Young Folks at Home

When she was picked up at a railroad station of the industrial city of Ploiesti in June 2000, Nina was a hardened little street child who hoarded food, carried all her belongings in a plastic bag and regarded strangers with a suspicious frown. Today, as a resident of Casa Austria, a family-type home in Ploiesti for children in need, she seems the picture of happiness. Though still a bit hyperactive, she smiles constantly, is extremely sociable and spends most of her time at play. She may never learn the identity of her parents, how she ended up at the railroad station or her exact age — estimated to be six — but she has clearly found a loving home that has allowed her to blossom.

Casa Austria, set up in the fall of 2000 by the Austrian humanitarian organization Concordia, is a radical departure from Romania’s notorious system of institutional care. Until about a decade ago, tens of thousands of Romanian children lived in large dormitory-style buildings, where they were starved of food, medical care and affection. Those grim places are slowly dying out, supplanted by group-home alternatives such as Casa Austria. It is a brightly painted two-story structure for just 30 kids — a maximum of four to a room — and has none of the impersonal chill of a large state institution. It has a playground, plenty of toys and three staff members on duty at all times to care for the home’s residents, whether by helping with homework or giving a reassuring hug. “We try to give them a sense of home and normalcy,” says Victoria Balan, the home’s deputy director, whom Nina calls simply Mom. “Here kids know that they are not in competition with each other, that each of them has a place in our hearts.”

Homes like Casa Austria are still a minority in Romania but if all goes as planned, over the next few years they will take care of many more children. The task involves closing down more than 160 large institutions housing 28,000 kids and replacing them with family-type alternatives, ranging from foster care to small-scale homes. Money for such reforms, as always, is scarce in one of Europe’s poorest countries. But critics of Romania’s child-care system agree that the current Social Democrat government is off to a good start. “After 10 or 11 years of relative stagnation, things are starting to move,” says Jonathan Scheele, head of the European Commission’s delegation in Romania. “The key is to maintain that movement.”

Soon after coming to power in late 2000, the government took the bold decision to suspend international adoptions, long criticized for encouraging abandonment, and vowed to halve the number of children in old-style residential care by the end of 2004. In January, it instituted a minimum income for poor families — those most at risk of abandoning their children. A national anti-poverty program was launched in September. And Prime Minister Adrian Nastase told Time that a new package of child protection legislation is forthcoming, including the restoration of international adoptions, but only “as a last resort.”

In mid-September, the first county, Teleorman in southern Romania, closed all of its remaining large old-style institutions. “We are only about halfway there,” says Silviu Calciu, adviser on strategy to the National Authority for Child Protection and Adoption. “But we are on the right track.”

Romania’s abandoned children are the legacy of the megalomaniac policies of the late Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who tried to boost the population to 30 million by banning abortion and contraception. He failed but left Romania with the highest number of maternal deaths per live births in Europe, as back-street abortions surged and thousands of unwanted children ended up in state institutions. Only after his 1989 execution did the world learn of places like Ungureni, where in a home for 200 children with disabilities roughly 40 would die every year from starvation and cold.

Even now, the process of deinstitutionalization is painfully slow — and complex. In Teleorman county, this meant housing some 300 children, a process that required setting up 41 family-type apartments for eight to 10 children each, seven day-care centers, eight apartments for young adults to ease their integration into society, two family-type homes for children with severe handicaps and one mother-and-child unit.

But with the government, local authorities and foreign humanitarian organizations all moving in the same direction, an air of hope hangs over a system that was once a worldwide symbol of shame. That optimism is shared by Nina at Casa Austria. “I want to be big when I grow up,” she burbles, before scurrying off to play with some puppies in the backyard.