“There are times, sadly, when you must be cruel to be kind.”
This morning I read that quote in the UK Daily Mail Online: The scandal of orphanages in tourist resorts and disaster zones that rent children to fleece gullible Westerners.
A part from the adoption lobby, that’s what I found the most incredible when visiting the Romanian ‘orphanages’: the orphan tourism and the omnipresence of foreigners. More and more children’s homes were set up by foreigners, often with the goal of ‘saving’ children for adoption.
Quote from Romania for Export Only – the untold story of the Romanian ‘orphans’:
31 March 2001
We saw the usual huge leagan with hundreds of babies and again the local TV crew was awaiting us there. We also visited a ‘private baby home’ run by a religious US adoption NGO, where thirty-five children were sung American lullabies by American volunteers. The villa had many rooms cramped with baby cribs, while the walls were decorated with pictures of children adopted to the US and Christian slogans.
This was in great contrast with the next visit, a family-type home run by the Romanian Orthodox Church. From the outside it did not differ from other houses in the village. Children would live at this home for as long as needed, but kept in close contact with their families and were returned whenever possible. Even though run by nuns, the Orthodox religion was present just like in most Romanian homes, an icon at the wall.
Later in the afternoon we visited a centrul de plasament that was supposed to be a good example of a restructured institution. Indeed, the large building had been divided up into modules for eight children each, family-type as they called it. The decorations were totally overdone and the place looked more like Disneyland. On top of that most toys and even the bed sheets had the Renault logo. After everything we had seen, this was too much. We separated ourselves from the staff for a while, as we could not stop laughing.
Everywhere we went we had discussed child protection, especially closure of institutions, foster care and adoption. Closure was not on the agenda here. According to Tabacaru’s reform plans, preference was given to create family-type modules in the centrul de plasament. And foster care was mainly used as pre-adoption measure, paid by adoption NGOs.
In private many people admitted it was not easy for Romanians to adopt and the healthy children were ‘saved’ for abroad. The selection of children by foreigners was sometimes very thorough. The Israeli, for example, were nicknamed ‘the vampires’ as they took blood samples of adoptable children, which were analysed in Israel before they were accepted.