Ceausescu's dictatorship killed thousands of children in orphanages. Post-communist samsars made fortunes by selling souls abroad under the authority of the authorities.

In the first days after the fall of communism and then for years in a row, the local but especially the international press made shocking reports about children in Romania suffering from AIDS, about children in orphanages and about the so-called "street children". All of them had in common Ceausescu's camps populated with the souls of the innocent. According to UNICEF, 700 orphanages housed about 100,000 children. The foreign press published hundreds of reports from orphanages in which 60% of children abandoned in maternity hospitals and hospitalized in these ghettos, with very serious disabilities, died after two or three years. Malnutrition and poor health care, lack of drugs or the interest of doctors were the main causes of childhood morbidity. Those who escaped until they became adults and were thrown into the streets from those establishments were left with lifelong sequelae. Some of them managed to find a job and integrate socially, but most were expelled or discriminated against by society, as is still the case today to a large extent with any minority: ethnic, religious, sexual and more. . Others, on the periphery of society, became criminals, victims of the demographic policy of the communist dictatorship that banned abortions. Thousands of children died, thousands of women died who tried to get rid of pregnancy by old methods, some of them downright barbaric. as is still the case today to a large extent with any minority: ethnic, religious, sexual and more. Others, on the periphery of society, became criminals, victims of the demographic policy of the communist dictatorship that banned abortions. Thousands of children died, thousands of women died who tried to get rid of pregnancy by old methods, some of them downright barbaric. as is still the case today to a large extent with any minority: ethnic, religious, sexual and more. Others, on the periphery of society, became criminals, victims of the demographic policy of the communist dictatorship that banned abortions. Thousands of children died, thousands of women died who tried to get rid of pregnancy by old methods, some of them downright barbaric.

In 1990 I went with a colleague from the magazine where I was working at an orphanage in Bucharest on Christmas Eve. The children camped on sweets and clothes bought with the help of colleagues, pulled on sweaters, pants, socks, those who managed to get their hands on an item of clothing ran away and hid under the rusty iron beds. And they never left. Many of them were naked, naked, with only skin and bone. When we wanted to leave, they encamped us in bunches, they held our clothes, they prayed for us to stay. "Take me in your arms, take me home with you," they prayed. Some swayed in one on rusty beds, suffered from autism, behavioral disorders or other mental illnesses. Inside, he smelled of urine, unwashed laundry, and baby sweat.

The orphanages were littered with rats, the children were starving, cold, washed with a cold water hose. But the caregivers took it well, took the food from the children's mouths, and so as not to be interrupted by crocheting, they beat them like animals. After December ’89, trucks with food and clothing from the West began to arrive. Many stopped at the gates of the orphanages. But the children were still starving and naked, because humanitarian aid was being handed over and taken home by the staff of those ghettos, from the director to the caregivers and doctors.

Children in orphanages, a commodity for soul mates

SUBSCRIPTION + Sunday April 26, 2020 3:31 pm

Corruption in adoptions

The deal about the child

The case of a convicted child mediator from Sri Lanka brings international adoptions into the twilight again.

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SP Member of Parliament Nine Kooiman and SP MEP Dennis de Jong want clarification about the report that the European Commission is trying to seize more power over the heads of adopted children. A quality Romanian newspaper revealed today that the European Commission has pressured researchers to conclude that there is a need for a European Adoption Agency when the underlying research does not support that conclusion. Kooiman: 'We all know the desire for more resources and more power from the European Commission, but I would find it terrible that the problems surrounding adoption would be used for that. Adopted children in particular deserve extra protection and care. '

Adoption scandals in the past have prompted Romania to stop intercountry adoptions. Attempts would now be made to force Romania to reopen its borders to adoptions. Rumors about establishing a European adoption policy have been around for some time. Kooiman: 'I recently asked a number of critical questions about this, but they have not yet been answered. But today's revelation goes even further than what I suspected. ”

The SP is not in favor of stimulating intercountry adoptions at a European level, because the starting point must be that children can grow up in their original environment as much as possible. Adoption from abroad is also a vulnerable process. Kooiman: 'If it is true that the European Commission is manipulating research results, we have a problem. Not only because it is unacceptable that studies are being adapted so that Europe can take more power. But mainly because these are vulnerable children. The best interests of the child must come first, not the interests of the European Commission. '

Kooiman has put written questions to the State Secretary of Foreign Affairs and the State Secretary of Justice about adoption. Dennis de Jong has asked the Commission for clarification.

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Indonesian twin sisters appear to live 40 kilometers apart in Sweden. They also both became teachers.

Lin Backman and Emilie Falk were born as twin sisters in Indonesia. After their birth they were separated and adopted by two different Swedish families.

After some research on Facebook, the sisters found each other nearly 30 years after their adoption. They turned out to live 40 kilometers away from each other and had both become teachers. They have even more in common: they have the same wedding date (with a year difference) and chose the same song for their wedding (“You and Me” from Lifehouse).

What is special about the story of Lin Backman and Emilie Falk is that their adoptive parents had already contacted each other because they suspected that their daughters were twin sisters. A taxi driver in Indonesia had told the Backmans that their baby had a twin sister. Because the girls did not look alike and the adoption papers did not mention a twin sister, the families did not maintain contact with each other after a meeting. They knew that their daughters had the same mother.

The women tracked down each other via Facebook, where Emilie Falk found a message from Lin Backman stating her date of birth and the name of her biological mother. A DNA test confirmed that the women have the same parents. They also now know that the taxi driver who pointed out to the Backmans that they were taking half of twins is their father.

HOUSE COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee:

Thank you for the opportunity to address you today regarding implementation of the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, currently under consideration for ratification by the U.S. Senate. I thank you for holding these hearings to explore how the United States might best implement the Convention and provide its protections to children who would benefit from intercountry adoption and to the parents who are adopting them.

I am the Hague Convention Policy Coordinator for the Joint Council on International Children’s Services, the nation’s oldest and largest affiliation of state-licensed, not-for-profit child welfare agencies serving children through intercountry adoption. The Joint Council’s 130 member agencies provide services in an estimated three-quarters of all intercountry adoptions to the United States. I also was a member of the U.S. delegation to the meetings at the Hague that prepared the Convention in 1992 and 1993, where I represented the interests of adoptive and prospective adoptive parents when I was Executive Director of Adoptive Families of America. I myself am the lucky mother of a daughter adopted from Korea 24 years ago when she was an infant.

Joint Council calls for U.S. ratification of the Hague Convention.

Standing in the lobby of London's Savoy hotel, pregnant and with a crying bundle in her tattered shawl, Dublin woman Florrie Kavanagh must have attracted some disdainful looks.

A combination of desperate poverty and daring had brought her here. While she waited to hear whether she would be seen, she would have cried a little herself and tried to quieten the child. And, most of all, she would have reasoned with herself: this was the Fifties and babies were abandoned all the time. Better to be left in the plush suite of a Hollywood film star than in some dire orphanage or at a railway station.

Florrie, like everyone else in London, had heard the news. Jane Russell, the "moody, mean and magnificent" Queen of Hollywood had swept into town and was looking for a young addition to her family. On the front page of the paper that morning there had been just two huge photos. One showed a smiling Winston Churchill, who had just been re-elected Prime Minister. The other showed the bejewelled screen goddess with the caption: "Miss Russell in London to adopt baby boy."

Years before, Florrie had moved to England in search of a better life, but things had not been easy. She already had three small children and was living in a shabby, tiny house in south London with no working toilet inside. She and her husband Michael, also from Ireland, were struggling to make ends meet. This latest baby, Tommy, left her young family on the brink, and with one more on the way she had few other options. She had heard of rich Americans adopting children back home and had read that Jane Russell was devoutly religious. Florrie told herself she was securing her little boy "a place in heaven".

In ordinary circumstances, of course, an Irish church mouse with a crying baby would have had no chance of getting in the orbit of an imperious film deity such as Russell. The actress had starred alongside Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and, together with Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth, embodied the sensuously contoured "sweater girl" look. With her topaz-coloured eyes and perfect figure, she represented what one publicist described as "lust, desire and everything that good boys are not supposed to think about". She was one of the biggest stars in the world.

The excitement that surrounds us back to school only rekindles painful memories in Julienne Mpemba. Several times, she was expelled from the public school where she was enrolled in the Congo: her mother could not afford the tuition. The financial situation of the DRC having deteriorated further, it is thousands of children, who are not in school, who are hanging around the streets today. In 2008, with other people made aware of the fate of the Congolese, she launched the Tumaini association. Tumaini means "hope" in Swahili. By paying € 125 per year, the price of a sponsorship, a child is guaranteed to go to school for a whole year. In October, Julienne Mpemba will leave Namur for a few months where she lives for the Congo. She is going to settle in Kinshasa, a relay office with the association. On September 11, the non-profit organization Tumaini is organizing a dinner in Belgrade. It is also about raising funds to help children.

Julienne Mpemba has been living in Namur for several years now. There are memories that she is not ready to erase from her memory. Fatherless when she was still a child, she experienced the harsh reality of life. She says: "Until Dad died, I was enrolled in an upscale school where I learned a lot. The teaching was excellent, that's how I had a very good foundation in French as in mathematics. " A paying school of course. When the mother finds herself alone with her children, it is no longer possible for Julienne to follow her education in such a privileged establishment."I was enrolled in a less renowned public school but still of good quality. We were more than 40 children per class. Several times I was expelled from school because my mother had not paid the fees. I came home and the next day I went back to school with the money. I have comrades who have never been able to go back to school for lack of means and today they have the level that they had in primary school. It is revolting. In my time, at the end of the 80s, children in my situation there were five or six per class. Now, it is much worse: it is the half of a class that is affected. "A class where the children are 60 to follow the lessons. There are so many of them that schoolchildren attend classes from 7:30 to 12:00 and others from 1:00 to 5:00. The following week, we reverse.

Buy his bench

"Not continuing your studies for lack of financial means is horrible, says Julienne Mpemba. I had a boyfriend who was a hit during university preparation but he was so poor that his parents could not to pay the fees. He would have been a perfect lawyer, his case still haunts me today. "But it is well before the university that the door of the school is difficult to cross. Thus, a child can only be enrolled in kindergarten in the private sector and it is of course paid. Many therefore do not enter school until the age of 6 without having learned the ba-ba.

We still come to situations that could be laughable if behind there was such disarray. So that her daughter can follow her schooling, Julienne's mom will go to a carpenter to whom she will ask to build a bench. The school accepted Julienne but there was no more seat! She went to school with her bench wedged it in front of the teacher's desk and she took her lessons.

President Kabila has declared a one-year moratorium on adoptions of Congolese children. Seven Belgian couples take turns in Kinshasa while waiting for permission to return to Belgium with their children. Hope is dwindling ...

Lhe summer 2013, Thérèse, a young grandmother, showed us the photo of her grandson, a little Congolese: “ Here is Harry, by the end of the year, he will be with us . "

Since then, the happy wait has turned into doubt, into uncertainties, and it is now sorrow that prevails: neither Harry nor the six other orphans in Kinshasa will fly to Belgium, not immediately in any case.

It was on November 30 that Madeleine, Harry's mother, arrived in Kinshasa, thinking she had reached the end of the "obstacle course". This had lasted seven years of a complex and meticulous adoption procedure.

You must be declared eligible as an adoptive parent, identify the child, verify if it is indeed an orphan and finally obtain a favorable judgment, in Congo and Belgium.

30 years after the end of Ceausescu's regime, the imprint left by the dictator's pro-natalist policy remains strong in Romania. Many abandoned children still live in unsuitable placement centers today. A new law, supported by CARE and its local partner SERA, could be a game-changer.

CARE and its local partner SERA are participating in the implementation of this law which will make it possible to provide children with a real home.

© CARE

Towards the gradual closure of placement centers

In 2018, more than 54,000 children were still under state protection. The vast majority grow up with professional foster mothers and foster families, and a third live in residential centers. Despite the government's efforts to favor family-type solutions, 9,000 children are still growing up in centers unsuited to their needs.

ALBANY – Ten-year-old Myroslava "Mira" Chumakova has lived in Ukrainian orphanages since she was a toddler, surrounded by dozens of other children, seeking new families and new homes.

That was all supposed to change for Mira, in the middle of March.

That's when Albany resident Theresa Grimes, 53, boarded a plane in Newark, New Jersey, on March 13 for the 10 hours of travel to Kiev, Ukraine. It was the fourth time that she flew to the eastern European country, but this time she planned to return home with Mira, her newly adopted daughter, to join her husband, Michael, and their eight biological sons.

But Theresa Grimes never made it to Mira on that trip. About a day after she arrived in Kiev, Grimes was contacted by a U.S. Embassy representative to tell her that the borders were closing because of the COVID-19 pandemic and that she could end up stuck in Ukraine indefinitely if she didn't leave the country immediately.

Grimes made the difficult decision to return home to Albany without Mira, who has epilepsy and cerebral palsy. Two other American families that work with the same adoption organization as Grimes and her family also had to turn around and head back to the states.