Irish charities in Romania continue to fund 'orphanages' there, despite opinion that such institutions should be closed and the children integrated into society. Why? Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer report from Bucharest
When heart-rending pictures of Romanian "orphans" (see right) flashed on the world's TV screens in 1990, there was a huge response in terms of aid and volunteers. Among the most generous with their time and money were the Irish.
However, while these Irish charities were well meaning, it has been suggested by childcare experts that their programme of housing and educating children in institutions may in the long-term exacerbate their plight rather than help them.
The situation in Romania has changed since 1990 and, according to these experts, the skills for charity workers that were adequate during the humanitarian crisis are no longer appropriate.
Today, Romania is getting ready to join the EU. It has been the policy of both the Romanian government and the EU since 1997 to close the large institutions and they are closing all over the country. Children are being reunited with their families and fostered and locally adopted. Social work services are being offered. However, despite all this change Irish charities continue to spend hundreds of thousands of euro on so-called orphanages (the vast majority of children are not orphans), which undermine these alternative services.
In Ireland, the Romanian Challenge Appeal (RCA) is one of the best-known charities working with Romanian children. It gained international attention with the involvement of singer Daniel O'Donnell who has huge fan bases in the UK, the US and Australia. He has given hundreds of thousands of euro to the appeal.
Most media reports about the Romanian Challenge Appeal focus on how the charity's director, Monica McDaid, has rehoused children from an institution for the handicapped in Siret, northern Romania. However, a number of international experts have described the Romanian Challenge Appeal's arrangements, which are a series of small luxurious institutions, as potentially damaging to the children.
Dr David Tobis, a World Bank and UNICEF adviser on institutionalised children in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, says more than half a century of research has shown that institutions, no matter how well appointed, are detrimental to children, who thrive best in a family.
"All the research has documented for years the problems that are caused by living in institutions. It's just the worst kind of care for children, yet charities, and not just the Irish, continue to build them when everyone knows it is wrong," says Tobis, who worked in Romania throughout the 1990s.
"On the surface you can take people through it and it looks good. You don't see the emotional consequences to kids. You see smiling, clean faces not the internal trauma of living in an institution and not being with a family."
However, according to McDaid, the children in the care of the Romanian Challenge Appeal could not be fostered by people who were not RCA-trained, but later in the same interview she agrees that finding foster families for the children is beyond their expertise.
"We don't have enough power or experience to find foster parents for these children," she says.
Despite the kind of research which Dr Tobis cites, McDaid, and Simon O'Connor who runs the Romania Challenge Appeal with her, explain to The Irish Times how in one case they opposed attempts by a parent to be reunited with a child living in the charity's institutions, believing this to be in the child's best interest.
"S's father visited and said he wanted to take S home, \ not being sceptical but there has been chat in the press about getting a \ allowance if you take a child home. I can't help but be sceptical to be honest," says O'Connor. He adds that S's father has visited the Romanian Challenge Appeal institutions and asked twice for his son to be brought home, but he has now given up.
McDaid is also sceptical about S's father's motives and about the Romanian government policy of encouraging children to leave institutions and be reunited with their families.
"What were they going back to? Alcoholic parents? Very poor parents? Is that childcare? Is that what we want to do?" she asks.
McDaid and O'Connor are also suspicious of the Romanian national foster care programme which, with European Union support, has placed 11,000 children in families.
"I would really love to know who actually went to the homes to do a social visit and really look at the conditions and see that they were OK and who is doing the follow-up visits. I don't think it exists," says McDaid, who has lived in the region for 12 years.
However, it took The Irish Times just one afternoon to find social workers who monitor the 400 foster families around Siret. Dana Josep is one of a team of social workers in the county of Suceava (where Siret is located) who monitors these foster families. She says families have fostered severely handicapped children and some who fostered now want to adopt. She says the foster-care programme, which has placed children in a nurturing family environment, has changed the lives of handicapped children.
"One of the children . . . had encephalitis, he couldn't speak or do anything, four months later, he walks. And it's all because of the efforts of the foster mother," says Josep. "It's a very good thing for these children. This is the only way these children can be integrated in the community. It is their only chance, not living in an institution," she adds.
McDaid acknowledges that despite "spending $4-5 million" the 13 children and about 40 adults in the charity's institutions are not integrated into the local community. "Socially they are miles away . . . it's not easy for them to mix, not easy for the people in the town to accept them," she says.
O'Connor says the locals are jealous of the children and young people in their care because they live in such beautiful homes and are so well dressed.
The children's institutions in Siret do stand out from the area's traditional homes. They are large luxurious buildings, mostly on the outskirts of the village. But they also stand out because almost all the building materials were donated from sources in Britain and Ireland. Inside the institutions the connection with Ireland is even more pronounced. Square three-pin electrical fittings have come all the way from the UK; adapters must be used for Romanian equipment.
McDaid and O'Connor proudly show visitors the latest building, Killybegs House. The house is a modern bungalow with a large furnished patio, fitted kitchen, a television and stereo system. It is one of the most luxurious homes in the area.
The head of the European Commission in Bucharest, Jonathan Scheele, says that providing accommodation of this standard is not appropriate. "Magnificent facilities like these reinforce the idea with parents that they are not capable of looking after their own children . . . You have to have a standard which is consistent with the average standard in the rest of the community. Otherwise you create a guilt feeling among parents."
The Romanian Challenge Appeal's institutions help approximately 50 children and adults, at a cost of €300,000 a year. Local childcare officials said they were shocked to hear that so much money was being spent helping so few individuals. The Child Protection Commission in Suceava county, where the RCA is based, helps 2,300 children in the area, including a 400-family foster care scheme, at a cost of €400,000 a year. The appeal's trustees, who ensure the charitable funds are correctly spent, declined to be interviewed for this article. However, The Irish Times has learned that last year two trustees travelled to Romania because of concerns over the running of the charity. No impropriety was suggested, but they were worried about the amount of money it was costing to maintain the charity, particularly since it catered for so few children. They also had fears about the sustainability of thecharity because so many mini-institutions had been built and would be a long-term drain on resources.
In response to queries from The Irish Times, Daniel O'Donnell says in a statement that it is his understanding the Romania Challenge Appeal "made several attempts to contact the families of the children. I believe they had virtually zero response." O'Donnell says he has been told the charity is being advised by US childcare experts and he believes "the RCA is using the money raised in the most appropriate manner possible in the situation they are in".
Five hundred kilometres away from Siret, another one of the many Irish charities operating in the country, the Romanian Children's Appeal, has also built an institution which has been criticised by international experts.
Vidra is a quiet village 30 kilometres south of Bucharest; children play on the roadside and the adults, sitting outside their homes in the summer sun, chat to passers-by. However, for one group of children in Vidra life is not so social. These are the children of Hospital Seven. They have HIV and AIDS, but unlike other children with HIV and AIDS these children do not come out to play with others in the town. They live behind a high chicken-wire fence surrounding the large institution and they never go home to their families.
HIV-positive children were moved to Vidra in the early 1990s. At the time it was thought the children had a short life expectancy and could pose a danger to their communities through infection. However, many of the children have survived and best practice now states they should be reintegrated with their family or placed in foster families. This has occurred with most HIV-positive children in Romania.
However, the Romanian Children's Appeal, which is headed by Wexford nurse Margaret Spencer, decided the hospital needed its own separate school. The Irish Department of Foreign Affairs gave €63,500 towards the building, which cost approximately €120,000 and is the most luxurious non-private school in Romania.
This approach, while it may deliver a good education to its 33 pupils, has been criticised by Tobis and Scheele for thwarting attempts to reintegrate children into their families, because parents are happier for their children to stay there to receive an education than for them to come home. It also encourages parents of HIV-positive children from throughout Romania to try to have their children placed in the institution to take advantage of the school's superior facilities.
According to Dr Tobis, schools such as the Irish Government-funded one "are unacceptable and damaging to children".
"It is dreadful for many reasons. Firstly, you should never segregate anyone with disability. The world philosophy in social work practice is for integration for any disability. There is no reason why kids with HIV or AIDS should be segregated."
Scheele says: "There is no reason why children with HIV and AIDS shouldn't go to normal school. It isn't even legal in Western Europe to set up separate facilities, you're setting up apartheid. If challenged it would be a breach of European human rights legislation."
According to Pierre Poupard, UNICEF's director in Romania, the school goes against best practice.
"What we have to do with children living with AIDS is to integrate them, to include them, to have them in the society. And it's not easy . . . But this is the way we have to work and absolutely not create specific schools for those children," he says.
Scheele says many Irish charities do not understand international best practice and have no understanding of the Romanian children's lives. "I would advise against giving money to any charity that talks about orphans and orphanages in Romania because it is clear that they do not understand the situation Only a small percentage of these children are orphans - don't have parents. In most cases something like 80 per cent of these children are in regular contact with their parents."
In an interview, Margaret Spencer initially describes the hospital as an orphanage. "All of the children in Vidra are orphans, they haven't got anybody, if they have somebody, they don't want to know them," she says.
However, Angelica Paun, Vidra hospital's director, says the children all have families who visit as often as they can. "They live a long way away . . . it is very difficult for the parents to visit, they are very poor. Many of them would like to visit their children and they have expressed this wish, but the distance is very long," she says.
Spencer later in the same interview says: "I don't believe that there is one parent out there who doesn't care about these children."
The Department of Foreign Affairs' perspective is that funding for the school was approved by its NGO co-financing committee which believed the school was built "to provide better accommodation and comfort for abandoned HIV/AIDS orphans".
When The Irish Times asks Spencer why she spent charitable funds on a school rather than on re-integration, she says she believes education is the greatest priority for children. "I am not going to say for one moment that I made a mistake in developing education in Vidra for these children . . . I'm not an expert, I just do my best," she says.
It is this type of lack of expertise which qualified childcare officials say is at the root of so much misspent money which has potentially disadvantaged so many children in Romania.
UNICEF's Pierre Poupard stresses that Irish charity workers in Romania are well meaning, but points out that some of them may not be not sufficiently skilled.
"For too long the aid coming from Ireland has been provided by people who are unqualified in dealing with institutionalised children and who do not understand the children's situation," he says.
Close to the Bulgarian border, another Irish charity has invested a large sum of money in building work which goes against current international best practice and Romanian government policy.
Gradinari is not on most maps of Romania; it is a typical old-style institution for the handicapped. The communist administration, which was toppled in 1989, believed it was best to house handicapped children in large isolated institutions - a practice also followed in Ireland in the past.
Last year, Sister Imelda Walsh, a Presentation nun from Galway, organised the building of what she calls an orphanage in the grounds of Gradinari after a conversation with the director of the institution. Sister Imelda has spent hundreds of thousands of euro refurbishing and building better institutions for children.
Despite coming regularly to Romania over the past 11 years, Sister Imelda says she was not aware of Romanian government and EU policy to close institutions and reintegrate the children in their family or organise foster care and adoption. She has spent approximately €216,000 building the new "orphanage", yet according to the EU Commission in Bucharest, Gradinari is to be closed within 18 months.
Despite the enormous sums of charitably donated money, the children still live in unacceptable conditions in Gradinari. This is inevitable, according to Dr Tobis, because it is impossible for staff to care for children and nurture them adequately in the type of large institution built by Sister Imelda.
"No amount of money or building or re-furbishing can ever adequately humanise such a place," he says.
Jonathan Scheele says the money should have been spent helping to reunite families or to find foster families.
"I'm sorry, but you should not be spending your money on maintaining or supporting a large institution with 100-150 children . . . because they are scheduled to be closed as a priority. The money would be better spent supporting alternative services for those children," he says.
Sister Imelda declined to answer specific questions about the appropriateness of her charity's work.
According to Dr Eoin O'Sullivan, a Social Science lecturer at Trinity College and co-author with Mary Raftery of Suffer The Little Children, a history of Irish children's institutions, Irish charity workers need only look at how our own young people were treated in the recent past to see they are in danger of repeating thosemistakes. Ireland had a similar proportion of its children to Romania in institutions for much of the last century. However, they were emptied after it was found they were an expensive and inappropriate way to treat children.
"We spent a fortune in Ireland on institutional care for children and from as early as 1906 there were constant recommendations for foster care as an alternative. Anything - but not institutional care," says Dr O'Sullivan.
Despite Ireland's mistakes with its children's institutions, it is now being suggested by experts that Irish charities are unwittingly repeating these failed policies with vulnerable children in Romania.Maria Vislan, who runs a small charity which helps families bring home their handicapped children from institutions in Romania, says Irish people must believe in Romanian families.
"Trust in families and in the power of parents. When parents are together with professionals they can find the best way," she says. "No matter how poor a family is, the charity must fight to keep children with families. Strengthen families and fight for family dignity."
Name withheld to protect the identity of child S