, who was the state attorney overseeing government orphanages at the time.
“I was immediately offered a baby,” Vodičková says. But she wanted Věrka. She had read the girl’s file and knew that her parents had earned several years in prison for starving and beating her. In fact, it was Vodičková herself who had prosecuted the case.
COURTESY PHOTO
Lost generation no more: Vodičková's family (above) is close-knit and resembles any other.
“And, when I saw her, I didn’t know it was her but there was an immediate connection. She had these big, brown, sad eyes,” she says in her office near náměstí Republiky. Vodičková, a warm, lively woman with red hair, sips on a cappuccino as she recounts the pivotal moment.
The orphanage sent Vodičková to a psychologist to talk her out of the adoption. Besides, they said, there was still a chance that a two-parent family wanted Věrka. In theory.
An unexpected path
At the time, in 1981, Vodičková was 30, single and lived with her parents. She hadn’t been looking for a child. Mostly what she had been doing was overseeing those who cared for abandoned or unwanted children.
Vodičková, the daughter of a dressmaker and a tram driver, grew up wanting to be a veterinarian. She certainly had the grades, but it turned out she didn’t have the heart. After learning that vets had to put down animals, she knew it wasn’t for her.
Not knowing what else to do, she went to law school, figuring it would be a good choice because it encompasses many fields. Her teacher said she would be a good prosecutor, but Vodičková had never thought of it.
“I thought only geniuses did it,” she says. Not only that, but she felt she wasn’t punitive enough to go into criminal law. No matter, her advisers told her.
Vodičková gravitated toward prosecuting crimes against youth and what followed was a 22-year career as a state attorney fighting child abuse and overseeing institutions that care for children. What she found shocked her.
“The conditions were just horrible,” she says. “[The children] were not hungry — they were dressed, but they were hungry for human contact.” During her visits, children would flock around her and ask her if she was their mother.
Most of the time, the children were fated to spend several years, if not their entire childhoods, in state orphanages. While there they were cared for by social workers who, Vodičková felt, were just mailing it in.
“Many times I found out that they were very passive and they were not doing much,” she recalls.
Věrka
Věrka, the little girl the determined prosecutor had her heart set on, was a product of both the abuse of her parents and the neglect of the orphanage. At 7, she didn’t know how to count and she didn’t know the names of common fruits such as apples. Her verbal IQ was low.
One time Vodičková visited the orphanage and found Věrka running around a tree — the only game available — and dressed in a tattered sweater. “She looked horrible,” she says.
At this point, Vodičková had met with the psychologist, who arrived at the opinion that the would-be adoptive parent knew what she wanted and was aware of what she was getting herself into.
A countrywide search for a two-parent family for Věrka had turned up nothing. A woman who was supposed to take her died of a heart attack. After she failed to show up, Věrka spent the whole night crying.
But she still held out hope. When Vodičková was introduced to Věrka, the girl told her that she soon would have a new mother and a new father.
On a walk that afternoon, Věrka asked Vodičková if she was her new mother. Even though heaps of red tape still had to be tackled and adoption was far from certain, Vodičková said, “Yes.”
From that moment on, Vodičková says, “She was holding on to me like a tick.” Věrka didn’t want to let her surrogate parent out of her sight, not even to go to the bathroom, for fear that she would leave her.
Within two months, Vodičková took her charge home for good. She remembers two Romany boys approaching her as she left the orphanage. “Are we going, too?” they asked. “Why not us?” As Vodičková recalls the encounter, her eyes fill with tears. She says she is 100 percent certain the boys stayed in the home until they were 18. Aside from being older, they were Roma, and Romany children are rarely, if ever, adopted.
A year after Vodičková adopted Věrka, she took in another girl, Renata. Two years later, she became the foster mother of two Romany sisters. Three years after that, she took in two Romany cousins. By 1990, she was a single mother of seven girls.
“The social workers said, ‘You are a lost cause,’ ” she remembers with a laugh.
But Vodičková’s parents supported her decisions to take in the girls. Four years after she got Věrka, she moved out of her parents’ house and into a small three-room apartment in a prefab concrete building. Vodičková never married but managed to get by somehow, with the girls spending daytime in school and attending a club after school. The older girls helped take care of the younger ones and she received state subsidies for all the girls except Věrka because they were foster children. Věrka, because she was legally Vodičková’s daughter, was ineligible.
An alternative
In 1990 — eight years after taking Věrka — Vodičková founded the Fund for Children in Need with other adoptive and foster parents. The small group raised funds and advocated for orphans and abused children.

By 1996, the group’s activities had expanded and Vodičková left her job as a lawyer to run the organization. In 2000, they opened their first Klokánek (“Little Kangaroo”), or private orphanage, as an alternative to the state system.

Klokáneks are based on the concept of home care and resemble apartment buildings. Four children live in one unit with an “auntie,” an employee who lives in the apartment for a week at a time. Two aunts take alternate shifts. Psychologically, this setup is best for children, who can stay with their siblings and live in a home environment, according to Leona Koutenská, the director of the Klokánek in Hostivice, just outside Prague.
Another difference between these homes and state orphanages is the length of time children stay in the institutions. Children in orphanages stay an average of five years, while those in Klokáneks stay about eight months, according to Vodičková.
The homes are partially funded by the state and cost about 300,000 Kč ($14,000) annually per child, Vodičková says.
She now oversees 16 Klokáneks, which house about 300 children across the country. The demand is greater than the supply, and there is a list of children waiting to get in.
It’s been a fight to keep them open and funded, as state agencies routinely try to close them down, citing various laws, or withhold funding. Last year, Vodičková couldn’t pay her workers for three months. She thinks that, had she not been a lawyer, she would’ve been shut down long ago.
The state has tried different angles — from accusing a Klokánek worker of kidnapping children to arguing that it’s illegal for such places to take in small children — but Vodičková has won all these battles in court.
“We are not liked,” Vodičková says. “It’s something new. They want to do it the old way.” The state orphanages also see Klokáneks as competition, a threat to the authority of the institutions.
Markéta
As for her own family, Vodičková took in one more girl, her last, in 1999.
Markéta was 13 when Vodičková became her foster mother. The girl told her, “Three families have already kicked me out and you will, too.” Vodičková admits that Markéta was a difficult teenager: She didn’t finish school, and she sometimes stole from her. Last month, at 19 and unemployed, Markéta took off. Vodičková doesn’t know where she is.
“She is an adult, and it seems to me she likes this kind of lifestyle,” Vodičková says. But Vodičková considers herself lucky.
“I think it’s a great result if only one child does it out of eight. It’s so great to have so many children because if one doesn’t turn out it’s not as painful because others turned out well.”
With the other girls — now women — she has wonderful, open relationships, she says. Some of them even have their own families now.
As to whether she would ever adopt again, Vodičková says with a laugh, “I have grandchildren now. I am an old lady. Not anymore.”

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com


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