Hewer on the highway: Mongol Rally, day 21
On the latest leg of the Mongol Rally, Nick Hewer, Sir Alan Sugar's sidekick on The Apprentice, visits the Romanian children's charity for which he is raising funds and learns about the country's harrowing history.

Link to this video
By Nick Hewer 4:15PM BST 23 Jul 2008 Comments


Nick Hewer is raising money for the charity Hopes and Homes for Children - see www.justgiving.com/nickhewer
Having arranged to meet Stefan Darabus, the country director of Hope and Homes for Children at the Baia Mare branch of McDonalds the following day, I cross into Romania and stay overnight in Satu Mare.

We are beginning to travel into a different, more exotic part of the world, but there is always a McDonalds nowadays, and increasingly it is the top place to rendezvous; I met Daniel at the Gorlitz McDonalds all that time ago. It always used to be the railway station. Why, with all the wonderful fresh food that Europe has to offer, we pour into these burger joints beats me. Kids like sweet meat, I’m told.

RELATED ARTICLES

Nick Hewer's video diary 22 Jul 2008
Google Map: Hewer on the highway 06 Aug 2008
Hewer on the highway: Mongol Rally, day 2 03 Jul 2008
Hewer on the highway: Mongol Rally, day 12 15 Jul 2008
Hewer on the highway: Mongol Rally, day 7 10 Jul 2008
Hewer on the highway: Mongol Rally, day 5 09 Jul 2008

Baia Mare means Big Mine in Romanian, and it was a European centre for lead, copper and gold mining, some say from Roman times. Mining has more or less disappeared now, but the city skyline is still dominated by a towering chimney, as high as the Eiffel Tower, they boast. When it was belching at full bore, at the time when Baia Mare was the third most polluted city in Europe, a dark cloud engulfed the area. There was a terrible price to pay in health terms; the pollution was so toxic, I was told, that women’s tights would simply melt away.

When the mines closed, unemployment soared and real poverty followed fast behind. This poverty, and Romania’s childcare policies, developed to a terrifying degree under the communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, prompted Hope and Homes for Children (HHC), a British charity dedicated to building a world where every child is loved in a family environment, to start operations.

Adi, the HHC secretary and IT manager meets me and we set off to the HHC office. Housed in a back street of this city, the Romanian headquarters of this British charity, started just 10 years ago, now employs thirty young and enthusiastic Romanians.

When Stefan Darabus, the energetic and clearly impassioned country director, joined HHC as a 23 year-old, there were 480 institutions in Romania, housing 80,000 children.

Explaining the background to Romania’s childcare policies, Stefan says:

“Under the communists, the child became the property of the state, and it became quite normal for families, struggling to survive economically, and with abortion outlawed, to pass their children over to the local government, which would promptly put them into an institution.

“So poverty, lack of local educational facilities, overcrowded housing and child disabilities became the main drivers to creating a massive problem in childcare. It was a problem that was hidden away and our prime objective at that time was to close down these terrible places in our province of Maramures”.

On the face of it, surely every government should care for its country’s needy children, but in Romania, that concept was terribly abused, the result being that perfectly normal children, often just babies, were tossed into these huge “child warehouses” and became hopelessly institutionalised in a very short time.

It should come as no surprise that a childcare system with no money to support it, no training to speak of and a staff ratio of one to 30 children, overlaid with a brutish government and an uncaring community, should be such a massive failure.

Stefan continues: “We wanted to shut down one particular institution and reunite the children with their biological or extended families – remember, these are not orphans, most of them have parents, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts and so on.

“Other options included national adoption, foster care or placing them with couples or building our own small family-like units with maybe ten or twelve children living together in a small community supervised by motivated and trained staff with a ratio of no more than one to four. Our over-riding concern was to do what is best for the child with the belief that every child has the right to grow up in a family or in an environment as close as possible to the family environment.

“Our absolute determination to change our country’s childcare system was renewed and strengthened every time we saw a young child, institutionalised almost from birth, come into the outside world for the first time.

“I remember seeing a young girl cry with pleasure as she washed her hands in warm water for the first time or the young boy cry with fear as he felt the wind on his face for the first time. It was all ‘first times’ – the first time to see grass, to see an animal, to see the sun go down.

“But don’t think that when an institution is closed down, the children come running into the sunshine as normal children. The terrible damage is done, for example with the self harming little girl who had her ankles and hands tied together behind her head in her cot for year after year so that when they cut the rope, she was U-shaped and could not walk or sit, just rock on her back.

“The children that cannot talk, cannot walk, cannot relate, often cannot eat – for their whole universe in the institution was their cot and their bottle, and the bottle went on for years, maybe until they were nine years old.

Today, ten years after Stefan and his staff started work, the 450 institutions with 80,000 “inmates” has been reduced to 184, housing 17,000 children, mainly with disabilities or special needs. Hope and Homes for Children directly closed 14 institutions in Transylvania, but has been instrumental in the closure of all the others, through lobbying the Romanian government, helping to change radically entrenched attitudes in the old childcare regime.

As Stefan says, “The old guard knew nothing and cared less about the psychological needs of a child; they just cared about putting a roof over their head, feeding them after a fashion, and keeping them quiet. They treated the children like merchandise, to be stored.

“It’s not easy to tell the staff of a large institution that you are going to close them down; that they’ll be out of a job.

"Diplomacy and persuasion are key weapons in our armoury.”

Nowadays, while bureaucracy and time-serving management still are a big problem, HHC is working hand in hand with the government and Stefan plans to halve the number of institutions still operating by 2013.

I spend the rest of the day with Otto Sestak, HHC’s training manager and Gabriela Rosus, a leader/translator, visiting some local projects. In Signet we enter what used to be a baby institution, housing 120 children, since reunited with families or fostered.

Now it has three new functions: a mother and baby unit designed to help mothers with children who are abused at home, or do not have a home or have been thrown out of their home; an emergency reception area where young children in danger can be taken; and a day care centre.

The irony is that in the past, when both parents worked to support the family, there would be nobody to look after the children, so they would be packed away in an institution. Now, this “crèche” exists for 24 young local children and their parents.

Otto takes me next to a HHC “family home”, a house bought with money donated by an English family, where 13 children are supervised by a staff of three motherly women. It is wonderful to hear that three sets of siblings have been reunited here. The remarkable thing to learn is that they did not know they had brothers and sisters beforehand.

But the damage that has been done to these children is clear to see. One little boy aged around nine (they are all so small as a result of poor diet and no exercise) has never spoken. Generally speaking, they are all quiet, but they are smiling now and when I show them how to make a perfect circle with a forefinger and pencil, they set to it with a will. Otto tells me they are making progress but there is no permanent solution and they will stay here until they have finished school.

We now go to an HHC home for moderately to severely disabled children, 12 in all, located in a house in a smart residential street. These children, from maybe five to fifteen, have really no discernable abilities; they were always disabled, but being institutionalised has exacerbated their condition. Now they are part of a small and homely community and the strides made by some are remarkable.

One little nine-year-old boy, who could not walk at all two years ago, is able to do so today with a little walking frame. They had to teach him to eat for he had never chewed food until he came to this HHC home. It was always just mush in a bucket. He still relentlessly chews his hand, for stimulation I am told.

Our final destination is an institution, still run by the government, for typical school-aged children. The 84 boys and girls are here through poverty and differing family circumstances. Otto wants it closed in 12 to 24 months and to have the children reunited with their families, or rehoused in one of HHC’s small family units. It’s easy to see why.

Without a vestige of warmth or sense of community, the mainly teenage children hang around on the bare stairs, or lounge on their beds. There is a yard of broken concrete and the sense of fear among the neighbours is understandable. Pimps still gather in groups at the corner of the street, hoping to lure another girl away to the bright lights and locked doors of Berlin, the Costa del Sol or maybe Cardiff.

I thank Otto and return to bid farewell to Stefan.

He shows me to Hortense, I start the engine. It’s been an intense two days.

Thanks for coming, he says. “The children around us need us to believe in them and to be there for them. Because we believe in miracles and transformations, we will continue to offer them the attention and affection they need, with the help of those who support our charity in England.”

You can find Nick Hewer's donation page for Hopes and Homes for Children at www.justgiving.com/nickhewer