Alice Evans, Managing Editor

Constanta, Romania–Don’t hesitate. Your gesture can bring back the smile on a child’s face who is suffering.

This theme of a recent fundraiser for 10 families at high risk brought in enough money to send several children to China for surgery. Organized by the governor of Constanta, with a reception for Holt Romania Foundation, the event is an example of the kind of collaboration that currently occurs between HRF and various government bodies in Romania–to help the children of Romania. It demonstrates the coming of age of an agency that has battled for children’s rights in Romania since 1993.

HRF put together a film for the event, focused on children’s eyes.

I looked into many eyes in the week I spent in Romania. The eyes of children, mothers and fathers. The eyes of social workers. The eyes of teenagers and university professors. I looked at sorrow, love and passion. Suffering, worry and fear. I looked at hope.

Romania, a stunningly beautiful country of mountains, woodlands, monasteries, fields and great cities…is a country still emerging from the dark years of Ceausescu’s rule.

In large part because of the passionate work of Holt Romania Foundation, thousands upon thousands of children were taken out of the institutions that prevailed during decades of oppression, and restored to family life. Now, a 2005 Romanian law protects the rights of children, and does not allow abandoned children under the age of 3 to be sent to institutions.

The battleline for HRF these days is no longer deinstitutionalization, but family preservation–training parents to be better parents, raising consciousness about children’s rights, countering abuse, teaching stress management, and helping stabilize families in crisis.

I will remember, a pair of newborn twins, delivered by C-section at a maternity hospital outside Iasi, their pretty mother happily expressing milk as she rested in a hospital bed in a room with three other mothers and their babies.

All of the mothers greeted us with pride and great friendliness as Julianna, their Holt social worker, introduced us. Julianna provides counseling and parent training to these mothers, here in a part of Romania where child abandonment at birth is the highest in the country.

These mothers, and the ones I visited in other parts of Romania, struck a chord in my heart. Mothers who are poor, young, uneducated. Mothers who are victims of domestic violence, who lack support from extended family. Unmarried mothers. Mothers who previously abandoned babies. These are the mothers whose children are most at risk of abandonment or abuse. And these are the mothers that Holt Romania Foundation seeks out time after time to work with through counseling, parenting classes, and through Holt International’s Child Sponsorship Program.

On our last full day in Romania, we visited HRF’s national offices in Constanta. Country Director Livia Trif, who guided us throughout the week, showed us the plans for a new Parent Resource Center, made possible by one of Holt International’s adoptive families.

Livia took us to a piece of land in the middle of the city, surrounded by a daycare center, a hospital, a cathedral…a beautiful spot given to HRF by the mayor and local council for this project. Groundbreaking will take place in about two weeks.

Not only will Holt Romania Foundation finally have permanent offices for its national headquarters, but also a permanent facility for parent training classes for the Constanta region. HRF will be in a position to hold conferences and offer meeting spaces for other organizations, making it possible for the facility to be self-sustaining.

“Holt Romania Foundation does not just slap money on a problem,” says Holt International Development Director Rose McBride. “They try to get to the root issues. It isn’t always food, or clothes. Sometimes it’s deep inside–a psychological need.”

By building parent centers, offering counseling to new mothers and struggling parents, HRF addresses children’s rights at the core. Holt International is committed to raising additional funds for this new Parent Resource Center to assure its timely completion.

Alice Evans, Managing Editor

Medgidia, Romania—A beautiful baby wearing a golden earring, her responsive, smiling face an unforgettable image in the dirt-poor surroundings. Her equally beautiful sister, a worried 3-year-old with dark eyes and multiple pigtails. Their worn but lovely mother, probably in her early 20s but looking 35. And next to them, an ancient, weathered crone with bent back and scarfed head—the mother-in-law. Three generations of women, presenting a startling progression of what years of poverty can do to the human body.

I was standing in the courtyard of a Roma neighborhood in Medgidia, about 20 miles outside Constanta, the headquarters of the Holt Romania Foundation (HRF). Livia Trif, the country director for HRF and two of her staff social workers were standing next to me. The two little girls we visited are both enrolled in Holt International’s Child Sponsorship Program, and every month an HRF social worker brings them food supplies, diapers and other items that will help see the family through the crisis of a new mouth to feed. Read the rest of this entry »

Alice Evans, Managing Editor

IIasi District, Romania—Expensive cars whiz by on city streets and country lanes, passing horse-drawn wagons filled with laborers or entire families. Sometimes a colt walks alongside the mother mare, in training for its future. The old ways coexist with the new in Romania, and every day we see peasant life interwoven with modern styles.

At a meeting hall used for parenting classes in a small village outside Iasi (pronounced Yosh), Holt Romania Foundation social worker Claudia Guzu was facilitating the second of ten training sessions with a group of mothers when we arrived. Claudia poured water back and forth between two plastic cups while more than a dozen women watched. Every day you have to refill your cup, Claudia told the mothers. Taking care of your children and your husband takes energy, and you must also care for yourself in order to be a good mother.

Stefan Cojocaru, the director of HRF’s Iasi office, emphasizes how essential to its family preservation efforts these classes are. Holding them in outlying villages rather than at a central location in Iasi itself means that these mothers do not have far to travel to get the help they need to be better parents, and to have a friendly, reinforcing environment in which to interact and learn. The classes are usually the first time someone has taught these low income mothers ways to reduce their stress, or reinforced a sense of self nurture. They are the first time someone has told them that they matter, too. Read the rest of this entry »

Alice Evans, Managing Editor

Iasi, Romania– We might have been entering a place without hope, climbing an iron staircase along the outside of a huge concrete building in the middle of a bleak warehouse district. But the new adobe-like covering on this corner section of building was painted in cheery colors. And inside the first set of rooms, white walls reflected maximum light.

The young staff of Close to You, one of two Holt-supported agencies operating in Romania, dazzled us with their own kind of light. Filled with enthusiasm and an eagerness to share their many tangible successes, these are the people on the frontlines of the HIV/AIDS crisis in a country still known mostly in the United States for its vampire legends. Read the rest of this entry »