Monday, November 29, 2004
dispatchesDispatches From RomaniaThe children stuck in the adoption pipeline.By Sarah E. RichardsUpdated Friday, Dec. 3, 2004, at 3:12 AM PT
From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: The Dictator's GroupiePosted Monday, Nov. 29, 2004, at 3:45 AM PT
BUCHAREST—Once a month, at 6:30 in the morning, Angela Boteza arrives at the Ghencea Civil Cemetery in western Bucharest. She walks down a gravel path to a nondescript grave, where she clears away dead leaves and candle wax and leaves yellow gladiolas in a wine bottle with a handwritten note: "May God forgive your evil deeds. Rest in peace. May the earth not be heavy upon your soul." A modest granite cross bearing a red star reveals the grave's occupant: Nicolae Ceausescu, 1918-1989. She then she goes to the other side of the cemetery to do the same at the graves of his wife Elena and son Nicu.
Boteza has been making regular visits for the past seven years, but my Romanian driver wasn't sure we had the right place. He'd seen the TV coverage of the dwindling crowd that still visits the dead dictator on Jan. 26, Ceausescu's birthday, but he had to ask directions from the cemetery groundskeeper, who led us to the sad little plot overshadowed by statelier monuments to other families. Besides Boteza's offering, the only other item decorating the resting place of Romania's president of 22 years, who was executed along with his wife on Christmas Day 1989, were some droopy flowers in a plastic cola bottle. Elena's grave looks even worse; her name is painted on a crude iron cross. Nicu, who died of liver cirrhosis in 1996, is entombed more respectfully in sleek black-and-white marble.
The story goes that Nicolae is buried backward, with his feet at the headstone, as an insult. But it's only assumed he's at Ghencea. After the revolution, it was never revealed where the couple's bodies were buried. Their graves were supposedly "discovered" in 1992. A year later, on what would have been his 75th birthday, Communist Party members donated the current headstone, and a flood of visitors came, leaving tributes and planting flowers on what it now a weedy patch. Today, only about a dozen people, mostly the curious en route to another grave, stop by on weekdays, and 30 to 40 make their way over on weekends. "They just look, stay 10 minutes, and leave," the groundskeeper said. "Nobody asks about Elena." Romanians believe Nicolae's vilified wife was behind his decision to order security forces to quell a popular democratic uprising that started in Timisoara to protest lack of freedom, food, heat, and electricity. More than 1,000 people were killed. The couple was found, arrested, tried, and killed by a firing squad within hours. (The timeline is up for debate, too, since everything was done in secret.)
A guard said party members recently asked to move Nicolae to a better location with fancier marble digs, but their request was denied.
Boteza left her phone number on her tribute, and my driver called her up. I could hear her shriek her address. "She said we can come over right now," he said.
After a quick tour of her three-room apartment, Boteza ushered us to the living room. She perched at the edge of her sofa, lit up a cigarette, and began: Ceausescu made a good life for Romanians, but he was judged rashly by people who wanted power and denied his rightful honor of a proper burial in a military cemetery. So, she has appointed herself the keeper of his legacy. She monitors the family's graves and throws out items she feels are insulting. Recently, she's tossed a dirty flag, a frayed Bible, and papier mache flowers.
Life was better under communism, she continued, parroting the refrain: "There was nothing to buy, but we had money. Now, there's everything to buy but no money." At age 52, Boteza is an unemployed accountant who gets a temporary pension of about $50 a month, through April 2005. Her son, who, she boasts, is a military officer, helps her out some. She owns her own apartment, which she bought shortly after the revolution. "I don't eat so much. I have a few cigarettes and coffee, but it's OK," she said, staring at me intently with big somber eyes. She was confident that she would find another job but admitted that she's having sleep problems.
During the 10th anniversary of the fall of communism five years ago, much was made of Romania's lack of celebration. Polls showed that four out of five Romanians were unhappy with the way they lived, and 61 percent said they would be better off under Ceausescu. Such amnesiac musings ignored the nightmares of the Stalinist dictator: the rations, the torture of anyone who opposed the regime, the deadly winters when the energy sector collapsed, the razing of villages and historical Bucharest to make way for his projects, including the so-called House of the People. His megalomaniacal monument, which is widely believed to be the second-largest office building in the world after the Pentagon, was built while the people suffered austerity measures to pay off a $10 billion foreign debt at one point.
Now the nostalgia is tempered. "Yes, it was better under communism. You had a job, a house, a car," said 20-year-old university student George Pascaru. "But you could not have your own thoughts."
But such talk makes few feel better about the giant elephant making its way east. Romania, a country of 23 million, is lumbering toward entry into the European Union in 2007. Despite robust economic growth and low inflation, corruption is rampant, and the average Romanian makes slightly more than $2,100 a year, or just 30 percent of the EU average in purchasing power.
The shiny Bucharest Mall, which opened five years ago and includes a Marks & Spencer department store, a Ruby Tuesday restaurant, and a 10-screen movie theater, is eerily empty. New cars occasionally zip down the highways, but gas-spewing Dacias still dominate*. For every new building, there are miles of crumbling, Soviet-era apartment blocks. Add some bitter, chain-smoking locals; street children; and packs of mangy stray dogs that seem to roam every city, and you get the feeling the country isn't going anywhere soon.
The mention of the European Union is met with cynical laughs. People tell how Hungarians have been forced to raid Romanian grocery stores because they were priced out of their own when their country joined the union this spring. There are rumors that EU regulations will force polluting old cars off the road, and drivers won't be able to buy new ones. And how will people buy houses?
"[President Ion] Iliescu said he will make Romania a rich country, but I just don't see it happening," Boteza said, lighting another cigarette.
Correction, Dec. 1, 2004: This dispatch entry originally claimed that "diesel-spewing Dacias dominate Romanian highways." In fact, Dacias run on gasoline. It also said that Bucharest's House of the People is the second-largest building in the world; this statement has been modified to note that it is "widely believed to be the second-largest office building in the world."
From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: King of Roma EverywherePosted Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2004, at 5:01 AM PT
SIBIU—Mention the name Florin Cioaba to the average Romanian, and you usually get a laugh, followed by a head shake and a muttered, "That crazy guy!" In 1997, Cioaba inherited the title "King of Roma Everywhere" from his father, Ioan, who sort of invented it in 1992. There's at least one other royal, namely Cioaba's relative Emperor Iulian Radulescu, who also lives in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu. But Cioaba is the best-known, largely because of the publicity surrounding last year's lavish wedding for his then-14-year-old daughter, Ana Marie, to a 15-year-old. Reports claimed that the bride tried to escape but was forced to return, sparking headlines like "Gypsy child bride scandal" and prompting British Euro MP Baroness Emma Nicholson to threaten to remove her from harm. Romanian officials ordered the couple apart until she reaches 16, the legal marrying age.
Cioaba, 49, a Pentecostal minister, defended the practice by arguing that early marriage was an important part of Roma tradition that must be preserved. (Roma, rather than gypsy, is the preferred term for the poor migrants who arrived from India a thousand years ago and are scattered mostly in Central and Eastern Europe.) The dozen or so ethnic Romanians I spoke with were quick to dismiss Cioaba as an eccentric but then indulged in gossipy speculation about how much the bridal dress cost and what goes on in that gated compound with the Mercedes S320 parked inside.
I gained access to the king through his English-speaking sister Luminita, who publishes poetry, is making a film on the Roma survivors of the Transnistrian concentration camp during World War II, and likes to talk about her recent trip to New York City to buy a camera. After we waited an hour in the so-called "king room," which features a large fresco of Ioan mounted on a horse, wearing a cape, a gold crown, and a ridiculous grin, Luminita finally escorted me into the living room to meet his current majesty.
Another half-hour later, the king emerged. Clutching his back, he limped toward the glass-and-gold table and carefully set himself in a chair, allowing his open shirt to reveal the sleeveless undershirt covering his ample gut. "Sciatica," he explained. Cioaba is a member of the wealthy 300-strong Kalderash tribe, who are known as skilled coppersmiths. But his lifestyle is a far cry from that of the country's estimated 2 million to 3 million Roma, who are known mostly for being dirt poor. They're subject to rampant discrimination and are mistreated in police stations, prisons, and psychiatric hospitals. Roma children are segregated in many schools, and tales abound about job offers being rescinded once employers learn that applicants are Roma. The latest report from the European Union on Romania's progress toward meeting entry criteria pointed out that, despite some improvements, the legal system still has a long way to go in protecting Roma rights.
Cioaba is the Roma's spokesman and represented them at a meeting on Roma rights in Budapest last year sponsored by the World Bank, George Soros' Open Society Institute, and the European Commission, which is an arm of the European Union. The meeting's brainchild was the "Decade of Roma Inclusion" beginning in 2005. Nine countries committed to support programs targeting poverty, health, school enrollment, and employment to close the gap between Roma and non-Roma.
"There's a new beginning for the Roma," Cioaba said, insisting that integration does not mean assimilation. "We don't want to change our culture," he said, explaining why he defied the law to let his daughter marry young. "I was married at 14. This was our tradition 100 years ago. We have agreed to change, but not in one night."
Delia Grigore, head of the Roma human rights organization Aven Amentza, wants Roma to reclaim their heritage by taking advantage of new constitutional protections to learn the Romani language and wear traditional clothing. "They think their identity will stigmatize them, but this is a process of self-rejection," she said, smoothing out her long flowing skirt. "Our grandparents had to assimilate to survive. There is a cultural re-emergence happening. I came into the movement to really be a Roma."
Despite all the heady talk of a "cultural nation," many Roma see little use for the movement, especially when they can't pay their bills. In fact, they say the Roma fared best during communism. They were forced to leave their nomadic lifestyle and permanently settle and faced deportation, but they were guaranteed housing and factory jobs.
"In Communist times, I worked 30 years in an iron factory," said Sandu Stana, who is 71 but looks 80. "In capitalism, it's hard to have a job. When the jobs are open, and they see our face, they say, 'Sorry, it's been taken.' "
Activists insist that embracing the Roma identity is the only way to move the community forward. For example, the government recently hired 200 health-outreach workers and set aside 400 university spots for Roma in 2004 compared with 10 earmarked in 1994. About 2,000 have graduated, said Marius Taba of the human rights group Romani Cris. About 80 percent of Roma drop out of the system before high school. For those who do go, there are tales of bus drivers refusing to pick them up and school officials segregating them in separate buildings. Discrimination is everywhere. A French film crew followed Taba and several other clean-cut Roma young men on a night out around Bucharest. Five of eight bars they visited kicked them out.
In an informal ghetto north of Bucharest, Roma residents had more immediate concerns. One woman showed me how they were stealing electricity by attaching wires from the power pole into their apartments because they couldn't pay their utility bills; they're worried the police will come soon.
Back at the king's house, Ana Marie just wanted the media to leave her alone. "They say that I left my wedding, but I just went to have a cigarette," she said, playing with the cell phone dangling from her neck. "I was angry about it, and it hurt my father's reputation. They wrote in the papers that I will go to an institution for kids. There are so many kids in the streets. Why me?"
Some press reports said she was 12 at the time of her wedding, but the king said she was 14, and given her curvy body, I believe him.
Ana Marie received a quick education in public relations. She went out of her way to let me know that, per the baroness's instructions, she was in school, and she and her "husband" are just "good friends." She didn't seem too stressed about her future. "The women stay home to raise kids. It's easy.'"
With that, the king went to lie down, and his wife sent the teen upstairs to bring down some scarves to sell me.
From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: The Babies Left BehindPosted Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2004, at 9:01 AM PT
ORADEA—Michelle Sims picked up the floppy infant and showed him to me. "He looks like a 2-month-old, and he was left here almost six months ago," the American social worker said. "They call him Little Bird Boy." The puny child with a mat of black hair and big brown eyes that stare blankly was abandoned at birth at the Oradea Children's Hospital in northwest Romania, near the Hungarian border.
If his mother has not shown up to claim him by the end of six months, the hospital can declare him officially abandoned, making him eligible to be adopted domestically, according to current Romanian law. But that is unlikely to happen, Sims explained, since Little Bird Boy's dark skin identifies him as a Roma, or gypsy. Romanians aren't lining up for Roma children. They make up 10 percent of the population but about 60 percent of abandoned babies.
"Any American family would take him because he's so cute!" Sims said, squealing the compliment and squeezing his foot. But after accusations surfaced that adoption agencies were selling children to the highest bidder, the European Union pressured Romania to permanently shut down foreign adoptions. It is one of a flurry of new initiatives drafted to overhaul the child welfare system as a condition for EU entry in 2007 and to show that Romania can take care of its children.
Sims runs a foundation called Children in the Son, which is affiliated with a South Carolina church. It is building a home for pregnant mothers, hires foster parents for about 10 children, and pays for infant formula and clothing for the 30 or so abandoned babies. They are one of several nonprofit groups that hire women from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. each weekday to hold, rock, and sing to the babies to try to prevent attachment, failure to thrive, and sensory-deprivation problems.
"You should have seen it before," Sims said, a refrain I would hear repeatedly during my stay in Romania as people described malnourished, under-stimulated children screaming for attention and biting themselves in the infamous orphanages, which were exposed in 1991 and led to a wave of international adoptions.
This Sunday, hospital workers change diapers only on scheduled rounds and prop up baby bottles on blankets because they don't have time to hand-feed their charges. Despite the forest murals in the sterile hallways and the donated Fisher-Price toys in the corner, the place is pretty grim. The smell of feces hits you as soon as you enter the floor, and babies don't stop crying. The noises are not the sharp outbursts that signal the need for attention or the whimper of a fussy baby resigned to a nap, but rather the unfocused wails of neglected infants. "Nurses don't hear the crying anymore," Sims said, as she looked for a supervisor to release another baby to his new foster parents.
Sims suspects that Little Bird Boy's mother was one of the many women who drop their babies off at the hospital, listing a false address, and then disappear. Some babies have been there a while because their mothers use the hospital as a form of child care, especially during the winter months, when many poor families don't have heat. If a mother visits her baby once every six months, she can keep her parental rights. "One told me, 'I'll get him in a couple of years when I can afford it.' I must hear stuff like that a dozen times a year," Sims said.
In the meantime, babies like Little Bird Boy languish. But in what appears to be an "a-ha" moment for the Romanian government, a new law will require hospitals to report abandoned babies within 24 hours to the local departments of child protection, which will place them with foster families. The police have 30 days to locate the mother and encourage her to take back the child. If she can't be found, local authorities will give the baby a name and birth certificate.
The reforms also mandate that babies under age 2 will no longer be placed in institutions. The government is slowly shutting the orphanages anyway in favor of group homes and foster care, but the babies will benefit first. Marv and Diann Tieman, an American couple who run a private home for abandoned babies in Galoti, a few hours north of Bucharest, were told they would receive no new babies after Jan. 1, 2005.
But no one seems to know where the state is going to find enough foster families. Marv Tieman said he had to keep some of the babies for months before families could take them. Sims had to turn down requests from the state hospital asking her foundation to find and pay for foster care for five children because she couldn't afford it. And a group of foster parents from Olt County in southern Romania recently staged a protest claiming they were being forced to care for more children than they had agreed to.
"We're developing a foster care network. But it's hard to find so many parents. It's very expensive," explained Sanda Gancevici, a pediatrician who specializes in developmental disabilities at Orphanage No. 1 in Bucharest, which is in the process of closing. She is a slight woman with a hard face who became resigned to the sluggish, exasperating system long ago. A quick tour of the orphanage showed that the children were well tended to, but they still had the telltale signs of having spent years in institutions—the hand-waving, head-rocking, and morose faces.
"It's improving, but a child in an institution is forever a damaged child," she said.
Despite pledges to close all the big institutions by 2007, about 37,000 children still live in them, according to the latest EU report on Romania released last month. The same number live in group homes run by the state or nongovernmental organizations, and nearly 50,000 live with foster families. Romanian government figures are even rosier: They show that only about 32,000 children remain in institutions—down about 5,000 since last year. But critics claim that children simply have been moved around to make the numbers look better.
Then there's the problem of how to find permanent homes, since international adoptions are no longer an option. "We can't solve the problems with Romanians," Dr. Gancevici said, folding her arms and leaning back in her chair as if challenging me to prove otherwise. "No Romanian will adopt a gypsy or problem or disabled child."
In the meantime, the Romanian government is trying to figure out how to cut off the supply of unwanted children by forcing desperate mothers to rethink their decisions. The current law requires mothers to wait 45 days after the birth of a child before she can legally sign over her rights.
Anna, 16, who didn't give her last name, was forced to take her newborn daughter back after she tried to abandon her at a hospital in the suburbs of Bucharest, "A social worker told me, 'You can't leave it here,' " she said. "I first thought about abortion, but I couldn't do it because the baby was too big, almost five months. I was confused. I didn't know what to do," she said.
She explained that she was kicked out of her parents' house, so the social worker sent her to a shelter for mothers and children run by the charity Hope Worldwide. Loredana Bogdan, who helps run the 6-month-old center, where women lounge around the kitchen with their babies, said two women decided to keep their babies after the waiting period ended.
Anna has been there a little over a month, and from the way she can barely be bothered to prop the baby's head up, it's clear she's counting the days.
From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: Please Keep Your Children, or Don't Have ThemPosted Thursday, Dec. 2, 2004, at 12:11 PM PT
SIBIU—Eni Gall has one of the most depressing jobs in Romania. Equipped with a minimal range of social services, a couple of loaves of bread, and an earnest idealism, 25-year-old Gall works as a case manager visiting poor, dysfunctional, and marginalized families. Her assignment is to keep families together so they won't abandon their children.
Gall is one of a slowly growing number of social workers in a country that, during communism, didn't recognize it had social problems. Today, Romanians know they have problems, but there is scarce public funding to even begin to address them. They can clean up the orphanage system in an attempt to become a EU–worthy country by 2007, but there's no mechanism in place to stem the supply of deserted children. "There are no public social services in Romania, only institutionalized ones for the disabled or orphans," explained Calin Blaga*, director of Gall's employer, Arapamesu, a nongovernmental agency founded in 1995 by an American nun and funded by U.S., European, and Romanian donors. It provides counseling, tutoring, support groups, and children's activities for around 330 at-risk families in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu. "We need services, services, services!" he said.
The little agency with an annual budget of $100,000 takes on the big demons of Romanian society: poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, unemployment, and bad housing. "Families are in a difficult situation, and they have children, and they don't know what to do anymore," he said, explaining that older children, not just babies, were at risk of being abandoned. "We don't have shelters in Romania. This is a problem of abandoning 2- and 5-year-olds."
I accompanied Gall as she made a surprise visit to the Zeng family. Gall briefed me on their story in the car: The husband and wife both grew up in orphanages, where they met. He's 31 and asthmatic; she's 24 and anemic. They have two pre-schoolers. The wife recently returned home, after living with a new boyfriend, because she's sick. In the meantime, the husband let a homeless pregnant mother and her 16-year-old daughter move in. He once was so desperate for better housing that he doused himself with gasoline in front of the mayor's office and threatened to light a match. It didn't work.
On this rainy morning, all six were hanging out on two small beds and a couple of chairs in their spartan one-room studio. There was no television, and I couldn't imagine what they did all day. The smiley and precocious kids, ages 2 and 4, jumped on the beds, and the group seemed glad to see new faces. Gall delivered the bread she brings weekly. The husband supplements his meager pension of about $60 per month by doing odd jobs, such as repairing tables for the greengrocer in exchange for vegetables, or secretly selling used clothing donated by Gall's agency. "He came to us to see if we knew where he could work," she said. "We have a program to repair homes, but it was winter, and he's asthmatic."
Gall giggled after we left and rolled her eyes, as if to say, "What can you do?" The house was a circus, but Gall thought the kids were safe. "He loves them too much," she said.
More troubling was the next stop at the apartment of the Boier family, which consists of a tubercular uncle, an alcoholic grandmother, and her 5-year-old granddaughter, who she retrieved from an orphanage a year ago after the child's mother had deserted her. The man who answered the door refused to invite us in and barked that the grandmother was out. Gall thought it was her boyfriend. Even from the doorway, I could smell old garbage, and Gall took a deep breath before peering inside and waving at the timid, cross-eyed child. "I want to go to child protective services. The girl is living in a bad condition. But the state never checks up," she said bitterly. "Sometimes the grandmother is so drunk she can't speak to me." Gall once offered to take the girl to her agency's youth club, but the grandmother said she couldn't afford the bus fare. "This job is hard sometimes," Gall said, turning quiet on the ride home. "But it's necessary."
If social workers are trying to help people keep their children, public health officials are attempting to show women how to avoid having unwanted children in the first place. Contraceptives are taken for granted in most of the world, but in Romania, they've only recently become widespread. Many forms of birth control were banned or unavailable during communism in an effort to boost the birth rate. Doctors weren't trained to prescribe oral contraceptives, and many Romanians thought they were carcinogenic anyway.
Now, condoms are discussed on the Romanian version of MTV, and doctors must join a waiting list to attend birth-control information seminars. Three years ago, the Romanian government—with help from John Snow Inc., an international health-care consultant, and funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the United Nations—started a campaign to offer free birth control to poor people. Recently, the healthy ministry and a Roma human rights group trained 200 Roma health coordinators to educate a community still stigmatized by the old joke, "A gypsy woman is washing her baby and drops him in the mud. She asks her husband, 'Should we pick him up or just have another one?' "
Two years ago, residents of a gypsy ghetto north of Bucharest didn't even know contraceptives existed. I met health coordinator Florica Petre, who blushed as she recalled showing a roomful of men how to put on condoms. She said that whenever she gets a new delivery of prophylactics, the men scoop them up for visits to local prostitutes. (Apparently, the equivalent of $6 buys a visit to a French or a Japanese hooker, the neighborhood favorites.)
Petre is responsible for teaching 2,300 people in her area about vaccination and family planning options. That includes trying to persuade women that the pill won't make them fat or that that missed periods from contraceptive injections, which are given every three weeks, won't cause blood to build up in their stomachs. It's been a slow sell.
She introduced me to Angela Bitbea, a 30-year-old woman with five children, who stopped using birth control pills after they gave her headache. Since she hasn't gotten pregnant in two years, she assumes she is no longer fertile. Her husband doesn't work, and the family lives off a monthly pension of about $100.
And Mariana Burdulea, 36, got hot flashes when she tried the pills, so she stopped using them. She is the mother of two children "who are enough because life is so hard." She thinks she is pregnant now and will look into an abortion, which would be her fifth. "She's pregnant all the time," interjected her husband. She thought the termination would cost her the equivalent of $30; she will borrow the money to pay for it. Petre added that the price didn't include the $10 consultation fee.
"Before, women were ignorant," Petre said, with a satisfied look on the face. "Now, I've helped to emancipate them."
Correction, Dec. 7, 2004: This entry originally misspelled the name of the Arapamesu director quoted in the second paragraph. He is Calin Blaga, not Braga. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: Stuck in the PipelinePosted Friday, Dec. 3, 2004, at 3:12 AM PT
TIMISOARA—Larissa is a bossy, bewitching 3-year-old whose family hangs on her every word. Lari wants to watch Finding Nemo again. Lari had a dream about a "skalamander." Lari saw a truck today. Lari likes blue M&Ms. "What did she say?" they ask each other, with eager anticipation of bursting into laughter. It's not the novelty of having a young child in the home of a couple with older children. The Heisey family, from Lancaster County, Pa., is completely in love with this kid. And every day they wrestle with a sick anxiety in the pits of their stomachs that someone will knock at the door and take her away.
Peter and Julie Heisey have worked as missionaries for nearly six years in Timisoara, Romania, the epicenter of the 1989 revolution that ended the Ceausescu regime. Ever since Julie received a call from a friend telling her about an 8-day-old gypsy baby, whose teenage mother planned to take her to an orphanage, the Heiseys have tried to legally adopt her.
In November of 2003, after years of delays in the long, maddening process to make it official, their file was finally completed. The Heiseys had taken psychological tests. Julie had been re-fingerprinted, after the first set was unreadable. Their home had been inspected. They had included another copy of Lari's most recent medical exam.
It's not easy to adopt a child in Romania, and at first, the Heiseys thought they were following the law by hiring lawyers to notarize the signing over the birth rights and applying for her birth certificate. That began a local legal brouhaha that involved more lawyers, social workers, abandonment proceedings, commission meetings, and mandated visits of the birth mother to the Heisey's home to make it clear that she indeed did not want this child.
There's an old joke that Romania is the land of possibility, where anything can happen—anything bad and anything worse. So, when Peter proudly plopped the file containing every single document carefully copied and collated on the desk of Larissa's assigned social worker at the local office of the National Authority for Child Protection, he wasn't surprised when the clerk told him she couldn't send it on to Bucharest. The Romanian government had passed an emergency ordinance forbidding international adoptions. For the previous three years, the government had imposed a moratorium stopping such adoptions after a report in 2001 on Romania's membership application to the European Union claimed that hundreds of children were sold into trafficking networks under false adoption claims. It also said that some were used for organ donation.
Hoping to join the union in 2007, the Romanian government said it would resume international adoptions once it had a chance to straighten out the corrupt child welfare system. In the meantime, there had always been a special clause allowing exceptional cases, such as those involving older or disabled children. The Heiseys filed to declare Larissa a special case. After all, she had joined their family as an infant, lived in Romania with them, and was a gypsy girl who few Romanian families would want to adopt. But Peter knew this latest decree was more serious. It banned all adoptions, except to relatives living abroad. Parliament approved the legislation this summer, President Ion Iliescu signed the ordinance into law, and it's scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2005. Still, the Heiseys thought they were safe. They had a registration number.
In the latest disturbing development of the Romanian adoption saga, which began nearly a decade ago when the world learned of orphanages full of 100,000 malnourished, abused, and neglected children, approximately 2,000 pending international adoptions are currently in legal limbo. That figure includes nearly 300 American families who filed so-called exceptional cases after the first moratorium went into effect in June 2001. One group called For the Children SOS, which includes prospective adoptive parents, has been lobbying the U.S. government to pressure the Romanians to put through the cases that have matched children with American families and, in many cases, have been approved by local Romanian authorities.
Emotions have run high on both sides of the Atlantic. Romanians gossip about corrupt officials charging Americans $50,000 a child or approving adoptions to 60-year-old parents in Spain. Or they claim that Americans abandon or abuse their adopted children once they discover they have emotional or developmental problems. Then there are charges that Romania rebuffed American efforts to draft new legislation because of pressure from the European Union.
Romania heeded an EU warning this summer not to amend the law or yield to U.S. pressure to process the pending cases, even those involving sick babies. However, last month, France and Romania agreed to set up an international committee to sort through the so-called pipeline children, many of whom are disabled or older.
In the meantime, families and children are waiting for answers. Thomas and Margarida Harr of Gilford, Conn., already received theirs. After flying to Romania four times in two years to visit the two children they had been on track to adopt, the couple received an e-mail from the agency notifying them that the boy and girl had been adopted by Romanian families. "It was shattering," said Thomas. "We were so, so disappointed. We knew it could happen. But we never thought our two would be taken, especially both of them. Some woman decided she wanted to adopt the girl, and the boy was adopted by his grandparents."
The Heiseys wait, too. Peters schemes about his legal options and writes impassioned posts on a Yahoo group. Julie refuses to fantasize about Larissa's future. A couple of months ago, she had a dream in which she saw a baby crawling on a railing with two other babies on her back. She wanted to help them, but she couldn't leave Larissa behind.Sarah E. Richards is a freelance writer based in New York City. She can be reached at sarah@saraherichards.com.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2109971/
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From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: The Dictator's GroupiePosted Monday, Nov. 29, 2004, at 3:45 AM PT
BUCHAREST—Once a month, at 6:30 in the morning, Angela Boteza arrives at the Ghencea Civil Cemetery in western Bucharest. She walks down a gravel path to a nondescript grave, where she clears away dead leaves and candle wax and leaves yellow gladiolas in a wine bottle with a handwritten note: "May God forgive your evil deeds. Rest in peace. May the earth not be heavy upon your soul." A modest granite cross bearing a red star reveals the grave's occupant: Nicolae Ceausescu, 1918-1989. She then she goes to the other side of the cemetery to do the same at the graves of his wife Elena and son Nicu.
Boteza has been making regular visits for the past seven years, but my Romanian driver wasn't sure we had the right place. He'd seen the TV coverage of the dwindling crowd that still visits the dead dictator on Jan. 26, Ceausescu's birthday, but he had to ask directions from the cemetery groundskeeper, who led us to the sad little plot overshadowed by statelier monuments to other families. Besides Boteza's offering, the only other item decorating the resting place of Romania's president of 22 years, who was executed along with his wife on Christmas Day 1989, were some droopy flowers in a plastic cola bottle. Elena's grave looks even worse; her name is painted on a crude iron cross. Nicu, who died of liver cirrhosis in 1996, is entombed more respectfully in sleek black-and-white marble.
The story goes that Nicolae is buried backward, with his feet at the headstone, as an insult. But it's only assumed he's at Ghencea. After the revolution, it was never revealed where the couple's bodies were buried. Their graves were supposedly "discovered" in 1992. A year later, on what would have been his 75th birthday, Communist Party members donated the current headstone, and a flood of visitors came, leaving tributes and planting flowers on what it now a weedy patch. Today, only about a dozen people, mostly the curious en route to another grave, stop by on weekdays, and 30 to 40 make their way over on weekends. "They just look, stay 10 minutes, and leave," the groundskeeper said. "Nobody asks about Elena." Romanians believe Nicolae's vilified wife was behind his decision to order security forces to quell a popular democratic uprising that started in Timisoara to protest lack of freedom, food, heat, and electricity. More than 1,000 people were killed. The couple was found, arrested, tried, and killed by a firing squad within hours. (The timeline is up for debate, too, since everything was done in secret.)
A guard said party members recently asked to move Nicolae to a better location with fancier marble digs, but their request was denied.
Boteza left her phone number on her tribute, and my driver called her up. I could hear her shriek her address. "She said we can come over right now," he said.
After a quick tour of her three-room apartment, Boteza ushered us to the living room. She perched at the edge of her sofa, lit up a cigarette, and began: Ceausescu made a good life for Romanians, but he was judged rashly by people who wanted power and denied his rightful honor of a proper burial in a military cemetery. So, she has appointed herself the keeper of his legacy. She monitors the family's graves and throws out items she feels are insulting. Recently, she's tossed a dirty flag, a frayed Bible, and papier mache flowers.
Life was better under communism, she continued, parroting the refrain: "There was nothing to buy, but we had money. Now, there's everything to buy but no money." At age 52, Boteza is an unemployed accountant who gets a temporary pension of about $50 a month, through April 2005. Her son, who, she boasts, is a military officer, helps her out some. She owns her own apartment, which she bought shortly after the revolution. "I don't eat so much. I have a few cigarettes and coffee, but it's OK," she said, staring at me intently with big somber eyes. She was confident that she would find another job but admitted that she's having sleep problems.
During the 10th anniversary of the fall of communism five years ago, much was made of Romania's lack of celebration. Polls showed that four out of five Romanians were unhappy with the way they lived, and 61 percent said they would be better off under Ceausescu. Such amnesiac musings ignored the nightmares of the Stalinist dictator: the rations, the torture of anyone who opposed the regime, the deadly winters when the energy sector collapsed, the razing of villages and historical Bucharest to make way for his projects, including the so-called House of the People. His megalomaniacal monument, which is widely believed to be the second-largest office building in the world after the Pentagon, was built while the people suffered austerity measures to pay off a $10 billion foreign debt at one point.
Now the nostalgia is tempered. "Yes, it was better under communism. You had a job, a house, a car," said 20-year-old university student George Pascaru. "But you could not have your own thoughts."
But such talk makes few feel better about the giant elephant making its way east. Romania, a country of 23 million, is lumbering toward entry into the European Union in 2007. Despite robust economic growth and low inflation, corruption is rampant, and the average Romanian makes slightly more than $2,100 a year, or just 30 percent of the EU average in purchasing power.
The shiny Bucharest Mall, which opened five years ago and includes a Marks & Spencer department store, a Ruby Tuesday restaurant, and a 10-screen movie theater, is eerily empty. New cars occasionally zip down the highways, but gas-spewing Dacias still dominate*. For every new building, there are miles of crumbling, Soviet-era apartment blocks. Add some bitter, chain-smoking locals; street children; and packs of mangy stray dogs that seem to roam every city, and you get the feeling the country isn't going anywhere soon.
The mention of the European Union is met with cynical laughs. People tell how Hungarians have been forced to raid Romanian grocery stores because they were priced out of their own when their country joined the union this spring. There are rumors that EU regulations will force polluting old cars off the road, and drivers won't be able to buy new ones. And how will people buy houses?
"[President Ion] Iliescu said he will make Romania a rich country, but I just don't see it happening," Boteza said, lighting another cigarette.
Correction, Dec. 1, 2004: This dispatch entry originally claimed that "diesel-spewing Dacias dominate Romanian highways." In fact, Dacias run on gasoline. It also said that Bucharest's House of the People is the second-largest building in the world; this statement has been modified to note that it is "widely believed to be the second-largest office building in the world."
From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: King of Roma EverywherePosted Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2004, at 5:01 AM PT
SIBIU—Mention the name Florin Cioaba to the average Romanian, and you usually get a laugh, followed by a head shake and a muttered, "That crazy guy!" In 1997, Cioaba inherited the title "King of Roma Everywhere" from his father, Ioan, who sort of invented it in 1992. There's at least one other royal, namely Cioaba's relative Emperor Iulian Radulescu, who also lives in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu. But Cioaba is the best-known, largely because of the publicity surrounding last year's lavish wedding for his then-14-year-old daughter, Ana Marie, to a 15-year-old. Reports claimed that the bride tried to escape but was forced to return, sparking headlines like "Gypsy child bride scandal" and prompting British Euro MP Baroness Emma Nicholson to threaten to remove her from harm. Romanian officials ordered the couple apart until she reaches 16, the legal marrying age.
Cioaba, 49, a Pentecostal minister, defended the practice by arguing that early marriage was an important part of Roma tradition that must be preserved. (Roma, rather than gypsy, is the preferred term for the poor migrants who arrived from India a thousand years ago and are scattered mostly in Central and Eastern Europe.) The dozen or so ethnic Romanians I spoke with were quick to dismiss Cioaba as an eccentric but then indulged in gossipy speculation about how much the bridal dress cost and what goes on in that gated compound with the Mercedes S320 parked inside.
I gained access to the king through his English-speaking sister Luminita, who publishes poetry, is making a film on the Roma survivors of the Transnistrian concentration camp during World War II, and likes to talk about her recent trip to New York City to buy a camera. After we waited an hour in the so-called "king room," which features a large fresco of Ioan mounted on a horse, wearing a cape, a gold crown, and a ridiculous grin, Luminita finally escorted me into the living room to meet his current majesty.
Another half-hour later, the king emerged. Clutching his back, he limped toward the glass-and-gold table and carefully set himself in a chair, allowing his open shirt to reveal the sleeveless undershirt covering his ample gut. "Sciatica," he explained. Cioaba is a member of the wealthy 300-strong Kalderash tribe, who are known as skilled coppersmiths. But his lifestyle is a far cry from that of the country's estimated 2 million to 3 million Roma, who are known mostly for being dirt poor. They're subject to rampant discrimination and are mistreated in police stations, prisons, and psychiatric hospitals. Roma children are segregated in many schools, and tales abound about job offers being rescinded once employers learn that applicants are Roma. The latest report from the European Union on Romania's progress toward meeting entry criteria pointed out that, despite some improvements, the legal system still has a long way to go in protecting Roma rights.
Cioaba is the Roma's spokesman and represented them at a meeting on Roma rights in Budapest last year sponsored by the World Bank, George Soros' Open Society Institute, and the European Commission, which is an arm of the European Union. The meeting's brainchild was the "Decade of Roma Inclusion" beginning in 2005. Nine countries committed to support programs targeting poverty, health, school enrollment, and employment to close the gap between Roma and non-Roma.
"There's a new beginning for the Roma," Cioaba said, insisting that integration does not mean assimilation. "We don't want to change our culture," he said, explaining why he defied the law to let his daughter marry young. "I was married at 14. This was our tradition 100 years ago. We have agreed to change, but not in one night."
Delia Grigore, head of the Roma human rights organization Aven Amentza, wants Roma to reclaim their heritage by taking advantage of new constitutional protections to learn the Romani language and wear traditional clothing. "They think their identity will stigmatize them, but this is a process of self-rejection," she said, smoothing out her long flowing skirt. "Our grandparents had to assimilate to survive. There is a cultural re-emergence happening. I came into the movement to really be a Roma."
Despite all the heady talk of a "cultural nation," many Roma see little use for the movement, especially when they can't pay their bills. In fact, they say the Roma fared best during communism. They were forced to leave their nomadic lifestyle and permanently settle and faced deportation, but they were guaranteed housing and factory jobs.
"In Communist times, I worked 30 years in an iron factory," said Sandu Stana, who is 71 but looks 80. "In capitalism, it's hard to have a job. When the jobs are open, and they see our face, they say, 'Sorry, it's been taken.' "
Activists insist that embracing the Roma identity is the only way to move the community forward. For example, the government recently hired 200 health-outreach workers and set aside 400 university spots for Roma in 2004 compared with 10 earmarked in 1994. About 2,000 have graduated, said Marius Taba of the human rights group Romani Cris. About 80 percent of Roma drop out of the system before high school. For those who do go, there are tales of bus drivers refusing to pick them up and school officials segregating them in separate buildings. Discrimination is everywhere. A French film crew followed Taba and several other clean-cut Roma young men on a night out around Bucharest. Five of eight bars they visited kicked them out.
In an informal ghetto north of Bucharest, Roma residents had more immediate concerns. One woman showed me how they were stealing electricity by attaching wires from the power pole into their apartments because they couldn't pay their utility bills; they're worried the police will come soon.
Back at the king's house, Ana Marie just wanted the media to leave her alone. "They say that I left my wedding, but I just went to have a cigarette," she said, playing with the cell phone dangling from her neck. "I was angry about it, and it hurt my father's reputation. They wrote in the papers that I will go to an institution for kids. There are so many kids in the streets. Why me?"
Some press reports said she was 12 at the time of her wedding, but the king said she was 14, and given her curvy body, I believe him.
Ana Marie received a quick education in public relations. She went out of her way to let me know that, per the baroness's instructions, she was in school, and she and her "husband" are just "good friends." She didn't seem too stressed about her future. "The women stay home to raise kids. It's easy.'"
With that, the king went to lie down, and his wife sent the teen upstairs to bring down some scarves to sell me.
From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: The Babies Left BehindPosted Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2004, at 9:01 AM PT
ORADEA—Michelle Sims picked up the floppy infant and showed him to me. "He looks like a 2-month-old, and he was left here almost six months ago," the American social worker said. "They call him Little Bird Boy." The puny child with a mat of black hair and big brown eyes that stare blankly was abandoned at birth at the Oradea Children's Hospital in northwest Romania, near the Hungarian border.
If his mother has not shown up to claim him by the end of six months, the hospital can declare him officially abandoned, making him eligible to be adopted domestically, according to current Romanian law. But that is unlikely to happen, Sims explained, since Little Bird Boy's dark skin identifies him as a Roma, or gypsy. Romanians aren't lining up for Roma children. They make up 10 percent of the population but about 60 percent of abandoned babies.
"Any American family would take him because he's so cute!" Sims said, squealing the compliment and squeezing his foot. But after accusations surfaced that adoption agencies were selling children to the highest bidder, the European Union pressured Romania to permanently shut down foreign adoptions. It is one of a flurry of new initiatives drafted to overhaul the child welfare system as a condition for EU entry in 2007 and to show that Romania can take care of its children.
Sims runs a foundation called Children in the Son, which is affiliated with a South Carolina church. It is building a home for pregnant mothers, hires foster parents for about 10 children, and pays for infant formula and clothing for the 30 or so abandoned babies. They are one of several nonprofit groups that hire women from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. each weekday to hold, rock, and sing to the babies to try to prevent attachment, failure to thrive, and sensory-deprivation problems.
"You should have seen it before," Sims said, a refrain I would hear repeatedly during my stay in Romania as people described malnourished, under-stimulated children screaming for attention and biting themselves in the infamous orphanages, which were exposed in 1991 and led to a wave of international adoptions.
This Sunday, hospital workers change diapers only on scheduled rounds and prop up baby bottles on blankets because they don't have time to hand-feed their charges. Despite the forest murals in the sterile hallways and the donated Fisher-Price toys in the corner, the place is pretty grim. The smell of feces hits you as soon as you enter the floor, and babies don't stop crying. The noises are not the sharp outbursts that signal the need for attention or the whimper of a fussy baby resigned to a nap, but rather the unfocused wails of neglected infants. "Nurses don't hear the crying anymore," Sims said, as she looked for a supervisor to release another baby to his new foster parents.
Sims suspects that Little Bird Boy's mother was one of the many women who drop their babies off at the hospital, listing a false address, and then disappear. Some babies have been there a while because their mothers use the hospital as a form of child care, especially during the winter months, when many poor families don't have heat. If a mother visits her baby once every six months, she can keep her parental rights. "One told me, 'I'll get him in a couple of years when I can afford it.' I must hear stuff like that a dozen times a year," Sims said.
In the meantime, babies like Little Bird Boy languish. But in what appears to be an "a-ha" moment for the Romanian government, a new law will require hospitals to report abandoned babies within 24 hours to the local departments of child protection, which will place them with foster families. The police have 30 days to locate the mother and encourage her to take back the child. If she can't be found, local authorities will give the baby a name and birth certificate.
The reforms also mandate that babies under age 2 will no longer be placed in institutions. The government is slowly shutting the orphanages anyway in favor of group homes and foster care, but the babies will benefit first. Marv and Diann Tieman, an American couple who run a private home for abandoned babies in Galoti, a few hours north of Bucharest, were told they would receive no new babies after Jan. 1, 2005.
But no one seems to know where the state is going to find enough foster families. Marv Tieman said he had to keep some of the babies for months before families could take them. Sims had to turn down requests from the state hospital asking her foundation to find and pay for foster care for five children because she couldn't afford it. And a group of foster parents from Olt County in southern Romania recently staged a protest claiming they were being forced to care for more children than they had agreed to.
"We're developing a foster care network. But it's hard to find so many parents. It's very expensive," explained Sanda Gancevici, a pediatrician who specializes in developmental disabilities at Orphanage No. 1 in Bucharest, which is in the process of closing. She is a slight woman with a hard face who became resigned to the sluggish, exasperating system long ago. A quick tour of the orphanage showed that the children were well tended to, but they still had the telltale signs of having spent years in institutions—the hand-waving, head-rocking, and morose faces.
"It's improving, but a child in an institution is forever a damaged child," she said.
Despite pledges to close all the big institutions by 2007, about 37,000 children still live in them, according to the latest EU report on Romania released last month. The same number live in group homes run by the state or nongovernmental organizations, and nearly 50,000 live with foster families. Romanian government figures are even rosier: They show that only about 32,000 children remain in institutions—down about 5,000 since last year. But critics claim that children simply have been moved around to make the numbers look better.
Then there's the problem of how to find permanent homes, since international adoptions are no longer an option. "We can't solve the problems with Romanians," Dr. Gancevici said, folding her arms and leaning back in her chair as if challenging me to prove otherwise. "No Romanian will adopt a gypsy or problem or disabled child."
In the meantime, the Romanian government is trying to figure out how to cut off the supply of unwanted children by forcing desperate mothers to rethink their decisions. The current law requires mothers to wait 45 days after the birth of a child before she can legally sign over her rights.
Anna, 16, who didn't give her last name, was forced to take her newborn daughter back after she tried to abandon her at a hospital in the suburbs of Bucharest, "A social worker told me, 'You can't leave it here,' " she said. "I first thought about abortion, but I couldn't do it because the baby was too big, almost five months. I was confused. I didn't know what to do," she said.
She explained that she was kicked out of her parents' house, so the social worker sent her to a shelter for mothers and children run by the charity Hope Worldwide. Loredana Bogdan, who helps run the 6-month-old center, where women lounge around the kitchen with their babies, said two women decided to keep their babies after the waiting period ended.
Anna has been there a little over a month, and from the way she can barely be bothered to prop the baby's head up, it's clear she's counting the days.
From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: Please Keep Your Children, or Don't Have ThemPosted Thursday, Dec. 2, 2004, at 12:11 PM PT
SIBIU—Eni Gall has one of the most depressing jobs in Romania. Equipped with a minimal range of social services, a couple of loaves of bread, and an earnest idealism, 25-year-old Gall works as a case manager visiting poor, dysfunctional, and marginalized families. Her assignment is to keep families together so they won't abandon their children.
Gall is one of a slowly growing number of social workers in a country that, during communism, didn't recognize it had social problems. Today, Romanians know they have problems, but there is scarce public funding to even begin to address them. They can clean up the orphanage system in an attempt to become a EU–worthy country by 2007, but there's no mechanism in place to stem the supply of deserted children. "There are no public social services in Romania, only institutionalized ones for the disabled or orphans," explained Calin Blaga*, director of Gall's employer, Arapamesu, a nongovernmental agency founded in 1995 by an American nun and funded by U.S., European, and Romanian donors. It provides counseling, tutoring, support groups, and children's activities for around 330 at-risk families in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu. "We need services, services, services!" he said.
The little agency with an annual budget of $100,000 takes on the big demons of Romanian society: poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, unemployment, and bad housing. "Families are in a difficult situation, and they have children, and they don't know what to do anymore," he said, explaining that older children, not just babies, were at risk of being abandoned. "We don't have shelters in Romania. This is a problem of abandoning 2- and 5-year-olds."
I accompanied Gall as she made a surprise visit to the Zeng family. Gall briefed me on their story in the car: The husband and wife both grew up in orphanages, where they met. He's 31 and asthmatic; she's 24 and anemic. They have two pre-schoolers. The wife recently returned home, after living with a new boyfriend, because she's sick. In the meantime, the husband let a homeless pregnant mother and her 16-year-old daughter move in. He once was so desperate for better housing that he doused himself with gasoline in front of the mayor's office and threatened to light a match. It didn't work.
On this rainy morning, all six were hanging out on two small beds and a couple of chairs in their spartan one-room studio. There was no television, and I couldn't imagine what they did all day. The smiley and precocious kids, ages 2 and 4, jumped on the beds, and the group seemed glad to see new faces. Gall delivered the bread she brings weekly. The husband supplements his meager pension of about $60 per month by doing odd jobs, such as repairing tables for the greengrocer in exchange for vegetables, or secretly selling used clothing donated by Gall's agency. "He came to us to see if we knew where he could work," she said. "We have a program to repair homes, but it was winter, and he's asthmatic."
Gall giggled after we left and rolled her eyes, as if to say, "What can you do?" The house was a circus, but Gall thought the kids were safe. "He loves them too much," she said.
More troubling was the next stop at the apartment of the Boier family, which consists of a tubercular uncle, an alcoholic grandmother, and her 5-year-old granddaughter, who she retrieved from an orphanage a year ago after the child's mother had deserted her. The man who answered the door refused to invite us in and barked that the grandmother was out. Gall thought it was her boyfriend. Even from the doorway, I could smell old garbage, and Gall took a deep breath before peering inside and waving at the timid, cross-eyed child. "I want to go to child protective services. The girl is living in a bad condition. But the state never checks up," she said bitterly. "Sometimes the grandmother is so drunk she can't speak to me." Gall once offered to take the girl to her agency's youth club, but the grandmother said she couldn't afford the bus fare. "This job is hard sometimes," Gall said, turning quiet on the ride home. "But it's necessary."
If social workers are trying to help people keep their children, public health officials are attempting to show women how to avoid having unwanted children in the first place. Contraceptives are taken for granted in most of the world, but in Romania, they've only recently become widespread. Many forms of birth control were banned or unavailable during communism in an effort to boost the birth rate. Doctors weren't trained to prescribe oral contraceptives, and many Romanians thought they were carcinogenic anyway.
Now, condoms are discussed on the Romanian version of MTV, and doctors must join a waiting list to attend birth-control information seminars. Three years ago, the Romanian government—with help from John Snow Inc., an international health-care consultant, and funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the United Nations—started a campaign to offer free birth control to poor people. Recently, the healthy ministry and a Roma human rights group trained 200 Roma health coordinators to educate a community still stigmatized by the old joke, "A gypsy woman is washing her baby and drops him in the mud. She asks her husband, 'Should we pick him up or just have another one?' "
Two years ago, residents of a gypsy ghetto north of Bucharest didn't even know contraceptives existed. I met health coordinator Florica Petre, who blushed as she recalled showing a roomful of men how to put on condoms. She said that whenever she gets a new delivery of prophylactics, the men scoop them up for visits to local prostitutes. (Apparently, the equivalent of $6 buys a visit to a French or a Japanese hooker, the neighborhood favorites.)
Petre is responsible for teaching 2,300 people in her area about vaccination and family planning options. That includes trying to persuade women that the pill won't make them fat or that that missed periods from contraceptive injections, which are given every three weeks, won't cause blood to build up in their stomachs. It's been a slow sell.
She introduced me to Angela Bitbea, a 30-year-old woman with five children, who stopped using birth control pills after they gave her headache. Since she hasn't gotten pregnant in two years, she assumes she is no longer fertile. Her husband doesn't work, and the family lives off a monthly pension of about $100.
And Mariana Burdulea, 36, got hot flashes when she tried the pills, so she stopped using them. She is the mother of two children "who are enough because life is so hard." She thinks she is pregnant now and will look into an abortion, which would be her fifth. "She's pregnant all the time," interjected her husband. She thought the termination would cost her the equivalent of $30; she will borrow the money to pay for it. Petre added that the price didn't include the $10 consultation fee.
"Before, women were ignorant," Petre said, with a satisfied look on the face. "Now, I've helped to emancipate them."
Correction, Dec. 7, 2004: This entry originally misspelled the name of the Arapamesu director quoted in the second paragraph. He is Calin Blaga, not Braga. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
From: Sarah E. RichardsSubject: Stuck in the PipelinePosted Friday, Dec. 3, 2004, at 3:12 AM PT
TIMISOARA—Larissa is a bossy, bewitching 3-year-old whose family hangs on her every word. Lari wants to watch Finding Nemo again. Lari had a dream about a "skalamander." Lari saw a truck today. Lari likes blue M&Ms. "What did she say?" they ask each other, with eager anticipation of bursting into laughter. It's not the novelty of having a young child in the home of a couple with older children. The Heisey family, from Lancaster County, Pa., is completely in love with this kid. And every day they wrestle with a sick anxiety in the pits of their stomachs that someone will knock at the door and take her away.
Peter and Julie Heisey have worked as missionaries for nearly six years in Timisoara, Romania, the epicenter of the 1989 revolution that ended the Ceausescu regime. Ever since Julie received a call from a friend telling her about an 8-day-old gypsy baby, whose teenage mother planned to take her to an orphanage, the Heiseys have tried to legally adopt her.
In November of 2003, after years of delays in the long, maddening process to make it official, their file was finally completed. The Heiseys had taken psychological tests. Julie had been re-fingerprinted, after the first set was unreadable. Their home had been inspected. They had included another copy of Lari's most recent medical exam.
It's not easy to adopt a child in Romania, and at first, the Heiseys thought they were following the law by hiring lawyers to notarize the signing over the birth rights and applying for her birth certificate. That began a local legal brouhaha that involved more lawyers, social workers, abandonment proceedings, commission meetings, and mandated visits of the birth mother to the Heisey's home to make it clear that she indeed did not want this child.
There's an old joke that Romania is the land of possibility, where anything can happen—anything bad and anything worse. So, when Peter proudly plopped the file containing every single document carefully copied and collated on the desk of Larissa's assigned social worker at the local office of the National Authority for Child Protection, he wasn't surprised when the clerk told him she couldn't send it on to Bucharest. The Romanian government had passed an emergency ordinance forbidding international adoptions. For the previous three years, the government had imposed a moratorium stopping such adoptions after a report in 2001 on Romania's membership application to the European Union claimed that hundreds of children were sold into trafficking networks under false adoption claims. It also said that some were used for organ donation.
Hoping to join the union in 2007, the Romanian government said it would resume international adoptions once it had a chance to straighten out the corrupt child welfare system. In the meantime, there had always been a special clause allowing exceptional cases, such as those involving older or disabled children. The Heiseys filed to declare Larissa a special case. After all, she had joined their family as an infant, lived in Romania with them, and was a gypsy girl who few Romanian families would want to adopt. But Peter knew this latest decree was more serious. It banned all adoptions, except to relatives living abroad. Parliament approved the legislation this summer, President Ion Iliescu signed the ordinance into law, and it's scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2005. Still, the Heiseys thought they were safe. They had a registration number.
In the latest disturbing development of the Romanian adoption saga, which began nearly a decade ago when the world learned of orphanages full of 100,000 malnourished, abused, and neglected children, approximately 2,000 pending international adoptions are currently in legal limbo. That figure includes nearly 300 American families who filed so-called exceptional cases after the first moratorium went into effect in June 2001. One group called For the Children SOS, which includes prospective adoptive parents, has been lobbying the U.S. government to pressure the Romanians to put through the cases that have matched children with American families and, in many cases, have been approved by local Romanian authorities.
Emotions have run high on both sides of the Atlantic. Romanians gossip about corrupt officials charging Americans $50,000 a child or approving adoptions to 60-year-old parents in Spain. Or they claim that Americans abandon or abuse their adopted children once they discover they have emotional or developmental problems. Then there are charges that Romania rebuffed American efforts to draft new legislation because of pressure from the European Union.
Romania heeded an EU warning this summer not to amend the law or yield to U.S. pressure to process the pending cases, even those involving sick babies. However, last month, France and Romania agreed to set up an international committee to sort through the so-called pipeline children, many of whom are disabled or older.
In the meantime, families and children are waiting for answers. Thomas and Margarida Harr of Gilford, Conn., already received theirs. After flying to Romania four times in two years to visit the two children they had been on track to adopt, the couple received an e-mail from the agency notifying them that the boy and girl had been adopted by Romanian families. "It was shattering," said Thomas. "We were so, so disappointed. We knew it could happen. But we never thought our two would be taken, especially both of them. Some woman decided she wanted to adopt the girl, and the boy was adopted by his grandparents."
The Heiseys wait, too. Peters schemes about his legal options and writes impassioned posts on a Yahoo group. Julie refuses to fantasize about Larissa's future. A couple of months ago, she had a dream in which she saw a baby crawling on a railing with two other babies on her back. She wanted to help them, but she couldn't leave Larissa behind.Sarah E. Richards is a freelance writer based in New York City. She can be reached at sarah@saraherichards.com.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2109971/
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