Children Have Fewer Health Problems in a Family Environment

In the experience of the last 12 years in closing institutions for children, we learned that the love of a family leads to better health for children. When they linger in institutions, they suffer from loneliness, even if they are surrounded by so many other people: each child is alone in his or her own way, as the family spirit is missing. Institutions try to cover for this chronic lack of love by a large number of medical nurses, medical doctors and pills. But sedating children with medicine and the white gowns do not replace the love of a family. The children with special needs, when getting into a family environment from an institutional one, they get much healthier. Suddenly, they do not catch colds, they do not fall victims to intoxication, they do not show the anxiety specific to the institutional environment. The warmth of a family and the humane environment give children a general positive and healthy state.

The trauma of family separation leads to shocking manifestations: the children stop talking; they stop eating; they stop learning to walk; they simply do not grow up, they do not develop physically. We observed a direct link between children"s development in a family environment and the acquisitions  specific to their age. When they do not get the affection of a family, the children somehow refuse to develop and are hit by different types of disease, one after another. In a way, they live their guard down, they do not have the power to fight with the world around them, conquered by the harsh blow of the lack of a family and love they get in a family.

The more we tolerate institutions, the longer we will have sick children.

Mark Waddington - Our New CEO

Mark Waddington has been appointed Chief Executive Officer for Hope and Homes for Children. Last week, he visited HHC Romania, joined by Dr. Delia Pop, our Director of Programmes. We had discusions with the entire team, we saw together a few of the families we work with, so that the children can stay at home, with their parents. We also visited a child placed in foster care, Radu, who comes from Camin Spital Institution, in Sighet. Had Radu not been placed in a family, he would have stayed in the institution, labelled as "irrecoverable". We talked to a cunning, well-mannered young boy. The love he feels in the family is apparent in the way Radu has grown up. If you see him, if yo talk to him, it doesn"t occur to you that at some point in the past he was labelled as "handicapped" and "irrecoverable" by a system which refused to see potential in children, by a system which could not understand the importance of affection and attachment in children"s development. We visited family type homes, where other children coming from institutions for kids with disabilities have an infinitely better life, and grow up surrounded by the attention of good people. We walked into households of families reunited due to our intervention and we saw once again what a nightmare it is for any child to be torn apart form his/her family, and also what extraordinary joy it is to be able to put them back together.

Overall, beyond the joy of conversations with Mark Waddington, had I been in a position to remember something quickly about this visit, I would see Radu, who, without us, would have still been an "irrecoverable" child. And there are thousands of children in whose lives we made the difference between life and death, between adaptation and the lack of adaptation, between family and institution.

If there is anything Hope and Homes for Children offers to the children it is there to serve, than that "something" is the feeling of belonging to a family and, more than that, the feeling of being loved. Love "recovers" any child.

Colours, Children and Paintings

Children have talents hard to discover. Thoughts, ideas about the world surrounding them, about the people they interact with. They usually communicate without words. They speak through art. Through their paintings, we can see what they feel. Through  their drawings, we can understand a part of their inner universe. The canvas and oil can be a form of revenge against all the pain they suffered. Sadness is visible in the dense touches of the painted canvas, and joy shines in explosions of colour. With the artists, I see them smile. More than 30 painters spent a week of communion with nearly 40 children from family type homes and institutions, sheltered by Priest Ioan Ardelean and his wife, Luminita, in Hoteni village. The summer camp is at the seventh edition. Glass icons, wood icons, oil paintings - are the touching manifestations of this communion among artists and children.

Each time I get to priest Ioan Ardelean"s household, I can feel the warm solemnity of art, becoming transparent through fantastic children, guided by artists. Surrounded by paintings, icons and colour. With that wonderful wooden church on the top of the hill.

Au revoir, Dragos Bucurenci. And thank you for your help!

He is one of the most ambitious persons I have met. He became somebody through himself, with ambition, with confidence in himself,  and with confidence in the people around him. He is a brilliant mind, and an innate communicator. I admired his written pages on many occasions. He is a truly rare combination of entrepreneur, philosopher and new media addict. So it seems somehow normal that the Stanford Graduate School of Business hunters targeted him and then took him.

Dragos starts a new chapter of his life. He turns a brand new page. I wish him all the success in the world.

Few know how much he helped me and how much he helped HHC Romania, the organisation I lead. He leads himself Mai Mult Verde, a green NGO. I am nowhere near the refined communicator he is. He gave me ideas, he introduced extraordinary people to me, he helped me open my organisation to the ones around me, and talk about what we do. When we started the work in Bucharest, he hosted us in the office of his organisation for a while, and rarely have I felt so much authenticity in somebody"s act of generosity. He worked shoulder to shoulder with us, at night, if need be, preparing HHC Romania events.

And that was because, he says, he believes in what we do.

Dragos, I believe in what you do, as well. I shall miss you.

Spain Stops Placing Children under the Age of 6 in Institutions. Slovakia Follows the Initiative.

The best piece of news I heard in the last few months in childcare: Spain decided to stop the placement of children under 6 years old in institutions. Slovakia is to do the same, by power of law. According to the new legislation, the kids would move straight into adoption, or fostering. As Spain has been at the top list of European countries who "protect" their children in institutions, this is breaking news! Moreover, the law offers proceedings according to which, when there is a social risk identified, social services proactively take action with a view to prioritising the family.  According to the Ministry for Health, Social Policy and Equality, if this will not be enough, the children are to benefit from one-to-one planning: they will have the possibility to attend a day care centre, and to receive educational support. In case this is not enough, the children are to be assigned with foster families.

Like in Romania, children wait forever in institutions for a solution to their situation, which the public services specialised in childcare are unable to find.

Slovak new law also presents a major innovation: children under the age of 6 are to grow up in foster care families, and not in institutions.

Hopefully, with the new law on childcare, Romania will follow such ground-braking initiatives. Thousands of children"s nightmares would be terminated, and so many kids would eventually live proper childhoods, unharmed by the abuse and the trauma of life in institutions.