There is a moment in the home team dugout at Yankee Stadium when John Lahutsky’s voice falls into silence. This is no small thing. John enjoys communication—it is an innate ability for him, and perhaps his saving grace.
“He would talk,” his friend Andrei Sullivan had told me during batting practice, speaking of their time together in Russia. We’d been on the warning track outside the dugout, near the batter’s cage. A digital recorder in my hand, Andrei standing with the aid of the lightweight metal Lofstrand crutches commonly used by people with disabilities, his forearms balanced in their cuffs. “He was loud, very loud . . . like, one of the most talkative kids there,” he’d said.
Andrei was referring to Baby House 10, the nightmarish unit in a Moscow orphanage where they’d met years before. Back then, John was called Ivan Pastukhov, the name given to him by his birth mother. Born prematurely six months into her term, stricken with cerebral palsy, he’d been turned over to the orphanage’s care when he was just a year and half old. His mother’s doctors had told her he would be a medical and financial burden to her.
And now on the players’ bench during our separate conversation, John has abruptly stopped talking midsentence. Andrei is moving by us through the dugout with a video reporter and crew. He is about to be interviewed at the opposite end of the bench, the one that extends toward the outfield, and space in the dugout is tight—especially because Andrei has to walk using the crutches, his gait wide and uneven. John’s walker, meanwhile, is in front of him as he sits on the bench, blocking Andrei and the camera’s crew’s way. Someone has politely asked him if it’s all right to move it aside for just a second, and then gone ahead and done it to let the group pass.
John has barely acknowledged the question. He’s turned toward Andrei, his gaze following his progress toward the far end of the bench, and there is something at once remote and protective in his eyes.
I remember something else Andrei told me about John behind the batting cage. “I believe that if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have made it,” he said. “He just helped me . . . he brought life in me.”
Before today, they had not seen each other in almost a decade and a half, since 1997, when Andrei was adopted by an American couple, John and Roz Sullivan. John had been seven years old , Andrei five. They’ve talked on the phone, once a month or so, in the time since John arrived in the United States over two years after they were last together in Russia.
Andrei now lives in Detroit with his parents; John and his adoptive mother, Paula Lahutsky, in the town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Whenever they would discuss reuniting in person, they envisioned it happening at some future date. Twenty years off, thirty, the future. Perhaps in a quiet restaurant somewhere. They never dreamed it might be this soon. They never thought it would be while touring 
the studios of a national morning television show in New York City, The Today Show. They could not have imagined they would be riding a horse-drawn carriage through Central Park with the manager of the Yankees, or at the zoo there with two of the team's players, or throwing out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium. It had simply never occurred to them.
Now I remind John of the question I’d asked him before his friend appeared in the dugout, calling his attention back to me. What, I’d asked, had drawn him to Andrei at the orphanage . . . at Baby House 10? He was only a child at the time after all, and the other boy so much younger by comparison.
“I knew that Andrei needed help,” he says. “I knew he could not survive in the way he was. We were in a room with silent people. With kids that were not speaking, didn’t have any communication skills. And they were banging their heads, basically. Andrei was doing the same thing, and so I had to find some way to communicate with this person across the table.”
As John speaks of how he found Andrei, he rocks slightly forward and backward on the bench to illustrate his condition, and it brings on a cold rush of memory for me. Once, many years ago, I had done volunteer work in a New York State facility for the mentally handicapped. A series of reports on the local news had exposed the deplorable conditions there, and the people that ran the facility had reluctantly let in people who wanted to help the residents.
They had lived in terrible deprivation, some for twenty or thirty or forty years, since being abandoned by their families as children. Many had had no mental disabilities whatsoever, but suffered from neuromotor diseases such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy. They were warehoused in thirty odd buildings, most of them bare, filthy and overcrowded.
In the wards that suffered the worst neglect, I saw people rocking exactly as John was showing me in the Yankees dugout. There had been huge common rooms filled with as many as fifty children and teenagers, every one of them rocking up and down, rhythmically, repetitively, some in nothing but underwear, strapped to the backs of their chairs so they wouldn’t injure themselves against the walls and tables. They stared with blank expressions on their faces, or kept their eyes closed, rocking in utter silence.
The medical term for this is Stereotypic Movement Disorder, and it is typified by compulsive, nonfunctional movement. Associated with cognitive impairments or developmental disorders such as autism, the cause of this behavior is still not entirely understood by doctors. But it is considered a self-comforting behavior.
In a Russian orphanage like Baby House 10, it was what children did when they were denied human 
warmth and attention or any sort of mental stimulus.
Even at six- or seven-years-old, John felt he had to do something to help Andrei, even as he had once helped himself. No one had taught him to speak. No one had taught him much of anything. In Russia’s child-welfare system, there had been no distinctions between those with physical and mental disabilities. All such conditions were considered shameful and irremediable.
“I learned how to speak by listening to people and just learning the language that way,” John told me. “I didn’t have baby Russian, I didn’t have orphanage Russian. It was just . . . people were impressed that I had an adult language that most children don’t master until later on in their lives.”
John explained that he’d he felt his ability to pick up language was intuitive, a blessing of sorts. “I think I had the instinct from an early age to realize that you need to communicate. You need to show people that you’re much more than what people think. Because when I was in the orphanage, people thought, ‘Okay, this kid can’t walk, his mind is broken too. So I had to prove to people that I was worth something’”
In the Baby House, John begged the woman in charge of the unit for toys, and occasionally he’d get them. They weren't given with kindness or compassion. Once a broken doll had been slammed down on the table. John took it apart and rolled the pieces across the table's surface toward Andrei, wanting to stimulate his brain and senses.
“I would play with him, and show him what the toy did, and teach him how to communicate,” John tells me in the baseball dugout. And then he pauses, looking over at where his friend is being interviewed in front of the cameras. “His mom thanked me for that today.”
But when they met, there had been no adults to express gratitude. Instead, for a time afterward, John had been sent to a place called Filimonki Mental Asylum, where children with physical disabilities were essentially condemned to languish and die. Confined to a metal crib, naked and sedated, his health and mental condition began to decline. But Sara Philps, whose husband Alan was a Moscow-based journalist with the British Daily Telegraph, had taken an interest in him on a tour of Baby House 10. With the help of a young Russian student named Vika, they strove to get him adopted.
It was not easy, as Russia’s policies on international adoptions had grown increasingly restrictive. Sara knew something had to be done fast, however. The boy was slowly withering into oblivion.
Then a story Alan Philps wrote on the abuses of the Russian childcare system led to the closure of the children’s wing at Filimonki. After almost nine months, John was returned to Baby House Number 10, with his friend Andrei.
“His skills had deteriorated,” John says. “But, still, after I came back, he revived to his old self.”
But for John the situation had gained urgency. Sara’s husband was being transferred out of the country. Andrei was soon adopted by the Sullivans, who had been in Russia for several years working with a Christian ministry. Everything was being taken away from him.
Then Sara learned of a loophole in the Russian policies. She met a couple from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, that had managed to adopt from Baby House 10, bumped into them as they left the building, and asked how they’d managed to do it. And the new parents told her it was a church sponsored adoption, and that these were still possible—although even that small loophole would soon close to Americans.
As Paula Lahutsky recalled, “Sara and her husband said, ‘Well, when you go back to Bethlehem, can you do anything to try to save this boy we know of? Because he’s already eight-years-old, and if we don’t get him adopted, he’s going to be in far worse condition than he’s in now.”
Returning to the states, the couple put a notice in their church newsletter, and Paula Lahutsky, a school psychologist, took notice. Her entire home had been made handicapped-accessible because she’d been taking care of her father, a double amputee, for the final years of his life. There was an access ramp and other modifications.
Paula will tell you she is no risk taker. She won’t even drive the sixty or seventy miles from Bethlehem 
to Philadelphia. But there she was. She knew. The minute she read about John, she knew. Daunting a challenge as it might be, she had to try to adopt him, she says.
There were setbacks. It took almost 12 months before Russian authorities approved the adoption. In the previous year, John had had been consigned to a ward with two and three year old toddlers, denied schooling, and had two surgeries on his legs whose positive effects were erased by lack of aftercare and malnutrition.
In 1999, John’s adoption was finally allowed, and Paula took him back to the United States. A dozen years later, after graduating high school with honors, he is preparing to enter Northampton Community College in its upcoming fall semester.
And today John’s at Yankee Stadium with his mother, and Andrei and his parents, and Chuck Frantz, President and Founder of the Lehigh Valley Yankee Fan Club, who first contacted the New York Yankees about bringing him on a possible field visit to the Stadium, a request that turned into something far greater, what Frantz simply calls “a spectacular thing.”
Today, John Lahutsky is being recognized for what he always has been. A symbol of hope and perseverance, a living inspiration.
“I can’t believe it,” he says, looking straight at me now. “It’s a dream of a lifetime.”
I click off my voice recorder, sit facing him without saying a word. I’m at a loss for how to possibly express what I feel.
And then I start to rise, reaching out touch his shoulder. An inspiration.
“Thank you,” I say at last, the words spoken with profound gratitude.
I know, but do not tell John, that it is only in part for the interview.
With deep appreciation to Jason Zillo and the entire New York Yankees media relations team, Blayke Scheer and Joe Auriemma from the YES Network, and my YESNetwork.com colleague Jon Lane for providing all the support, encouragement and assistance I could possibly wish for throughout HOPE Week 2011.
