The children in this orphanage were divided into five developmental groups, based mainly on whether or not they could feed themselves. Group Five was the furthest behind, and Group One was the most advanced.
Group Five was bottle-fed, and most of the children in that group couldn’t walk, even though some of them were four years old. None of them were physically handicapped; they were just completely behind in all development.
Mark spent most of his time in Group Five, so we called it “Marks Group”, and Mary spent the majority of her time in Group Two so that was “Mary’s Group.” Groups One and Three received attention from other various volunteers that came. Group Five was the group I first met and fell in love with, but I adored the children in Group Four too, and spent most of my time with them, calling it “My Group.” I tried to divide my time between Mark’s Group and My Group because I wanted to be with them all. Some days I was torn between wanting to stay in Mark’s, but not yet having spent time in mine. Other days I wondered if I was doing any good at all. I felt that the overall time each child got was not enough, but I couldn’t tear myself from either group to be exclusive in the other. The children in Mark’s group needed so much help and extra attention, but if I didn’t go into my group and give them love and attention they wouldn’t have anyone except the workers. The workers were there to provide for their basic needs like feeding and changing, but they rarely gave the children attention or played with them.
Children move through three orphanages during their lives in the orphanage system. The first one is called Leaganul de Copii, which means “the seesaw of children.” In the first orphanage, children range in age from very young to around five years old.
The children then move on to the second orphanage called Case de Copii which means “house of children”. It is in this orphanage they begin schooling. Nine months of the year the orphanage is a school. Some of the older children go to a regular school near the orphanage for a few hours during the day. Children stay in this orphanage until the age of nine or ten.
In the third orphanage, I was told they continue their schooling and learn a trade. Around the age of eighteen the children supposedly leave orphanage life. However, by that age most of these children are far from normal, terribly unequipped to function in the world because they are so socially inept. Orphanage life fails to prepare them for the challenges they will face, and deprives them of natural self sufficiency. Few ever receive proper schooling, and many end up in mental institutions. Too many will never become healthy citizens. In some of the big cities, children run away from these orphanages to live and beg on the streets. Train stations inevitably house many of them.
As I mentioned earlier, these children in Romanian orphanages aren’t actually orphans whose parents have died, but children whose parents have abandoned them, or couldn’t afford them. There are very few that have no record of parents. Some children receive visits from their families, and one or two even return home when their family can afford to care for them again. Sometimes when a child is old enough to work, and the family can benefit from bringing them home, they are reclaimed.
Even after different forms of birth-control became legal in Romania they were not often used. They were expensive, not widely available, and people were not educated in how to use them. Consequently, many continued having unwanted children. At the same time, abortions became legal, and were a very common alternative. One of the doctors we had a lot of dealings with told me that the hospital where she worked averaged fifty abortions a day, and this was not in one of the larger cities. (I don’t know if this statistic would be different today in the same hospital.)
Mothers who choose to bear their children, but don’t want to keep them, take them to the orphanage, or leave them in the hospital. Most of the children I knew were a few months to a year old before they were brought to the orphanage. I think most mothers probably want to try and keep their children, but find it too hard to support them. Because the economy is constantly changing; it would be impossible to say what the average income is, but it is obviously not sufficient. People make do, but many find it harder to get by as inflation soars so rapidly. I saw the price of bread rise from 9 lei when I first arrived, to 100 lei when I left.
In the south of Romania most children in the orphanages are Gypsies. Romanians are very prejudiced against Gypsies. I feel that this is one of the main reasons why the conditions in Romanian orphanages do not change.
Gypsies are not working in the orphanages, and are not taking care of the children in them; the workers are Romanian. Romanians see Gypsies as thieves, liars, beggars, filthy people, and a nuisance. I didn’t meet many that didn’t feel this way.
Gypsies are typically darker-skinned, poor and unclean. In Călăraşi there are apartment buildings that have been allocated for the Gypsies to live in. I’ve been in them. They have no running water, no heating, and very little room. I do not know for a fact that they pay no rent, but I was always under the impression that these buildings were turned over to the gypsies and forgotten about, left to remain unclean without running water.
A Romanian friend once told me, “Nobody knows where Gypsies come from. They are Romanian, but a different breed.” I looked into the Gypsies’ origin, and found out that Gypsies originally came from North West India nearly one thousand years ago, and are now all over the world. The ancestors of Romanian Gypsies may have come from India hundreds of years ago, but to this day a Gypsy family name is not considered a Romanian name, even though it is not Indian.
In order to clearly explain my thoughts to you, I will continue to use the distinction Gypsy from Romanian. I am not trying to attack the Romanians for being prejudiced, nor the Gypsies for any reason. I am trying to present the situation clearly enough that you can see both points of view. (I understand I do not know every man’s heart, and I do not assume I know every side to this issue.)
For many Americans the idea of a Gypsy is romanticized into an image of “carnival” people who travel in groups, never settling in one place, wearing lots of big jewelry, and living a happy carefree life. This might be the case for Gypsies somewhere, but hardly for the Romanian ones which are estimated to number more than 1.5 million which is around 7% (according to the internet source Wiki.Answers). Gypsies all over the world have been encouraged for years to settle and abandon their nomadic existence for social and economic reasons, and many have in Romania. Not all Gypsies around the world are the same; there are different tribes. The Rom tribe; which most Romanian gypsies are part of, hardly have a life that could be considered carefree.
I saw Gypsies on the street constantly treated badly, put down, and openly pushed aside. Many Gypsy children make their way into restaurants to beg for food or money. Most often they are waved aside told to “Get out of here!” and called names whether they beg quietly or brusquely.
Most Gypsies loiter on the streets and many make pests of themselves. I came across Gypsies in Bucharest who were ungrateful for what was given to them and made sure we knew it was unsatisfactory. Many Gypsies in Romania will admit freely they would sell their children if given the chance. I even had Gypsies come to my apartment door asking me if I wanted to buy their babies. The Gypsies provide reasons for Romanians to feel the way they do. I met Gypsies who were thieves, but this is a direct result of being so poor. It’s a never-ending cycle; because the Gypsies can be poor, dirty, and dishonest they are never given a chance to be different. It may not matter whether they would or not because children are taught from a very young age to hate Gypsies and call them names.
Gypsy children don’t go to school. They grow up to be illiterate, and then can’t provide for a family. They become everything that a Gypsy is considered to be. The children from filthy homes with no running water are not going to school where everyone else is clean, clothed, and fed. Illiterate parents don’t enroll their children in school. Children with little education from in or out of the home are growing up not having a good clear sense of right and wrong. Abortion and abandonment are both simple solutions to a young mother who doesn’t know differently, and hasn’t been raised to value the importance of creating life.
Where we were in Romania, there are also a lot of Turkish Gypsies. It was not uncommon to hear that a Gypsy child in the orphanage had a mother who was a prostitute in Turkey. Those with Turkish last names were automatically seen as bastards. Just another reason for the children in general to be seen as having no worth.
Who pays for the running and upkeep of orphanages? Where must the money ultimately come from? Who is filling the orphanages with empty bellies? What becomes of an economy in such circumstances? The Romanians don’t think twice about having a prejudice against Gypsies, and the situation continues. As it so often happens in circumstances like this, the children are at the end of the line, and are the ones truly suffering in the situation.
There are children in orphanages who are not Gypsy, but they’re all part of something that is not a sympathetic institution. There seemed to be a general feeling among Romanians that the children with deformities and children whose families don’t want them are then obviously worth nothing to anyone. “Better off dead” was what I heard many times.
Adoptions of Romanian children were stopped in 1991. People were going to Romania having seen the masses of children on television; some people were rescuing abandoned children, but many were unknowingly buying babies. Before adoptions would open again, a committee for adoptions was organized and agencies designated in each country to be the sources through which children could be legally adopted.
Late in the spring of 1992 the system was organized and adoptions were legally open, but children weren’t being rescued quick enough. The criteria for adoption were very specific and the process proved to be a very slow one. The children now had to be on a special list as “adoptable.” This meant that they would have to be considered abandoned by their family before their name could be listed. If any child had not been visited by a relative for six months they could then be considered abandoned. If the parents signed papers saying that they didn’t want the child, then he/she could go on the list also. It was the responsibility of the orphanage Director to make and keep this list up to date. Very few children were visited in our orphanage, and many were considered abandoned by the six month rule. Even if it had been a one year rule, we would have still had many eligible for the list.
When Mary asked the Director which children were on the list from our orphanage, there were only thirteen, out of roughly one hundred children. Two of them had AIDS, eight had severe developmental problems due to neglect, and only three could have been considered normal for an orphan. Children with AIDS are unable to be adopted by foreigners, because of other governments’ laws. The chances of a child with AIDS being adopted by a Romanian family are even more remote than those without serious disease, who are almost never adopted by Romanians.
It occurred to us there may be a misconception that if all the eligible children were on the list, a major reduction in jobs would follow once the children began to disappear; being placed in families. This could hardly be the case because the supply of children is not diminishing. There are always poor parents turning to the orphanage for their child’s welfare. There will always be single or young mothers who do not want their children, and leave them for convenience. It may take years for the economic system in Romania to get better and for conditions to change. Orphanage jobs will not disappear. It seemed obvious, and we were very frustrated by the lack of action. Nothing seemed to be moving forward even though new laws were made and adoptions were supposed to be happening. We wanted to see children leaving the orphanage and going to families. Nothing would have made us happier. (Amendments to Romania’s original adoption law have been made, which hopefully will be more effective at getting these orphans united with families.)
The women working in this orphanage worked in rotating twelve-hour shifts with low pay. Even though many women dressed in uniforms like nurses; they were not. Most were not even trained or qualified in any first-aid. Spending more time with orphans than they did with their own children may be one of the many reasons they seemed callous and insensitive.
Everyone who worked in direct relation with the children, had to wear white lab-coats. We were asked to wear them as well. There was a belief that the white coat somehow made everything more hygienic. Even when visiting other orphanages, we were asked to put on a white coat, and therefore acquired white coats of our own.
Unfortunately, there were not many women whom I could consider friends, and so I did not get to know them all by name. It was hard for me to be non-judgmental of them, and not to get angry with them for all that I saw.
Mark was loved by most the women, I’m sure because of his never-ending ability to be nice to everyone. If Mark saw something he didn’t like, he said something. I often noticed the women were different when he was around; giving him respect and some authority. I’m sure the fact that he was male had a lot to do with it. If I could have loved the women more, as Mark did, it wouldn’t have been so difficult to go to the orphanage by myself, and I might not have felt so alone at times.
I now realize, too late to help me be more sympathetic, the women might have turned themselves off to the children a long time ago. They might have cared and loved in the beginning, but eventually found it too hard. Toward the end of my year I couldn’t take much more of the sadness, and wanted to close my eyes to the suffering of the children around me. I didn’t want to treat them badly because of it; I just wanted to get away from it all.
We knew a woman who worked at the hospital in the children’s ward and was very friendly. We were pleased and had high hopes when she got a job at the orphanage. It wasn’t long before we noticed she smiled less and seemed to have little tolerance for the children. In trying to interpret what I was seeing I came up with a couple possibilities. I wondered if it’s not the women shutting the children out intentionally, but the children in their rough, difficult and sad state turning the women against them. The children cannot control their situation, but is indifference and abuse toward them the result of their sad condition? Or, could it have been that she felt animosity from the other women because she did show the children love and compassion, and that was what caused her to change. There are really so many possible reasons for her altered attitude, I was just sorry to see it happen.
