BUCHAREST, Romania — Nicolae Craciun’s mother put him in a state-run children’s home at age 5, then didn’t visit for a year and a half.
Now she sees him every Saturday and wants to take him home to join his three siblings. Nicolae, 10, says wistfully that he would love to return to the place he remembers from “a long time ago.”
But officials in charge of his welfare say that, short of a court order, the children’s home must keep Nicolae. “She’s not the mother, by the law. She’s just another person,” said Claudia Prichia, the administrator in charge of the case.
Romania’s child welfare system has largely eliminated the worst of the horrors exposed after the 1989 fall of communism, when as many as 150,000 children were institutionalized in a vast network of homes where malnutrition, AIDS and prison-like conditions devastated young lives.
In place of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s policies, which encouraged population growth by banning contraception and abortion but made it easy to dump children into institutions, the government now favors family reunification and prevention of abandonment.