“Look at my bike!” five-year-old Oskaras, the youngest member of the Lesinskai family, points his finger at a blue vehicle in the yard and invites me inside. Svetlana, a dark-haired woman of average stature, is standing in the doorway, smiling. The large family of Svetlana and Saulius Lesinskas lives in a spacious 500-square-metre house in Molėtai. The two-story residence, built on a hill opposite a tiny river, looks like a small castle. Long narrow corridors, fourteen “halls” – there is enough space for everyone. And enough love, too.
At the moment, though, the Lesinskai house only has eleven residents – a university student, seven pupils, one kindergartner, and two parents. Enough for a football team. On holidays – like Mother's Day – four more daughters come to visit with their husbands and seven children of their own.
Mother saved newborns
“I grew up in Ukraine with two sisters,” Svetlana starts her story. “We lived in a place where they stationed many military regiments. Nearby, there was a maternity hospital, where my mother worked as a gynaecologist.
"Young recruits would come to serve, having left their pregnant girlfriends on the other side of the Soviet Union. She would find him, come here, give birth, leave the newborn in the hospital and go away. Babies born under such circumstances would be taken to an orphanage, so my mum took some of them home with her. We thus saved 18 infants.
"My dad once told her: “You know, Vanya, I saw it in her eyes while she was giving birth – she will come back and take it.” And they did. There was only one baby – a little girl – whom we took care of for eight months. In most cases, mothers or dads would discover where their kids were and come to pick them up within a week or two. My mum and dad would become their godparents. I probably inherited from my mum this ability to take care of my own and others' children,” Svetlana thinks.
Patron of poor families
Svetlana Lesinskienė is 59. She comes from Ukraine and after graduating from a vocational school, she got an appointment to a car factory in Rokiškis. She soon married Saulius, had kids and moved to Molėtai.
For sixteen years now, she has been heading an association of large families, Šeimynėlė. More than 100 families belong to the association. Svetlana does all she can to assist families living on limited means: she takes children to various free events, arranges meetings with celebrities, distributes food through the Food Bank and other charities. She always extends a helping hand, especially to single mothers.
Barely survived
Svetlana and her husband love children very much, so they knew early on they would have more than one. “You would have a baby, bring it up. Two or three, it seems, should be perfectly enough, but then you'd see mothers taking their babies in pretty prams and become so jealous,” woman laughs, explaining how she came to have so many kids.
Oksana was the first-born of the Lesinskai family. She is now 38. When she got a little older, Kristina was born. Eleven months later, the third daughter, Lijana, saw the light of day. Then the family moved from Rokiškis to Molėtai. The woman got pregnant again. This time, pregnancy was complicated and she almost died. She was pregnant with twins, but one of the babies was a stillborn and Svetlana went into a coma after giving birth. She survived and so did Laura, who is now living in Ireland.
Back then, if a woman had five children and was of feeble health, the state allowed her to retire early. So Svetlana resolved to have a fifth baby – Saulėna, another baby girl. Three years later, she got pregnant again and gave birth to Milena. She is now nineteen.
Foster kids
Bringing up so many children of their own, the Lesisnkai never planned to take on foster kids. “We were going on a trip to Odessa – the town mayor asked me to accompany a group of culture institutions' employees. A director of a foster home was coming along. We started talking and he asked me: Might you be the Svetlana that my pupils were looking for?” the woman recalls.
It turned out that there was one mother of four who had signed up with Šeimynėlė. Her kids had been taken away and put in foster home. Svetlana had once helped her, so the woman was trying to find her again. She couldn't, unfortunately, because Svetlana was in a hospital on that day. Their meeting might have been fateful, because the mother, having failed to find any help, took her life. Her kids in foster home remembered an “aunt Svetlana” who had once given them candy and now wanted to find her.
“I felt very bad in my soul,” Svetlana remembers a deep sense of moral responsibility that befell her. She first took Roksana from foster home. Svetlana only planned to have the girl over for summer, until she started school. When she came to the orphanage to take care of the paper work, Roksana's elder brother Tomas asked her to take him too. She did. And then she took in a third child from the same family, Valdas. Came September. The kids continued living in foster home, but Svetlana would take them on weekends. And this arrangement went on until December, when the family decided to apply for foster care.
Besides the three, the Lesinskai took in five more kids. “Roksana didn't know how to play, she would only run around with her brothers or sit staring at a computer. There were no girls in the neighbourhood. So my husband suggested I had some other girl from the orphanage over, at least for weekends, so they could play together.
"At foster home, they offered me to take second-grader Laura. She and Roksana already knew each other. Laura brought Alias, the board game, with her. She had to read a word from a card and began crying – she didn't know how! I tried to find out at school how it was possible that a second-grader couldn't read. The teacher just shrugged off – she was a candidate to repeat the course. I had to save her, I realized, and so I took her in. I taught her to read and write over the following summer. Laura had three little brothers – Oskaras, Žilvinas, and Ligitas. So we brought them home too. One from the previous family, Valdas, was already an adult and left our home, so we took another orphan in his stead, Vaidas.”
At the moment, the Lesinskai spouses are foster parents to seven children from three families. Why does Svetlana do it? “By taking care of someone else's kids, I wanted to show my own family, how important it was to keep those kids close to family. Children in foster home grow apart from one another,” she says.
Becoming mum on Mother's Day
When Svetlana decided to provide home for orphans, her entire family supported her. The Lesisnkai did not have it easy – some foster kids were gravely ill, others had already had lived on streets and caught bad habits. Yet others were very young and vulnerable.
“These kids started calling my husband 'papa' from day one, even though their fathers were still alive, while I was 'auntie',” Svetlana smiles. “And then came our first Mother's Day. One of the kids moulded a huge rose, brought it to me, accompanied by others, and announced: From now on, we are calling you mother.”
What is the Lesisnkai family tradition on Mother's Day? “All children come together. Even daughters from Ireland fly back with their families. It's the same every year, but you still get so excited... You know, I pity women who cannot have kids,” Svetlana says in a whisper.
Simple values
The woman's acquaintances often ask her: how are you doing with all those kids? She replies: Why don't you ask how they are doing with me? “I'm a woman of some age, I've already brought up my own kids. I try to discover what these children could be in the future, what they like.
"The most important thing is to try and find something in them that is similar to your own kids – or something that you failed to nurture in your own kids. It will be difficult otherwise. For example, Tomas is a copy of my Kristina – he keeps fighting for himself, even repeats her words. I know how to deal with him. Alternatively, I've always wanted for at least one of my daughters to be a good painter, but none of them was. And Roksana draws very nicely.”
Svetlana makes sure the kids are not idle – they take on several extra-curricular activities, some play basketball or do judo, others draw or sing or dance. They're all very proud of their achievements and awards.
“For me, the most important thing is that the kids love each other and don't lie, that they are well-fed, warm and that we can talk to them, take them out on a trip,” Svetlana says. “During the day, the kids do their own things, but in the evening, we all assemble around a table, we talk, everyone tells how their day went.”
With so many mouths to feed and heads to pat, is there any time left for herself and her husband? “My entire life has been like that,” Svetlana replies. “Work, kids. I never stop.”
1000 litas per child
In 2010, the Lesinskai applied for a special status. Now their household receives funding from the state and municipal budgets. Svetlana says this has made it much easier to her and the kids.
"Before, when we used to get 500 litas per child, there was a shortage, as kids need so much. Now, we receive 1000 litas per child, plus me and my husband get 200 litas each and it counts as work, even though, of course, we have other jobs. With more money, we renovated children's rooms. Tomas is going to take his driving exam - we have a scooter. We do not eat roasted pigeons, of course, but we do manage to buy bikes and computers to the kids. You can't buy just one bicycle and let one ride it with others running behind. The same goes to computers - the kids need them for school and play, one would not be enough."
