Text and photos by Onnik James Krikorian

At just eight months of age, Tiesa and her two sisters were abandoned by a roadside. They survived by eating roadkill — frogs, in fact — and drinking water from puddles before being discovered. The children, two of them with learning disabilities, were placed in Tbilisi’s Infant House, an orphanage by any other name.

According to EveryChild, a British children’s charity with a country office in Georgia, very little was known about them. “When they were found, the girls didn’t know their full names or even how old they were,” wrote EveryChild Fundraising Director John Bines in a 2012 Christmas appeal.

But even though the young girls were given refuge in an institution, their situation highlighted another problem. Children deprived of parental care, and especially those from socially vulnerable families or with disabilities, were not being properly accommodated or supported by the State.

“We need more emergency foster carers and long-term foster carers with specialist training,” Bines quoted the institution’s Director as saying. “There should be no places like this, no institutions. It’s better to abolish the institutions and develop services for infants and babies.”

Fortunately for Tiesa and her siblings that is now almost the situation today following a policy of deinstitutionalisation in Georgia introduced in 2006. “The lack of individual care and attention hinders child development,” a 2011 EveryChild report on children in residential care worldwide read.