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Romania
“With abandon” suggests a certain exciting wildness. Something in us that defies domestication. Abandonment is a complex issue.
Radu, 22, has one tooth in the front of his mouth. He ran away from State care in the Ceausescu era. He knows the current air fares to Germany and the UK, and does a hilarious take-off of respectable churchgoers begging from God. Last February he found an 11-year-old suffocated in the city drains.
Romania’s fostering programme is progressing well, with the target of closing State care institutions by 2004. However, the scars of dictatorship, an emergent market economy, and minimal free health care and welfare create massive problems. Reportedly in one county alone 173 babies were abandoned between January and June this year.
Children in “orphanages” are often not orphans, but were abandoned due to desperate poverty. Fostering, adoption and reintegration are the acknowledged way forward. Yet money received for a fosterchild may go to augment family income, foster-parents are not always well prepared, and up to six children may be placed in a family rather than one or two. This can create greater scope for getting into trouble.
At the age of 18 children must leave care, but rarely have they been adequately prepared for independence. Orphanage staff are themselves largely untrained in such areas as family life and parenting. There is no system of supervised housing.
Care leavers often lack basic information and work experience and so are illequipped for normal social interaction. Exceptional courage and highly-developed survival skills from orphanage life give them inappropriate boundaries. Although educated, they may be unable to use their knowledge constructively.
Many children in care or on the street originally left home due to abuse. Meanwhile institutions (most State-owned) provide stability, food, clothes, and schooling but remain “institutional” – and so some children prefer the abandon of the street.
Marketing and entertainment present the nuclear family idyll, and a counter-idyll of money, sex, and sexualised violence. Deceived by such idylls, unsupported youngsters are trapped into prostitution, addiction and into becoming a source of body organs. Romania’s geo-political position makes it a nodal point for illegal traffic in people and drugs, vulnerable to repercussions of conflict elsewhere. HIV is set to escalate throughout south-east Europe.
The problems of abandoned children are those of a global society that compulsively glamourises and institutionalises. Struggling, often heroically, against cyclical abuse and lack of opportunity, these children can recall us to values we have abandoned. “Who are my mother and my brothers?” asks Jesus. “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” (Mark 3.33-35)
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