Arad, Romania – Seated on a bed in her first-floor apartment here, Katrina Stoica held her 3-month-old daughter, Elizabeth, close and made what might seem like an unremarkable comment: “I’m glad to be with my baby,” she said. “I have to be with her. I’m her mother.”
Such an apparently normal scene is a significant achievement in this country, notorious for the rate at which impoverished families have given up their children to state care.
Until recently, Stoica, 23, with no job or family to support her, would have been expected to hand over her daughter to a government-run orphanage.
Instead, she and women in similar circumstances are being encouraged by the city’s social- services agency to keep their children. A nurse teaches them how to clothe and feed their babies.
Social workers counsel them and help them look for jobs and a new place to live.
Several new services in Romania are aimed at curbing the flow of children into the orphanages, which earned Romania the worst reputation of any country in Europe for child care.
“In the West, this country is best known as the home of Dracula and orphanages,” said Theodora Bertzi, secretary of state for adoptions.
But since 1997, Romania has been developing alternatives to squalid large-scale orphanages, putting greater emphasis on keeping children with their mothers or extended families.
New services are being built up from scratch. Foster parents and “family homes” where couples care for small groups of children have been introduced, providing homes for just over 50,000 children who would otherwise have been sent to large residential institutions.
Around 32,000 mainly teenage children remain in state-run institutions, down from 100,000 in the mid-1990s. In Arad, a town 265 miles northwest of Bucharest, local child-care officials say conditions of those put into the state’s care have markedly changed.
In 2002, the city closed its main orphanage. The county of Arad now employs 111 foster mothers to take care of children under the age of 2, and 116 social workers. There were none before 1999.
Nationally, the rate of child abandonment is disputed. A recent survey by UNICEF estimated that each year 10,000 children were left in hospitals for at least seven days, a figure it says has changed little in a decade.
But Romania’s National Authority for the Protection of Child Rights says that in 2004, 4,502 children were left in hospital care.
More than half were eventually returned to their parents, leaving 2,113 abandoned. Overall, the number of children in government care is now comparable to what it is in other countries in Eastern and Central Europe, according to the government.
