On my first day in the orphanage, I walked into the room I would end up spending most of my time in, and met DanuĊ£ Mustafa. My first thought when I saw him was ‘that’s him!’ I knew when I saw him he was a huge reason I was there. I went directly to him, stunned by what I was feeling. He had a terrible smell from a green infection that continually drained from his ears. I was told he was deaf and had Otitis Media. (A condition when the eardrum is infected and inflamed.) He soon proved he wasn’t deaf. When I puckered my lips and made sounds he was very interested. I also noticed when someone entered the room, he could hear the door squeak and turned to see who was entering.
DanuĊ£ was also called Danny, so I too called him Danny because it was easier to say. From the beginning I found him hard to play with; all he ever wanted to do was hang over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes while I sat on the floor. The more time I spent with him, the stronger I felt he was one of the main reasons I came to Romania. I felt a tangible connection to him.
When I left for Romania my mother had said, “Don’t expect to bring any of those babies home with you.” I told her “I won’t, that’s not why I’m going.” The day after I met Danny I spoke to my mother on the phone and asked her if she wanted to adopt a little boy. I told her what he was like, about his ears, and how strongly I felt about him. I asked her to find out about Otitis Media and adoption, and asked if she would consider it. She said she would look into his ear condition and that she wouldn’t say no or yes to adopting him.
“The anguish and financial pits this will bring upon you is not worth any feelings of being a guardian angel that you might receive.”
“The harm you will do to your own flesh and blood children you cannot estimate now. There will be resentments among all the children in your household. There will be problems created that are beyond your ability to comprehend.”
“As a single mother you are not equipped to take this burden upon yourself. Emotionally it will drive you to the wall. Financially it will rob you of basic things that you need for simple sustenance.”
“Concentrate on what God has given you and accept his goodness for having normal, good children.”
“I promise you that this child will bring you untold agony and your natural feelings of wanting to be a good mother will bring such a struggle within your heart that you will collapse emotionally and physically.”
“Please ponder this in prayer”
“I am not signing my name, because I don’t want you to turn your resentments upon me.”
My mother did not take offence to the letter. She said “If the writer had included their name, I would have taken what they said into consideration, and discussed it with them.
These ridiculous claims slightly amused me, but more so, annoyed me. “As a single mother you are not equipped…” My mother has been single for a number of years, and obviously has been equipped. The “promise” of “untold agony” actually made me laugh out loud. After all the struggles my mother has had in her life, adopting a child with problems will finally cause her to “collapse emotionally and physically”. With their final comment/request that my mother pray about it, I lost all patience. Who were they to assume that prayer had not been constant? Why would she blindly and flippantly make a decision on something as important as adopting a child? And actually, how was any of this their business? Do they think in sending the letter that they are the ones who would (being obviously anonymous to my mother) receive the answers to her prayers? The writer of the letter could not have known my mother, and therefore had no right to send it.
My mother was hearing from people: “Are you sure you can afford to adopt and support this child?” When she told me this, and that money was one of her main concerns, I told her, “Even if we had nothing, we could provide him with LOVE, and what does he need more than that? Money isn’t absent. It may be scarce at times, but he will be provided for even if we are not rich.” My mother was in a part of the world where people looked at this through eyes of money. From where I was, it was impossible to look at it any other way than these children need anything and everything. They currently survive on almost nothing. They could not be poorer anywhere else!
Around a month later, my mother began to prepare herself and the necessary paperwork for adoption. She had prayed a lot and knew that it was the right thing to do. Many have said I convinced or talked my mother into adopting. My mother knew we were talking about her adopting and gaining another child, not me. She knows what being a mother involves, and told me: “The two things I love most in life are being a wife, and being a mother. At the moment I’m not a wife, and I want to continue being a mother.”
One of my first days with Danny, I was asked to feed him at lunch time. They laid him down on the floor and told me to drop the food from the spoon into his mouth. I thought, “You don’t feed a child like this!” He didn’t close his lips on the spoon, and he didn’t even chew. He just closed his mouth and swallowed. When I gave him noodles or bread in the soup, he would moan, but eventually swallow. I found out that he was bottle fed, like many children, until around the age of four, and eating from a spoon was new in recent months. I also learned through my mother that you should never feed a child who has Otitis Media while lying down. So I tried to make sure he was fed in a chair like the rest of the children. I didn’t offer to help feed the children while Danny was still waiting to eat; that way they wouldn’t ask me to feed him on the floor.
About the only thing Danny could do for himself was walk, like most of the children in his group. There was only one child in the orphanage older than Danny, and he was in Group One; the most advanced group. Danny was twenty-three months old when his mother brought him to the orphanage. How advanced he was when he arrived I will never know, but because so much of his life was spent within the confines of his group walls, he became terrified if anyone tried to take him outside the room. He’d panic, scream, and cry. This alone made him impossible to toilet train.
I asked the “social worker” at the orphanage about adopting Danny, if his mother wanted him, and where she was. I was told that she was a gypsy and didn’t want him. She suggested we go and see her, as she lived nearby. The social worker understood that I didn’t want to ask about my mother adopting Danny, but simply wanted to find out whether his mother wanted him.
When we went to find her we were told by the new tenants of the apartment that she no longer lived there. Because I didn’t yet know much Romanian, I couldn’t understand the rest of the conversation, but the next day Danny’s mother showed up at the orphanage. Well, she said she was his mother, but she looked nothing like him. Danny has very striking features, big blue eyes, and a face you can only call beautiful. His mother had dark skin and eyes, and a very plain face. I asked her if Danny looked like his father, she said no and that he was a very ugly man. She told me she would sell Danny to me for 30,000 lei (roughly $100 at the time), so she could get herself a television. I asked it to be translated to her that selling children was illegal and that I was only nineteen and didn’t want a child. Her reply was that she was only nineteen too. I didn’t want her to know I wanted my mother to adopt Danny because I didn’t want to create problems for myself. I told her that I wanted to find Danny a family to adopt him. She didn’t seem to care either way. Danny was brought downstairs to her, and I took a photo of her holding him while he screamed trying to get away. (This one important picture was on a roll of film that I sent to my mother for developing, and it never arrived.) At least I found out in this short visit that she didn’t want Danny, but I couldn’t help feeling she wasn’t his mother. I never did find out if the girl I met was.
Near the time our three months would be up, Mark and I knew that we couldn’t leave. We had only just begun to gain the children’s friendship, and wanted to be with the children almost as much as they needed us to be there. I had no desire to return to America at that time, but I had only come with enough funds to stay in Romania a few months. Mary came to me knowing I didn’t want to leave, and asked if I would be willing to stay for a significant amount of time, if the Romanian Orphanage Project would support me financially. I was very grateful for her offer, and felt wonderful knowing I didn’t have to leave the place I wanted to be most. I wrote home about R.O.P. supporting me, and that I would be staying longer, but unsure how much longer that would be.
