Deborah Richardson

And so we had agreed, but it took about a year before it came to play.

And then all of a sudden it was, there was an urgency about it.

I think we got notified around about the August and it was like they were bringing them out in September.

Will you still have them?

And by that stage I'm then pregnant with our third son, quite heavily pregnant.

But I said to my husband, you know, we had agreed to be a foster parent and we still need to go ahead and do that.

What do you remember about meeting little Yuri for the first time?

So we went out to the police academy to meet these children.

You know, we were in the cafe of the academy and there was a bunch of children hanging around and we were told, oh, this is Yuri, he's yours, he's 11.

And in that moment, Sarah, Yuri didn't speak to us.

He had a tiny little backpack on his back,

which, as we found out later, had, I think, one or two T-shirts, a couple of pairs of underpants.

He was wearing a pair of jeans that clearly didn't fit him.

They were halfway up his legs.

And he looked like this terrified little boy.

And, you know, we were, like, whisking him into our car and come home with us.

And he's not saying a word to us.

We didn't find out until the four-week mark that he could and he was sitting down on a Saturday morning watching some cartoons on the TV with my dog beside him and all of a sudden he laughed and he said something in English and I happened to be in the kitchen and I looked at him and I went...

oh my God, Yuri, you can talk.

But he opened up in that moment.