Monday, February 15, 2010
7 pm

AfterWords Café

Lower Level, Reeves Library

~Refreshments provided~

Brought to you by the Zinzendorf Society in conjunction with the Friends of Reeves Library and Sigma Tau Delta With the help of USG funding.

About John:
John was born in Moscow, Russia in 1990. A preemie who weighed only two pounds at birth, John miraculously survived, despite the questionable level of medical technology available in Russia at that time. This was the first indication of John’s remarkable spirit, a spirit that allowed him to survive under enormously difficult circumstances in the years to come and to never give up hope for a better future. When John was eighteen months old, his birth parents abandoned him and his six-year-old sister Olga. The children were separated, with Olga going to one orphanage and John to another. John languished in the Stalinistic orphanage system which treated him as less than human because of his physical disability resulting from cerebral palsy. There were valiant attempts by concerned individuals, including Sarah and Alan Philps and a young Russian woman named Vika, to rescue John from this system, a system that placed John in an adult mental asylum at age six. But it was not until 1999, when he was 9 ½ years old, that John’s life turned around dramatically as he was adopted by Paula Lahutsky who became his mother forever. They live in Bethlehem Township, Pennsylvania with their chihuahua named Jambo. Currently, John is an honor roll student in the Bethlehem Area School District at Freedom High School where history is his favourite subject. He enjoys giving presentations about his life and his book The Boy from Baby House 10.