O/T Abandoned babies in Romania trip-REPORT

My Trip to Romania, April 2008

Sorry this is so long, feel free to skip straight to the pictures. NB there is none of the babies, only people who have contacted me/sent stuff will get an email with this report and baby pictures (in a few days!) due to child protection laws of posting them on the internet. If you are interested in seeing pics you may email me at the below address.

Saturday 5th April

Our team consisted of myself Shahlaa, and 6 other ladies from my church varying in age from 21 to 50#%92s and included Hazel, Sue, Katy, Lyanna, Charlene, and Zoe. We arrived at Luton airport at 6pm for our 8pm flight. We knew our bags would be way over the limit due to all that baby stuff so one of the organisations we would be working with wrote a letter to the airline asking to allow us extra space due to working with a charity etc, however once we got to check in they had no knowledge of this letter!! Panic started to set in as once weighed we were a whole bag over! The check in guy said we#%92d have to pay £160 to get the stuff on and referred us to his colleague. His colleague James re-weighed the luggage and worked it out to be 13kg over, and because there were 7 of us, he allowed us to do a group check in and said usually people are a couple of kilos over and he#%92s allow us to be 14kg over as a group, so let us take the extra stuff for free!!! PRAISE GOD!!! This was one of the first miracles for us on our way to Romania.

We arrived in Budapest, Hungary at 11:30pm and had a four hour drive to Arad, Romania.


Sunday 6th April

We met Jodie at her apartment and got a couple hours sleep, to be woken up at 5:30am to get ready for church. We had been invited to sing and share our testimonies in Timisoara, which was a good 2-3 hour drive away. We were all so tired during the service, but felt that we were able to bless the people there. In the afternoon, we went a little further out to help run a children#%92s church service, which despite the tiredness was great fun!

We got back to Jodie#%92s at 7pm-ish, had some pizza and went to sleep ready for our first visit to the hospital the next day.


Monday 7th April

We arrived at the hospital just before 9am to give the babies their morning feed. The abandoned babies were on two floors and were roughly split into over one#%92s/those going into foster care on the ground floor, and under one#%92s on the first floor. I spent most of my time upstairs with the little ones, but the ground floor babes were a delight!

Our first task was to bathe, change and feed the babies before their 12pm feed, it was a challenging task for me as I hadn#%92t ever bathed a baby and it had been years since I#%92d changed a nappy! Luckily, Hazel who has 3 grown up boys and had been to Romania before took the lead. By 12pm I was a dab hand at bathing and changing nappies! When we arrived at the hospital, I was surprised at how badly the kids smelt-horrible thing to say I know, but Jodie said this is because after she gives them all a bath on the Friday, they don#%92t get bathed again until we arrived on the Monday! One new arrival to the ward had never even been bathed!

The first baby I met was a 4 month old boy called Craciun (Romanian for Christmas). He was so tiny and malnourished, and was still in premmie clothes and nappies. He was in a small cot top to toe with another baby called Tao, who at the same age was just as small. It was very sad to see babies so thin and undernourished-you could see his ribs and his stomach was distended like you see of the starved African babies. Jodie had been asking the hospital for 3 weeks to supplement his feed with glucose, and on the day we got their they finally agreed and set up a glucose drip twice a day and added glucose powder to his formula-a big step in his care.

I spent my afternoon downstairs with the older babies, and mainly with a set of twins called Tatiana and her brother Trian. They were around 1 and were gorgeous. Unfortunately though most of the babies spend all their time in the cots so have none or very little head control. The twins couldn#%92t sit up on their own or crawl or turn themselves over. They were able to sit aided though which was good when it came to feeding time! We are allowed to supplement their food with canned or jar baby food, usually something with fruit or veg as the solids they are provided consists or mash potato and a porridge like substance dolloped on top, so just pure stodgy carbs (nice!).

Our first day was spent getting to know the babies and the hospital. We had to be very respectful of the staff as we were just volunteers, and couldn#%92t do anything to compromise Jodie#%92s privileged position.

Tuesday 8th April

Our morning routine was the same as the day before, just washing, dressing, changing and feeding the little ones. However today we got to spend some more time with the babies. I spent the morning putting the toys we had brought onto cots of the abandoned babies and labelling them so that they didn#%92t go walkies (although some did!!). The babies absolutely loved the toys, especially the mobiles and over cot toys! The musical ones went down a treat as well. It#%92s amazing what babies find so fascinating!

By Tuesday, we had all found favourites among the babies and mine was a little girl called Sorina. She was so beautiful and so happy despite her circumstances. She was about 2-2.5 months old but was abandoned again. Her parents are very poor and can#%92t really afford her and so they drop her off to the hospital and leave her there for weeks at a time before collecting her again. It#%92s very sad, and she is such a delight, but this is the case with the majority of the abandoned cases. When we met a lot of the babies they didn#%92t know how to handle all the attention they were getting, but by the end of the week they were in their element and hated to be put down. There was a few times when Sorina was so tired but fought falling asleep so she could stay in my arms instead of being put into her cot to sleep! Bless her!

On Tues we also had a new arrival-“Frodo”, well at least this is what we called him as he didn#%92t have a name at this point-I will come back to this issue later. He was absolutely tiny and not very well. Had no idea how old he was but looked like a new born, except his belly button was fully healed up so we had to assume he was at least a month old and just malnourished. He also had a hernia which was upsetting, as they wouldn#%92t operate until he was at least 6 months old and with parental permission. This is a sticky issue in Romania. Where as in the UK it#%92s the patient#%92s best interest, in Romania, nothing is done without parental consent. So if a parent refuses to sign the operation consent forms, the babies are left without the operations they need and many die. This is because the parents are worried it may cost them (which in most cases it doesn#%92t as the hospital will pay for it, or Jodie and her fiancé Cipri will save up donations and pay for the operations), or they don#%92t have enough understanding of what is going on, or finally the saddest excuse is that they just don#%92t care. They are not officially classed as abandoned unless they have had no parent contact for at least a year, or until they are 2, where they will then go into an orphanage. We just hope and pray Frodo#%92s parents sign the consent forms when the time arrives, or at least sign him over to the state.



Wednesday 9th April

Wednesday came and it was our 2nd to last day in the hospital and what a drama it was! We arrived onto the wards and found a baby missing and the baby girl Sorina labelled as a boy “Christian”!!! This caused a big problem! Until that day, they never put labels on the babies, but instead a piece of tape with the baby#%92s name on above their heads on the cot. SO when we bathed or changed the babies it was vital they went back into the right cot under their name. Now it transpired that those who did the night feed seemed to have put the babies in the wrong places, and at some point a nurse labelled the wrists of all the babies with medical tape with the name they were under, and to top it all off, baby Christian was missing. Luckily his mum had come to collect him, but the hospital had to call her in with him to check she had the right baby. We were told to wait outside while they checked every baby-which meant they undid all the nappies to check the sexes of them- a bad move being that they hadn#%92t been changed in over 12 hours and most were desperate to be changed and cried continuously. Finally a couple hours later we were allowed to go back in and change and bathe them all. It was a pretty worrying time, but it was a much needed wake up call the hospital needed! Until this day we didn#%92t#%92 know any of the first names of the babies, just their surnames, so it was nice to find out their real names.

Because we were delayed getting every baby ready, their midday formula arrived ready for them. The nurses decided to feed them while we changed, which meant they propped the bottles on a pile of blankets and tilted the babies heads to the side and pushed the bottles in! I was gobsmacked and had to sign to them that we would feed them properly and took the bottles out. Not only was it dangerous as most of the babies threw up like that, but the bottles they use are glass bottles with flimsy teats which have a huge hole in them so the babies choke on the formula. Where possible Jodie uses her own bottles for the littler ones but it is not always possible when she has a huge number of babies to feed. That week we had 17 babies at the highest point.

I spent the afternoon with the older ones again and had to console a little boy called Ciprian. He had been taken home in January but was back with us that week in a cot that was way to small for him, that he had seriously bashed his head on the metal bars and was left with a big bruise and many tears. He was learning to stand as he had been at his home before coming back into hospital and was also teething, so when we weren#%92t around to give him a teething ring, he chewed the cot bars (which were prob painted with lead paint). The cots were so awful I started referring to them as cages. They are the nice cots you get in England, but very high metal barred cots which have no padding or cot bumpers. The mattresses are so old and stained, some even mouldy and soaked through with urine and vomit, but unless we change the sheets daily the babies sit in those cots. It seems they haven#%92t heard of mattress protectors out there but its too late as really they need new mattresses all together.

On Weds evening we helped Cipri feed the “Streetkids” which involved a welsh lady called Irene cooking a local dish for 30 odd men and women aged from 14 up to 30ish. I was surprised at how well their English was compared to the people who worked in the hospital. Cipri tries to give them a good meal at least once a week, and also teaches them football. It was a humbling experience indeed.


Thursday 10th April

Our last day at the hospital was with us. We went into the hospital and did the usual routine and one of the doctors approached Jodie about the name mix up that had happened the previous day. She had managed to get a handful of wrist bands in blue and pink for the babies from the maternity hospital but couldn#%92t get any more and asked for her help sourcing them. So if anyone reading this can get baby wrist bands from a hospital or something please please email me (*******@*******.**.**).

Today we were able to spend much more time with the babies, which for each of us that was great as we all had a couple of favourites. It was almost as if the little ones knew we would be leaving that day as they were much more clingy than before and cried when we left them-needless to say, most of us were crying as well!! We helped Jodie sort out all the nappies and wipes for the evening change, which happens at 9pm with their feed. I was surprised to find out that Jodie supplies all the abandoned babies at hospital with nappies, as the hospital won#%92t provide them. She also provides clean clothes for them every day.

We headed for the airport at 12am the next morning and arrived in Budapest at 3am-ish. I got back to my house at 11am and slept!


A big thank you to everyone who sent stuff out for Jodie and the babies! It was so greatly received, everything down to a pot of sudocream (best nappy rash stuff ever!) to the wonderful cot toys. If you would like to find out about supporting Jodie financially or helping with fundraising, please contact me for details. We are currently helping Jodie raise funds for cot bumpers, new mattresses, and a continued supply of pampers.

Many thanks and may God bless you all


Shahlaa
*******@*******.**.**

Pictures:
http://hitched.photobox.co.uk/album/8072440

p.s. Jodie is getting married in Sept 08 and is pretty much on a nil budget. if anyone has anything left over from their wedding on a pink or ivory colour scheme that they are looking to sell cheaply or give away please contact me. I'm covering her jewellery and her parents are sorting out her dress, bm dresses, and invites, and she is having a small wedding/eve party in nottingham on 27th september. if any of you are hibs and would like to help please let me know. sorry if this is cheeky. xid="purple">