Saratoga, California Since
1955
Cover Story
Area residents reach out to Romanian AIDS orphans By Kate Carter There is a group of orphans in Romania with more parents than most children could ever hope to have. The orphans live in a warm, snug and modern home with caring mothers, teachers and administrators who seek to fill their every need. They have sponsors all over the world who know and pray for them by name. They grow, learn and thrive in spite of the deadly illness they all share—the HIV virus. But it wasn't always so. In fact, for most of their short lives, the children went unnoticed by almost everyone. They were given up for dead, which is probably how they soon would have ended up were it not for the commitment of a small group of Saratoga church members that, once it met the children, could not forget them. Hud and Cindy Staffield of Los Gatos, Rob and Nancy Stump of Los Gatos, Judy and Don Simpson of San Jose, Cupertino resident Linda Ikeda and her family, and countless others have transformed the squalor of Romania's Post Cura 3 orphanage into the House of New Life. For more than 10 years they have made dozens of trips to visit the children, spent thousands of hours corresponding on the phone and by email, and gathered hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions and donated time and skills. They have built a fully outfitted and staffed orphanage, constructed a playground and, most recently, added a complete and professional-quality medical-dental center. And, with their help, the 35 or so orphans have captured the hearts of people all over the world, including many at Saratoga Federated Church.
"I don't think we count it as a sacrifice," Cindy Staffield says. "It wasn't like we had a plan—it just happened. God has clearly been in charge of this. It's not the same life anymore." 'Little wasted children' Post Cura 3 is only one of many orphanages that arose in Romania during its 25 years under the rule of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena. Shortages left some families with no choice but to give those children for whom they could not care to state-run orphanages. The orphanages, however, could offer their charges little more than the basics of food, clothing and warmth. And the orphanages entirely lacked the love and concern that even the most desperate family could provide—limited staff fed and changed the orphans on fixed schedules and rarely touched or interacted with the children in any way. The orphans in Post Cura 3 lived like this, confined to cramped cribs until well into toddlerhood. But they had even bigger problems - they were the victims of the nation's failed attempt to use blood transfusions as substitutes for good nutrition and proper health care. This, coupled with Nicolae Ceausescu's refusal to acknowledge the threat of AIDS and HIV in his country, led to an enormous health crisis there—many children, including those with families, were infected with HiV through unscreened blood transfusions. The lack of information and level of fear about AIDS in Romania, and indeed across the world, led Romanian families to give up their infected children to state-run hospitals. But the hospitals couldn't cope with the explosion in numbers of infected children. Many of those children were instead farmed out to orphanages like Post Cura 3, where they were expected to merely wait out their remaining days. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Romania's communist regime ended, and on Christmas Day, 1989, the Ceausescus were executed. Western leaders, journalists and relief workers entered the country, visited the orphanages, and couldn't believe the suffering they witnessed. Newspaper, radio and television accounts of the babies and toddlers crammed in iron cribs in filthy buildings—many of the children suffering from malnutrition and a variety of disorders—caught the attention of people in the United States. At that time, Saratoga Federated Church's senior pastor was Greg Ogden, who encouraged his congregation to practice its faith everyday and everywhere, not just at church on Sundays. He supported active ministries to people in need both locally and around the world, and his people were responding. "He said, 'If you're going to grow spiritually, you've got to get outside the walls of your church. You've got to get scared. You've got to get stretched,'" Hud Staffield says. One church-sponsored activity was a 1990 viewing of a 20/20 television news program about the plight of the Romanian orphans. Women in the church who watched the program began asking each other what they could do to help. The church provided an answer. One of its members had been contacted by the Christian ministry organization World Vision, which wanted to take a group to a Romanian orphanage it was trying to help, hoping that those participants would return to the United States and raise large amounts of money to support the mission. After a meeting at the Staffield's house about the possible trip, two women agreed to go. Judy Simpson had actually already been to Romania early in 1991 and had seen some orphanages on the western side of the country. Linda Ikeda, at the time a pediatric nurse, also joined the trip that went to Romania in August 1991. The group spent several weeks in the country, but only one or two days at Post Cura 3, which is located in Constanta on the country's eastern border with the Black Sea. (Some believe the port city was the point of entry of AIDS into Europe.) That day or two, however, was enough to touch them deeply. "It was just like you heard about in all your TV specials," Ikeda says. "It was just a privilege to go, and of course I wanted to bring everyone home with me." "It was those little wasted children that was such a shock to us," says Simpson, a former preschool teacher. "They were dying, and it didn't seem to matter to anyone." The two went back and Simpson gave a talk to members of the church. But neither was up to the task of raising the tens of thousands of dollars World Vision needed. "They just wanted to be there with the children," Cindy Staffield says. It didn't look like the church's involvement in Romania would go any further. But the World Vision member who had set up the trip wanted to give the church another try. He went to Ogden for help, and Ogden began to pray about the idea. Hud says Ogden kept praying and kept seeing Hud, and didn't know why. Hud, who had retired from land development several years before, had begun to work with homeless people in downtown San Jose and was beginning to stretch his faith, as Ogden recommended. But he didn't participate in the original World Vision meeting at his house—he had been watching television in another room—and had no real inclination to get involved in Romania. With Ogden's push, however, Hud agreed to take a trip in 1992. "It was hell on earth," Hud reminisces. "It smelled. There was a meter of water standing in the basement—full of rats, sewage - that had been there forever. There was no hot water, little cold water, no laundry, no heat, no food. The kids were maintained with physical abuse, and they beat each other up. They were like little animals. It just absolutely put me on my knees. I literally put my head on the dirt and howled." 'Somebody's personal effort' World Vision was working with a church in Constanta to help get access and support while the group was there. Hud's group visited the Holy Trinity Baptist Church before it left, and Hud asked its members what they were doing about the problems in the orphanages. He didn't get much of an answer. So he offered to make a pact - he would work on problems in his home, continuing to serve the homeless in San Jose, if someone in the church would match his commitment and work with the orphans in Constanta. Adrian Olariu said he would meet Hud's challenge. Hud liked him immediately and invited him and two other Romanian church members to come to the Federated Church in February 1993 to tell about their experience of communism. Later that year, Hud and Cindy went back to visit Olariu and the children in Post Cura 3. Hud kept going back to visit the friends he was making and to meet the many people in the community and at World Vision trying to resolve some of the problems in the orphanages. Among those he got to know was a group of Catholic clergy and laity that had taken over another orphanage in Constanta. They had renamed the orphanage Casa Speranza and had organized the children into smaller "families" of four or five supervised by two "mamas" who alternated 24-hour shifts. The model worked well at helping meet not only the children's basic needs of better food, clothing, supervision, stimulation and care, but also to meet their perhaps more pressing needs of being able to attach to an adult and trust that person to care for them. But while Casa Speranza was thriving, Post Cura 3 was struggling. World Vision had to pull out a few years after it began working in the orphanage because it just wasn't getting the money and support it needed to do the job right. "It's not a project you can do at a macro level," Hud says. "It requires somebody's personal effort." Hud and Cindy tried to fill the gap and brought thousands of dollars over with every trip, which they gave to Olariu to use for the orphanage. But they would return on later trips to find the items their money had purchased had disappeared to the home of an administrator or authority, or had been hidden away in closets to make the children appear more miserable and more appealing for monetary help. "The children were bait for resources," Hud says. "It's inconceivable." Finally, Hud and Olariu realized the only way they could help the situation was to get control of it. In 1996, they approached the authorities who owned the Post Cura orphanage and made them an offer—they would take over the day-to-day operation of the orphanage and pay for all its requirements if the state would step out and give them total control over it. "We viewed those kids as our own," Hud says. "The Holy Spirit wouldn't allow us to view this as some good-deed project." At first, the authorities, incredibly, refused. Hud explains their reasoning: By giving up authority over the orphanage, the county would have fewer beds for which to receive state funding. But Hud and Olariu tried to explain that they weren't getting those state funds, anyway. Eventually, with a little nudging from their higher-ups, the local authorities relented. In May of 1997, Chi Rho was created. Chi Rho stands for Children's Romanian Health Outreach. However, Rob Stump says, the acronym is also the Greek term for restorative, redemptive love.
Their friends at Casa Speranza supported the group's plan to take over Post Cura 3, especially when they found out the team wanted to reorganize it into Casa Speranza's family model. But the orphanage would need to be remodeled, not only to deal with the endless infrastructure problems—"There were no quick fixes," Hud says—but also to accommodate a family-type arrangement. So the people at Casa Speranza used their contacts with local NATO officials and asked for some of the money left over from NATO missions that is earmarked for support of local programs. One day, Cindy received a call from Casa Speranza telling her the group had just received a $115,000 grant to remodel the orphanage building. With that funding in place, and under the leadership of Olariu, who is a civil engineer and general contractor, all that remained to begin a remodel was to officially take over, and that was scheduled for July 1, 1998, a Monday. But the orphanage directors vacated the building June 28, the previous Friday, taking with them almost anything that wasn't bolted to the floor, the Staffields say. The children were left without supervision over the weekend and one of the weakest died. It was bedlam when the hopeful team stepped into its first day in charge. "It was a little bit like taking the beaches on Normandy," Hud says. It was also about the time of Stump's first taste of what would eventually become his own mission. 'How can you say no?' Earlier that year, Hud had invited Stump to join him in his ongoing homeless ministry and soon afterward invited him to join a trip to Romania that year. Stump agreed, and there had an experience similar to nearly everyone's who had gone. He had to get involved. "How can you say no with what we've been blessed with here?" he asks. "Here we live in basically the richest region of the world, and there they are in one of the poorest regions of the world. Absolutely, we can make a difference." Remodeling efforts soon began, and the group took the children away to the country for the summer while their old home was "gutted, right down to the concrete," Hud says. The following November, they moved back into a new, clean building—the House of New Life, or Casa de Viata Noua in Romanian—with family apartments, school rooms, play rooms and all the accoutrements of a home. Now under closer supervision, and with attention and comfort, the children began to thrive. They were given structure and had teachers, and life began to be less bleak. But they still had HIV and suffered many of the associated ailments. And for some unknown reason, only seven of the 35 children present when the group took over were receiving treatment for the disease. The group didn't really expect most of the children to survive for long, but it wasn't about to give up on them as the state had. Hud tried to get the children the necessary care at the nearby municipal hospital and its Center for Infectious Diseases, which had been guided by Texan Dr. Mark Kline. But the hospital wouldn't treat the children in the House of New Life, Hud says, because its local authorities didn't want the new program stealing its thunder. So the next effort for the group was to find some way to get the children medical and dental treatment. If no one would help them, they would have to do it themselves. Hud had bumped into Colorado dentist Dr. John Sexton, who was in Constanta looking for some way to help the situation. Hud explained to him about the budding new program and its need for medical and dental help. Sexton agreed to join the team as the clinic chairman. "Nobody would treat these kids," says Sexton, who also did volunteer work in Cambodia. "The periodontal disease was worse than I'd seen in any textbook."
Sexton enlisted some of his dental contacts and oversaw much of the layout of the new clinic. He also got his neighbors to come over and help with the construction. On June 8, 2002, the group all went back to celebrate the opening of the clinic. "They took the toughest kids that nobody wanted; they tackled the project from the ground up," Sexton says. "They involved their church and their community, and the operation runs 24 hours a day while they're not there. Hud didn't let anything slow him down. The only way that can really come is from God." 'Many different issues' Throughout the intervening years, the program has developed in whatever ways the children have needed. "There're so many different issues, and we've just bumped into them as parents would," says Stump, who took over as president of Chi Rho last spring. "We certainly have not been short on challenges." To raise money, Cindy and Nancy organized a program getting people to sponsor one of the children. Eighty percent of the sponsors are members of the Federated Church, and the rest are somehow personally connected to the Staffields. The sponsors are encouraged to connect with their individual children and are kept informed of their progress. Some, like Judy Simpson and her husband, Don, have gone over to visit their faraway charges. The Simpsons have become grandparents for all the orphanage's children. "We want them to know what it is to have grandparents," says Judy, who with Don has 15 grandchildren of her own. "It's just enlarged our hearts."
"It's a loving family atmosphere, but you still have to call it institutionalized," Rob says of the orphanage. A few children have been adopted or been returned to their original families. One girl, the only orphan who didn't have HIV, was adopted by a family in Wales. Others have been taken into families already touched by HIV in some way, Cindy says. For some children, however, there will likely be no families of their own. About a third of the group is have severe developmental disabilities and some cannot talk. Another third have disabilities but are more capable. And another third is actually very capable—some are attending regular public school outside the orphanage. But perhaps one of the most severe needs of the children is the most invisible. They have all suffered the incredible trauma of being abandoned by their families and spent early childhoods without much love or touching or even basic care. Dealing with that issue was becoming more and more necessary, but none of those involved had the expertise to know how to begin. Linda Ikeda, the pediatric nurse who had gone on the Federated Church's first trip to Romania, had since become a marriage and family therapist. She had been feeling that she had been called to take that training and experience to Romania. "I just felt like God said, 'I want you to do this in Romania,'" she says. So one day in 2000, she visited the Staffields and told Hud that she wanted to provide therapy for the children. Hud cried with joy, and in April of 2001, Ikeda made her second trip to Romania, and her second trip out of the United States. She has made two more visits to Romania since then. Most of the children have what's called reactive attachment disorder, or RAD, which occurs when people experience profound neglect and lose their ability to trust others. Children exhibit symptoms of RAD when they are almost manipulatively sweet and charming, in an effort to make themselves irresistible to those who care for them. The happiest-appearing children are the ones most seriously affected, Ikeda says. "Of all the different kinds of abuse, neglect is the most serious," Ikeda says. "The kids need to learn they can trust. If they don't learn to trust, they can never have a relationship. I feel like I have the opportunity to give them a future." She is teaching one of the orphanage administrators and the mamas to continue her therapy, which currently is centered around helping the children write stories based on their individual lives—the goal is that they will, over time, come to accept their life as their own. But she acknowledges that the distance and the large breaks between her trips makes dealing with the children's severe needs very difficult. "I'm just one little person," Ikeda says. "Though a little bit of care and concern goes a long way." The next step for Chi Rho, Rob says, is to invite the Constanta community to take advantage of the new clinic as well. Hud adds that the organization is continuing to reach out to other agencies in Romania in an effort to work together, and possibly take on more children as space permits. And they are also considering how to get some of the children trained in trades so they can go on to become productive adults. The organization is also trying to determine how to continue to care for those who will likely never be capable of caring for themselves.
Cindy says it has been a lesson for their three daughters. Rob hopes it can be an example for many more. "There are plenty of opportunities to serve here in the U.S., even in San Jose," he says. "There's no end to the need. It just so happens that my mission is 6,000 miles away." |
Feedback, or story ideas for the Saratoga News?
(Close this Window to go back to our home page.)
Copyright © SVCN, LLC. Maintained by GoGuys, Inc.