Working up a sweat

On Saturday, some members from the church went to a nearby village where there is a home for mentally disabled children. First we stopped to pick up some wood and building supplies. The weather was the hottest we have experienced so far on this trip.

We arrived in the village and drove up to an aging building surrounded by a stone wall. Immediately the wall became crowded with kids who were obviously very challenged, yelling and jumping with excitement at the arrival of visitors. This was the most culturally different part of our trip. The home where these kids live is a pre-World War II school building, very dreary and depressing, that was converted by the communists as a place to put abandoned children, out of public sight where it might cause embarrassment and shame. Many of these children are very afflicted. Most of them are Roma and they suffer not only from mental disabilities but a variety of orthopedic disabilities that would probably have been easily corrected if they lived in Canada. Most are not orphans, they were just abandoned by their parents and hardly any of them ever receive visitors.

The kids were starved for contact and attention and we spent about 45 minutes just being with them, letting them get used to us, touching and being touched.

In the courtyard of the school were several dilapidated pieces of playground equipment and some broken benches which the team from the church was hoping to repair. Boards had to be sanded and metal climbers painted. They discovered they had brought the wrong size of steel bolts, so two of the men had to drive back into town to exchange them. The rest of the day was sawing, bolting, staining and painting.

One child caught Diane's attention. Because the kids all have their hair cut very short, we weren't sure if it was a boy or a girl. But we learned that his name was Ivan. He latched onto Diane who showed him how to sand the ends of the boards with a sanding block. He was very quiet and gentle and did not seem to have the problems that most of the rest of the kids had. The head of the staff at the home said there is a family interested in adopting him. That will go to the top of our prayer list. One of the men from the church is a social worker with the child protection office. He said that the government's plan is to phase out institutions like this one and place the kids in foster care. But there are 89 children between 7 and 16 years old in this facility. The ones we saw were the less afflicted. Some are unable to leave their rooms. If Ivan could find a loving family, what a difference it would make to his future.