When Jenny and Dwight Griffith found Alex, at Children’s Hospital No. 20 in the remote Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, he was sickly and malnourished and suffering from mild cerebral palsy and, barely 11 months old, lucky to be alive. When the Griffiths took their newly adopted son home to Forest Hill, in Harford County, they raised him as an American.

Nobody imagined the piece of Russia that would touch Alex’s heart 13 years later, and prompt him to reach back to his native land in an extraordinary gesture of gratitude.

“That city gave me life,” Alex was saying the other day, fighting a raspy throat. “The hospital took me in when my parents gave me up, and kept me for 11 months. They gave me life. I want to give something back.”

The gesture is Alex’s, but it’s also a measure of the parents who raised him. The Griffiths have five children, three boys and two girls, 9 to 16, all adopted. Four were born in Maryland. They found Alex through the Cradle of Hope Adoption Center, in Silver Spring, where they saw his photo on a flier of children with special needs. They put their arms around him just after the fall of the Soviet Union.

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“We spent two or three weeks there,” Dwight Griffith said. He chuckled a little. “Krasnoyarsk’s easy to find. You just go to the center of Mongolia, and head north. It was the home of Stalin’s gulag labor camps, and all that good stuff.”

Griffith is partners in Griffith-Brilhart Builders, in Harford County. They build and remodel houses. Also, he takes good notes. While he and his wife waited for Alex, Griffith kept a journal. In it, he described a children’s playground at the hospital.

It wasn’t much: a small wooden swing with a rotted seat, a sandbox, a picnic table. Some months back, when Alex read about the playground in his father’s journal, he decided he wanted to make something better. He’s entering North Harford High School in the fall. He’s also a Boy Scout, in Troop No. 809, who was searching for his scout Eagle Project.

“Typically,” says Dwight Griffith, “an Eagle Project might involve planting bushes at a library, or putting up a volleyball court at a camp, something you can do in a weekend or two.”

As his project, Alex decided to build a new playground at Children’s Hospital No. 20 in Krasnoyarsk.

“The playground,” says Dwight Griffith, “hasn’t changed since we were there.”

So Alex spent six months researching the project, and then presented it to Mike Balog, the Harford District Boy Scout official responsible for approving scout projects. Balog gave the go-ahead. Alex figures it’ll be next year before the work’s finished.

Already, he’s worked with playground companies to design the thing. He’s put together fundraising drives, selling candy and hot chocolate and pit beef. In September, he’ll put on a hot rod show with the Bel Air Rotary Club.

He’s put together an instruction manual for setting up the playground — written in English and Russian —  and begun crating and shipping parts of the playground to Russia. He’s gotten much help from the Bel Air Rotary Club, and from OrphanAct, a Rotary International organization that funds similar projects.

He’s also got three fellow scouts — Christian Posko, 15, Chad Short, 15, and Ryan Reese, 16 — publicizing the project.  

“It’s like a worldwide effort,” said Dwight Griffith, doing much of the talking for his son because Alex was battling a sore throat. “Alex has worked with people in 22 cities in four countries. He’s spent more than 400 hours planning this. He’s had hundreds of e-mail exchanges.”

The new playground will cost about $60,000. And it’ll have a lot more than a busted swing and an overgrown sandbox.

It’ll include 20 pieces, including a swing set, a curved rock wall, a crazy bone bridge, and climbers and slides. It’ll have wood carvings with Russian folklore and animals, and two totem poles: one with the Russian bear, and one with the American eagle.

Late next summer, Alex will lead a 10-person delegation to Russia, where the new playground will be opened.

It’ll be more than a 14-year old scout finishing a project. This is an American boy who appreciates the efforts in his native land to keep him alive. And offering a new generation of Russian children a better place to play.

Those wishing to help financially can send donations to the Krasnoyarsk Playground Project, Bel Air Rotary Foundation Inc., P.O. Box 53, Bel Air 21014.