Couple adopt unwanted ‘freak’ boy who was abandoned at birth – see him now

Across the world, there are more than one billion people living with a disability. In some countries, disabled children are treated like “freaks,” denied the opportunity to go to school, perish in filthy institutions and some are severely abused.

Rustam is one of these children, who because of several diseases that altered his appearance, was abandoned by his biological parents as a baby.

And just as he was about to move into a “house of the disabled,” the little guy had a huge miracle…

Up until 2006, there was no system providing protection to people living with disabilities. In that year, an international treaty was implemented by the United Nations, finally protecting disabled adults and children, who in some countries were shockingly abandoned, beaten or caged.

Rustam was one of the children, who was discarded immediately after he was born, left at the hospital because of his appearance.

The adorable little child was born with “several malformations,” that modified his face and left him without a leg and a partial hip. For the first two years of his life, he was fed through a tube, and over the next two years, doctors “literally piece-by-piece by collected his face.”

@nika_evil_ Таким мы увидели Рустама когда приехали знакомиться с ним в Детский дом – 3 года назад.#приемныйребенок #приемнаясемья #семьясмыслжизни ♬ оригинальный звук – user3123355417622

But no one wanted to adopt or foster the Russian-born Rustam, who still needed several procedures to live a healthy life.

Then in 2017, the kind-hearted Nika Zlobin, who wanted to foster or adopt a child, came across four-year-old Rustam’s photo.

“There was a hole instead of a face,” the Moscow woman recalls of seeing his picture.

After expressing interest in the youngster, her and her husband Yuri received a list of what Rustam needed: speech therapy, plastic surgery and a prosthetic leg.
The woman said (translated to English), “I read it, I figured – well, everything is solvable. Why don’t we do that too?”

Their first meeting with the child went better than expected. “When Yuri and I arrived, they brought Rustam to us in the playroom.” Nika continues, “You know, I was ready for a lot, I thought he was in diapers, but when I met him, he seemed like a child prodigy. I was shocked, honestly.”

Nika and Yuri’s timing was perfect as Rustam, who used gestures to speak, was being prepared for a transfer to a “house of the disabled.”

“And in a disabled home, he wouldn’t have survived,” Nika said, adding that trip would have been a one-way ticket.

The couple quickly filled in the documents, placed Rustam in the car and drove him to his new home in Moscow.

“I know that many adoptive parents worry about whether they can love someone else’s child as their own. I didn’t think about it,” Nika said, adding she is equally stern with him as she is with her biological daughter, Iya.
The parents also do not treat him any differently and expect the boy to work with them on his therapies.