My Visit to Romania
I visited Tirgu Mures, Romania, in November 2006 with one of our local judges, a court psychologist, and a youth services provider on sort of a "legal missionary" trip to talk to local Romanian government officials about our foster care and adoption procedures in Florida. We spent a week in a whirlwind of meetings with their judges, child protection workers, local bar associations, and law school students. We were hosted by an organization called Livada, which means "orchard" in Romanian, which was founded by an American minister who was concerned about the number of orphans in Romanian (mostly Gypsy, or Roma, children) and the horrific state run orphanages. Below is a story about my trip.
I don’t know what to expect as we enter the state run orphanage in Ludus (pronounced “Loo-doosh”), Romania on a chilly November morning. Our American host, Bruce Thomas, explains that we have to leave our cameras in the car, including any cell phones that have picture-taking capabilities. These are the rules – no cameras, and no reporters, in the state run facilities. This gives us a clue as to what we are to find.
Ludus is one of a smattering of remaining large institutions for orphaned children in Romania. It houses about 130 children, ages 6-21. There aren’t adequate words to describe the bleak and hopeless feel of the place. The outside of the building is the poster child for a communist-era government building. It is a drab, concrete block monolith with metal grates on the bottom floor windows that screams “institution.” The interior of the building shares the same stark, cold, style. It brings to mind what an old insane asylum must have looked like in the 1940s in our country.
Our first stop is a “play room” used by the disabled children at the orphanage. There is apparently no such thing as mainstreaming in Romania, so the children, most of whom appear to be autistic, are kept in a bare room all day, supervised by what appears to me to be a teacher in a catatonic state. When the door opens, the children rush out at us, screaming and jumping and spilling some sort of liquid out of a plastic container. We hope it is only water. One child goes immediately for my wrist to determine whether I am wearing a watch, and upon discovering it, promptly tries to bite it off. I say, “Nu, nu!” (“No” in Romania) but the “teacher” just sits there placidly. This, and other similar antics, goes on the entire time we are in the room. All of the children have shaved or closely cropped hair, making it difficult to distinguish gender. Most, despite being 8 years and older, wear diapers.