The English-language news channel Russia Today put up an interesting piece this morning on an orphanage in Moscow devoted to children with HIV and AIDS.

In case you are not familiar with Russia Today, it is an offshoot of the RIA-Novosti news agency. Like its parent organization, it covers breaking news, politics, business and human interest stories in Russia and other Eastern European and Central Asia countries. It also is taking full advantage of the Internet: It recently established its own channel on the Internet video site YouTube.

As I told you a few weeks back, HIV and the disease it causes, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, is a growing problem in Russia. According to an op-ed piece by one world health expert, 21,000 babies have been born to HIV-positive mothers in Russia, and about 1,500 have been abandoned, or roughly 7%.

The Russia Today piece says that, while Russia has set up centers across the country for abandoned HIV-positive children, the Moscow AIDS Orphanage is the most successful at finding homes for them. The Russia Today reporter says that the orphanage has found homes for 25 of its children this year, up from just 10 seven years ago. He doesn't say how many of those placements were domestic and how many were inter-country adoptions.

Regardless, the numbers are certainly heartening, and the orphanage's neat appearance and the strong vision of its director must have something to do with it. The video of the orphanage (you can watch the entire news clip here) shows it to have a well-tended playground, something that is not all that common at Russian orphanages. And the accompanying print version of the story (which you can read here) quotes the center's director, Victor Kregdich, as saying that "The most important thing for our children is to find a family, to find parents. Not toys, not rattles, but parents."

The report doesn't indicate which foreign adoption agencies work with the Moscow AIDS Orphanage, which would have been helpful. But if your heart is open to an HIV-positive child, I'm sure than an agency that works in the Moscow area would be able to find more information for you.