Nobody's children

There has been a lot of talk about institutionalized children in Romania who have been given special coverage by foreign newspapers.Ten-years old photos offered as fresh news throughout the world have featured Romania as a hell of institutionalized children. Faces disfigured by disease, prison cell like rooms, the sullen looks of the supervisers fed up with life. How many of these photos are for real? How many of them are still topical? This is a story of the about 78,000 Romanian children “in difficulty”.

We are in the suburbs of Bucharest.A long street with small houses and yards full of the overpowering scent of the lilac bushes.Somewhere,at the far end of the world,a high building breaks the rhythm of the tile roofs- a white,grand three-storey house with arched windows and a porch. It looks as if a VIP had hidden in the slums far from curious people’s sight. A blue little plate says: ”The St.Nicholas Assessment Centre nr.12,”. 77 children live in that building, nobody’s children, some of them abandoned by their parents, others visited by poor mothers every now and then.There are four of five of them in a room which they clean themselves.They have colour TV, their own closets, a library where they can do their homework, study and even work on the computer.The food allocation given by the Romanian state to the children in orphanages for three meals a day amounts less than one dollar. The director of the centre, Mrs.Rafila Sasca spends a great part of her time writing letters and looking for charitable people willing to make donations. I asked her if anything had happened in the orphanages in ten years. ”Around 500 children have lived here in the last 20 years.Great changes have only occurred in the last couple of years. However,the assessment centres are still overcrowded.And with a crowd you can never obtain good results.Good things do happen though:we have ongoing projects with various NGOs.The orphanages are no longer prisons,our children are free to go out;of course,we keep record of those going out.The little ones have companions when going out for a walk, to the theatre,or to the pictures.We are keen on socializing.We have problems with those who finish school.Protection is only given to teenagers up to l8.We have older youngsters who try by all possible means to be further enrolled in one form of education or another.Some of them graduated a vocational school,others attend high school which they finnish when they are 23 and then enroll in a post high school lest they should leave the Centre.”
One and half month ago,The Assessment Centre nr.12 hired a psychologist to take care of the children”s mental health.Luminita Vespe spends 10 hours a day listening to their problems. ”The greatest problems in an orphanage are the behaviour disorders such as homosexuality,juvenile deliquency and a lot of other behaviour disorders.In an assessment centre as it is conceived at the moment,,kids have a slightly deviant personality.They feel victimized even when they are 21,22 believing that they have more rights than the other people in society.In exchange,they think they have no obligations dreaming that the state is going to give them a house although the others do not enjoy such favours.They overestimate their skills and refuse to work and this is a generalized phenomenon.They wish to be grown-ups all of a sudden,to be celebrities, which would make up for what life didn’t offer them,but they refuse to accept the idea that you have to start from bottom.”
Valerica Popa is one of those older than 18,but he hasn’t finished high school yet.We asked him what he had in mind to do after the baccalureate. ”For the time being,I’m struggling to get a house. After the baccalaureate, I will go to France. I have a chance to work there and after making some money, I will come back home and buy an apartment,not in grand style. As I know several trades, I can arrange it to my liking,depending on the money I will have.And then,I will get married and have a family and I will see how things stand.”
A couple of months ago, the National Agency for Child Rights was set up in Romania under an emergency ordinance.The role of the agency is to coordinate all institutions in charge of children in difficulty,be they children in orphanages,learning in special schools or children undergoing treatment for AIDS,to prevent abuses as far as adoptions are concerned and to have a more rigorous control of the funds allocated to those children.Recently,in Brussels,Romanian education minister Andrei Marga presented a report on the measures taken by the governement to resolve the issue of the institutionalized children.He told us that in a near future,society would have to get actively involved in the life of those children: ”This is the way you can make changes:the family be it a foster one is to be preferred to the institution,which means that we are starting the process of deinstitutionalizing the children in this category.Adoptions are kept under a rigorous legal control,so that any abuses may be prevented.With a view to deinstitutionalization action is also taken for decentralization:local communities become the main forces working to resolve the issue of institutionalized children.It is obvious,there is a lot of work to do to change the outlook of people in the network,but also the realities children live in.In another development,the Rapporteur of the European Commission for Romania,barronness Nicholson said that unfortunately,there were such difficult situations of institutionalized children in other countries too and that in Romania solving the issues related to that situation might be indicative of what is to be done and can be done for the institutionalized children at the moment.”
According to the National Agency for Child rights,13,000 children annually leave the orphanages joining their own families or foster families.Unfortunately,the other children,nobody’s children remain in the assessment centres in the suburbs of the towns, dreaming to become grown-ups overnight…