Adoption, Foster Care, Orphanage

As a final installment on the situation of orphans in Romania I want to answer a few questions I've been getting. I've had a lot people ask me about Bridge of Love, the charity foundation I'm working with. What do they do? What is their purpose?

Courtesy of:
 http://momitforward.com/laurie-lundberg

Well on the Bridge of Love website it says, "Bridge of Love’s mission is to provide comfort and hope to Romania’s abandoned children by assisting them on a path toward lifelong happiness and success. Since 2001, Bridge of Love has been instrumental in rescuing Romanian children abandoned in orphanages and hospitals and placing them with caring foster families in their own country.
          Bridge of Love has spent the past ten years saving these abandoned and orphaned children. The foundation began its mission by working to find loving homes for the children and helping to place them, one child at a time, in foster care with Romanian families.
         Currently, there are nearly 40 children in foster care who receive support from Bridge of Love, plus a group of six older teens and young adults who were abandoned as children." People then ask me why foster care? Why not adoption? Isn't foster care still hard and unstable for the children?

Well that may be true. Foster care is still difficult for kids, but it is the best we can do. Adoption in Romania is incredibly difficult. Domestic Adoption is allowed but is is prohibitively expensive. There really isn't much in the way of adoption there, only about 700 to 900 children are adopted each year; a very small percentage of the abandoned children overall. 

Another problem with Domestic Adoption is that there are lots of difficult laws making it very tricky. One article shares that, "In Romania, to be considered "adoptable," a child's biological parents must be deceased or indicate that they have no interest in having a relationship with the child. But beyond this, all relatives as distant as siblings of grandparents also must sign away rights to the child."

Denisa, Alin's little girl

I remember one man I knew. His name was Alin and he was of Roma decent. He and his wife, Anka, were very poor and lived in this little field in a small shack they had constructed. I went to visit them in their "home" one day and I met their children. There was Denisa, a darling toddler girl, and little Alin Jr., who was running around the dirty field barefoot and naked. Every so often Alin would confide in me one of his biggest fears; that he wasn't providing well enough for his children and couldn't provide for them any more. He wondered about giving them to an orphanage where their lives may be secure but it frightened him. He kept his children with him and did everything he could to provide, which often wasn't good enough. I don't know if what he was doing was the best thing or the right thing. I do know, however, that there are lots of people in very similar situations, who cannot provide for or support their children and have to give them up.

An article I read mentions infants who have been abandoned in the hospital and says, "These days babies abandoned at hospitals are likely to stay there until their second birthday. New laws banning the institutionalization of children under two have backfired for them. Only when they turn two will they be legally allowed to go to a children's home. Not that that would be much better." The babies just stay there and the hospitals have too many children to give them sufficient comfort or stimulation. The infants give up on crying because nothing happens and nobody listens when they do. They just lay there silently, and the ones who are big enough to sit up just sit there rocking back and forth, showing that they severely lack stimulation.*

Foreign adoption used to be very common in the 1990's. However in 2001 and 2002 Romania enacted legislation to ban international adoptions. The main reason they stated for doing so was to eliminate black market trade in children (another problem Bridge of Love is trying to address). Romania was heavily pressured by the European Union of ban international adoptions as a condition to enter the EU. One English representative in the EU in particular made it her personal cause to eliminate foreign adoptions for Romania. 

One of the boys who came to the yearly activity
day** I had the chance to help out at in 2011.

When I asked the Lundbergs, who founded Bridge of Love, about the adoption situation they said, "Laurie Lundberg started efforts to facilitate foster care because of her belief that children were better off in foster care (in a family) than in an institution - a feeling that we share along with a lot of others. It was a solution better than the alternative - even though we would have loved to have seen the children formally adopted."

This is why Longboard For Love is trying to help. We're doing all we can do personally for these kids. I really like the project of getting a tutor for all of these kids. Lots of them come from difficult situations and circumstances and they are a little disadvantaged. Myself, I'm a college student right now and I've really gained an appreciation for the importance and power of education. Helping them with their education will help them to better their lives and make something more for themselves.

What a wonderful work.



*For more insights on why children need stimulation or care in orphanages click here

**To see more pictures from the Yearly activity days Bridge of Love does click here or here.

Hospital Horror

To preface this post I want to say that I don't like scare tactics. I try to make people aware, without trying to go for the shock factor. I try to say it how it is or how I see it and if people feel inclined to help it is much appreciated. This post I want to talk about hospitals in Romania and help people know why it is important to get the orphans out of institutions and into better situations. This is linking to my little series of posts on the situation for some people in Romania. My experiences are as follows:

Trivale Forest

Romania is a beautiful place and I was blessed to see most of it.  I spent some time living in Sibiu, a city in Romania that won the European Cultural Capital award in 2007 and it is gorgeous. I love Trivale Forest in Pitesti. Castles and churches are everywhere.  Casa Poporului in Bucharest is a large monumental architectural masterpiece. The most impressive place I got to visit was on a drive along the Transfăgărășan road up in the Carpathian Mountains connecting Transylvania and Wallachia. I described it to my family as the emerald, beating, beautiful heart of a wondrous land. Romania is a magnificent place full of lovely people. I look back to my memories and it seems celestial.

Transfăgărășan

Casa Poporului 

But there is opposition in all things.

Daily was my life heaven on earth. However, there were places where it seemed that if there was a hell on earth I had found it. I found it in the Romanian hospitals. I remember my first visit to one. I had been living in the country for just a few months. The teenage boy of a family we knew got sick and had to spend three days in the hospital. We were asked to visit him and bring along some groceries. This confused me. After we bought some bread and fruit we walked to the hospital. Three nurses, dressed in scrubs and sneers, were seated on the steps outside smoking. We walked inside and it was chaos. The only light in the hallways came from the windows because all the electric lighting was turned off. People were milling around and we couldn't find our way to the boy. After walking around the musty dark maze of hallways we finally found his room.

I now understood the reason for groceries; if we didn't bring food to him he wouldn't get any. The hospital didn't provide food. All they seemed to have provided was a small dingy bed in a small room with seven other beds crammed in, and seven other kids. I wondered, what would happen if there was no one to bring him food, or what if one of those kids had an infectious sickness? It would be so easy to make the other kids ill as well. Conditions were surprising and sad. I learned that the family had to bring food and sometimes they had to visit other hospitals or pharmacies to bring medicine because if the hospital didn't have it they wouldn't do anything to get it. They would wait to do their work until someone else brought what was needed. Even if the pharmacy was just across the street!

We visited, bringing food from the family, for three days, and each day the boy wore the same dirty pajamas,  which I later found out he had to bring himself because the hospital didn't provide clothing either. I felt dark and sad in that place. I didn't see how anyone could get better. The nurses were rude. Doctors were corrupt and condescending. The building was a ruin, and this was one of the better hospitals in the city.

Similar situation of overcrowded hospital room

A few months later we were working with a man who suffered from severe alcoholism  I have never seen it so bad. Romania uses this blue 80% alcohol mixture for medical disinfectant purposes, but it isn't denatured like the USA version. It was basically cheap poison and this man drank up to four liters each day. His habit was so bad his wife and child had to live in another city to be safe. To make things worse he had a heart condition. This man should have been dead.

His life was a conundrum as well. As soon as he sober up he would just as quickly relapse and take a drink. With his first sip his life was a paradox. If he stopped drinking he would have withdrawals that would cause him to convulse so severely that it would overwork his weak heart and kill him. He would have to continue to drink to stave off the withdrawals and survive. The only way to get sober again was to get muscle relaxants in order to assuage the convulsions and keep his heart from working itself to death.

He lived right next door to a hospital. Sadly they wouldn't accept him into their doors. One night he was having problems and he called an ambulance to take him. The paramedics took him to the hospital where he was turned away. He had to walk, in his drunken condition, to anther hospital, where he was turned away once more. He was told to go to the mental institution so they could treat his alcoholism, because a normal hospital didn't do that kind of thing.

The next morning we got a call from him asking for us or one of his friends to bring him food and muscle relaxants (the hospital was running out and needed us to get more for him. Yes, there was a pharmacy right across the street again). We got some friends of his together and went to visit him and see how he was doing.

You know how in scary movies or video games they have hospitals will dark long corridors, flickering florescent lights, and patients in tattered hospital gowns wandering around with blank stares. That is what the mental institution was like. It felt like straight out of a horror movie and I hated it. I felt dark and frightened.

We entered the doors (above which a sign should have hung saying "Abandon all hope ye who enter in") and to our left was the nurses break room  It was full of doctors and nurses smoking and watching a soap opera on a little television. We interrupted their TV show and asked where our friend was. Once they finished killing us with their eyes for being so presumptuous and inconveniencing they told us to go find him ourselves and gave rough directions to where he was and turned back to their show. Thanking them we walked towards the back of the hospital.

A long corridor with locked doors lining it. A man in a contorted position sat in a wheelchair. A patient paced anxiously, scratching his head and talking angrily to himself as he smoked a cigarette  A lady shuffled past us, eyes staring straight ahead, oblivious to the drool running from her mouth down her neck and soaking her gown. It may have been my terrified imagination or reality but I swear I heard groans and moans coming from the locked doors.

We found our friend and asked how he was doing. Candidly the environment was great because he wanted to do anything he could to get out, even sober up for once. He was becoming depressed and just wanted to leave. The other patient in the room, a very old man, noticed my missionary name-tag I had on. He assumed I was a hospital worked and began to plead to be let out. "I don't belong here" he said, "I'm well, let me go, please. I'm better, I hate it here, please won't you let me go?" His begging started out pathetic, then became angry, and turned hysterical. It echoed loudly through the dingy hallways of the hospital. After 20 long minutes of it two orderlies burst through the door. The patient's supplications became screams as the orderlies roughly strapped him to his bed, pulled out a needle and poured a sedative into him. A few seconds later the man lay still and the orderlies left. We all looked at each other and decided we should leave too. We finished talking, set a time to meet the next day and left that awful place.

The next day we brought more food and some books for our friend to read. The other bed in his room was now empty. We asked where he was and our friend shuddered. The old man was dead. A mistake had been made and he was given too much sedative and it had killed him. I still don't know if the man had another outburst later on which required a second sedative or if he died when we were sitting three feet from him. I didn't ask, I didn't want to know. My friend was now even more anxious to leave.

I visited many more hospitals in my time in Romania, thankfully never as a patient. I saw better places, and I saw some just as bad or worse. The fact that these exist at all is tragic. The reason I share a few of my experiences is to illustrate how bad the institutions can be there. Orphanages can be just as bad as the hospitals. I hate to read articles about the conditions these children can be in. It is evident that these children need to be somewhere better. That's why Bridge of Love is there. That's why I'm happy to be helping. I hope I didn't frighten, but I want to show what its like, and that a change needs to be made.

All You Need is Love

Harry Harlow

I wanted to share some of my thoughts about the Romanian children and their situation. As I've been thinking on the subject I realized that, were I to write it all down it would make for an interesting but excessively long blog post. Therefore I decided to do another series of posts leading you through my thought process. Similar to my posts on service.

Love at Good Park,
 by Deborah Blum

This past semester I read a very interesting book entitled "Love at Goon Park." It is a biography of Harry Harlow, one of the prominent psychologists in the study of affection and attachment, and probably one of the reasons why your mother held you as a child.

Before Harlow's time, in the first half of the 20th century, the world of science and psychology was charging ahead into misdirected "progress" as it so often does. Psychologists believed that a child's bond with its mother was based only on the mother as a food source, and any emotion were just conditioned responses to external stimuli. Any discussion of love or affection in child rearing was deemed unscientific, or just mushy sentimental fluff.

Some scientists, like Watson with his little Albert experiments, took this thinking too far. In more of a case study than a true experiment Watson took an infant named Albert and conditioned him to fear anything furry or white, like a rabbit. Watching videos of the process scares even me and looks like an old man just terrorizing a helpless child. However, thinkers of the day took this "experiment" to prove how children are just conditioned to do certain things. In fact, Wilson went on to write a best-selling book where he cautioned parents of the damaging consequences of love and affection.

The "Baby Tender" created by Skinner

B.F. Skinner and all of his behaviorist ideas had a thing or two to say as well. He believed that every single thing about us is a conditioned response to a stimuli. In theory  you could "condition" or "create" the idea human being with the right environment and stimuli. He took the "Skinner Box" used in his pigeon studies and designed one for children, and even placed his own daughter inside of it. It allowed for the child to be isolated in its own space and a piece of glass on one side allowed visual interaction between child and parent.

Forgive me for saying this, especially since I have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight vision, but these ideas were dumb. Especially given the evidence against it. The isolation that so many scientists were calling for was in fact damaging the children. In orphanages where children lacked the love and affection mortality rates were astronomical. Children would literally turn their faces to the wall and die from lack of will to live, which resulted from a lack of love. The children were living in deplorable circumstances.

One anecdote tells of an orphanage where mortality rates were high in all sections of the hospital...except for one. All the researchers strove to find out the difference. Diet? Peers? What was it? The answer was that when the cleaning lady in charge of that section of the hospital came in at night, she would pick up the babies and hold them while she worked.

Harry Harlow enters the picture with his monkey studies. A famous experiment of his, which is featured on the cover of the book above, is where he took infant monkeys and gave them surrogate mothers. The surrogates were made of wire and wood. Two of these surrogates were placed side by side. One had a milk bottle, and the other was wrapped in a terry cloth to make it warm and soft. Monkeys spend a vast majority of their time with the softer mother and only went to the wire mother when they needed food. This debunked the thinking that we form our relationship based on food alone, and showed instead that we need love, we need affection, that is what matters most to us.

In a Romanian Orphanage

After battling the zeitgeist of his day Harlow, and others, were able to show us just how much we need love. This was able to prevent situations seen in the hospitals and mortality rates dropped significantly. It now became a thing of the past. At least...it should have. However, orphanage situations in Romania mirror quite close to the way things were run in the early 1900's. Bridge of Love describes the situation as follows,  "Babies and toddlers stayed in their cribs nearly all day, starved for love and attention. The bedroom walls were bare, and a cold breeze seeped through the windows of the poorly heated orphanage/hospital.
               There were no blankets or toys in the room, and the workers changed the babies’ diapers in silence. The toddlers rocked their little bodies back and forth for hours, the only stimulation they could create. The older toddlers banged their heads on the side of the crib—over and over—creating a new noise and huge lumps on their heads.
               Laurie described the situation as “children living in a zoo.” They each had their own cage from which they couldn't escape. Most of the children had been abandoned at birth, with little or no information about them left behind. There were no plans for these children—they just existed."

It makes me sad when I'm reading a journal article on an attachment or rearing study and instead of some monkey experiment, the researchers were just able to go to Romania and observe the effects there. This is why I feel strongly about what I'm doing, and I'll explain further in later posts. These children need help, and we are in a position to offer it.

Deșteaptă-te, române!

Well....I've been a little slow in keeping up with the holidays. I think I have a good excuse for missing this one. The one I want to talk about now is December 1st. A great day for Romanian history.

December 1st is the Unification Day or National Day of Romania. Kind of like our fourth of July. It memorializes the unification of Transylvania into "Greater Romania" in 1918 as well as Bessarabia and Bukovina. The unification was held during the reign of King Ferdinand I. The declaration was read at a public event in Alba Iulia where 10,000 citizens attended.

I remember being in the capital city, Bucharest, on December 1, 2010. Lots of the roads were closed and traffice was bad due to the huge parade. I was, unfortunately, unable to attend the parade, but those who braved the cold weather and snow had a grand old time.

La mulți ani România!!!

Happy Birthday to a wonderful beautiful country, with wonderful beautiful people and a wonderful beautiful heritage and language. Over this weekend I got to meet a man from Romania and speak to him in Romanian. I miss that language, it is so beautiful.

The day of December 1st will forever have special significance to me beyond Unification Day of Romania. It was also the day when I asked my sweetheart, Jamie, to marry me. She said yes. Hence why I was a little slow in posting about December 1st. I was too busy trying to surprise her.

Make a Wish Bram Stoker!

Today Bram Stoker was remembered in a Google Doodle on Google's homepage. This is Stoker's 165th birthday. Bram Stoker is best known for his still-popular novel, Dracula. I love that book. It is masterfully written. I love the format of the book. It doesn't read like a normal book, but is more a collection of journal entries, letters, and newspaper articles, which all combine to tell the story of the Vampire. It is an engaging read, and one that really scares you at times. I would recommend it to anyone. It's no wonder why it is a "classic".

Vlad Tepes,
or Vlad the Impaler

"So Mason," you may ask, "Why are you putting this up on a blog about Romanian Orphans and Longboarding? I fail to see the connection. Why Bram Stoker? Why Dracula's Dash for Hope too?" Well, I do this because the main inspiration for the character of Dracula is none other than Romanian national hero, Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler. Even the name Dracula comes from a Romanian word that means, "The Devil." Transylvania is a region in the central part of Romania. I got to live there for a while. It is a beautiful area of the world, but a little eerie on a foggy winter night.

Vlad was a very bloody ruler who helped to unite Romania. His methods were violent and often involved impaling hundreds of people till they die. The Romanians love him. Why? Not because he was so ruthless, but because he was able to hold the country together and keep the Turks from conquering. There is an anecdote that the Turks sent an army to scout out Romania before the larger force arrived. When the main part of the Turkish army reached the borders of Romania they found their scouts...but not in the condition they expected. Every soldier in the scout army was impaled on a pole and their bodies lined the road that led to Romania. The anecdote says that the Turkish Sultan was so disgusted and horrified that he vomited, and then turned his army around, leaving Romania alone.

Stories about Vlad are fascinating, macabre, and at times they can be far-fetched. My favorite, however, is Bram Stoker's story. Thanks Bram, I appreciate what you've done for us all in giving us the gift of your book.

Now...the question, do vampires exist? Were they really killed. Here are two thoughts for you to think about. In order to kill a vampire one must drive a wooden stake through their heart and chop off their head. SPOILER ALERT: In the book, Dracula is hastily "killed" with a Bowie knife to the heart, and a kukuri knife to chop off his head. This is close, but where is the wooden stake? Did it work? I believe that this is the question that led to the Dracula sequel, written by Bram's descendant Dacre Stoker. I've never read it, so tell me what you think.

Bram Stoker

Another evidence for vampires, is someone I met in Romania. We used to teach free English classes to people in the cities in which we lived. On lady we taught was about six foot three inches tall, and apparently a judo champion, very intimidating  She always wore black, with a turtleneck or a high collar. Sometimes dressed like a pirate, knee high boots and frilly sleeves with a vest. Her son was a really nice kid who was also really tall, thin and had a "goth" look. We could never tell how old she was, 29 or 50. One time we asked the class what they all did for work. Her answer, she is a real estate agent for a Count who lives in a castle in Transylvania  Sound like Jonathan Harker to anyone else. Vampire? Well, I'm not saying yes, but I'm not saying no.

Don't Forget!

Don't forget about the Bridge of Love's fundraising 5K, Dracula's Dash for Hope. It's coming up this October 13. You can register here for the event. Its a really fun race and a great family friendly event. This helps to raise money to help the to assist abandoned children, teens and young adults in Romania. This is the organization I am doing my longboarding trip for on April 29th. They are wonderful people who are doing a wonderful thing, and it is wonderful that they have these events so we can help out.

The kids race will begin at 8:30 am. There will be refreshments, medals and prizes. Costumes are encouraged but not required. The 5k is $25 through Oct. 1st or $35 after. The kids race is $10. Come and have some fun, get a workout, and do something great for children who need our help. 

Kids race and a larger 5K

Fun activities

Do What You Love, For What You Love

Oradea. I lived here for six months of my two years

School has started and I'm quite enjoying it. My classes are a lot of fun and so are the people I'm with. I'm really grateful for my opportunity to gain an education and better my own life. To be honest I feel like I've lived a charmed life. This is one reason why I'm so excited for this trip, not just cause longboarding and camping with Kenton will be a blast, but because I feel like its another good opportunity to give back, to give to so many important things in my life.

Romania. I loved my time in Romania. Living there with those great people and talking to them each day. I went to serve them and help how I could, but more than helping them, they helped me. My mission influenced my life and has shaped me to be much of who I am today. I gave two years to be in Romania and I am excited to be able to give more. Especially to help the struggling children in Romania.

Longboarding. I'm happy to be about to promote the sport of longboarding. Board sports are an amazing thing. There are no real teams, no huge clubs, it can be a very solitary thing, but somehow it has become a culture and activity that has grown. It has been a pastime of mine for some years now and I really love it.

I'm happy to be longboarding, or doing something I love, to help Romania, or for something I love.

It is much to vague though to say, "Lets raise money to help Romanian children!" What does that really mean? The Bridge of Love foundation needs a lot of things, but one area we can help is in education for the orphan children. Going from the orphanage to foster homes and entering schools, many of the children struggle and can't get the attention they need. While it is important the help the children to get better care, they also need help getting a chance to succeed in life. Education is where their chance is to improve. Education is yet another thing I love and it is exciting to me that I can help someone get a better education. I've had my help, good teachers, scholarships, and if I can help out in a small but similar way, I fell privileged to be able to do so.

What we are hoping to do is to kick start the tutoring program from the foundation. We are hoping to raise enough funds to hire a tutor for the first year, and from there we can keep it going in other ways. Now, this begs the question, how much does a tutor cost for a year? In the States it's quite a bit of money, but in Romania it isn't that much at all. We have the estimation of $6,000 to hire a tutor for a year. I feel like this is a goal that is within our grasp, if we get enough people, who want to do something, no matter how big or how small, to change the world, to make a difference.

Draculas Dash for Hope

The Bridge of Love foundation that I am going to do my longboard trip for, is doing one of their yearly fundraisers for the children of Romania. Dracula's Dash for Hope (yeah, Dracula is Romanian!). It is a 5K race and half-mile kid's run. The date is Saturday, October 13th at Cottonwood Complex, 4400 S. 1300 E. in Salt Lake City. You can register for the race here.

Additional information from the website: Sign up early and save $10. The kids race will begin at 8:30 am. There will be refreshments, medals and prizes. Costumes are encouraged but not required. The 5k is $25 through Oct. 1st or $35 after. The kids race is $10.

The event is a lot of fun and a great family activity. Please sign up to run. Please, if I can longboard 650 miles, you can run three. Not only is it fun and healthy for you, but it also is a great cause to help the orphan children of Romania. Below is the video from last years race. Check it out.

Why the Bridge of Love?

So Mason...you have your crazy adventure, and your crazy idea to help out kids on the other side of the world, but, why? Why Romania and why Bridge of Love?

Well, dear reader, I will tell you why.

From 2009 to 2011 I lived in Romania. I was a missionary serving for two years for my church. I spent two years living with the Romanian people, learning their language, learning their culture, and falling in love with it all. I still feel very connected to that place. In fact I really was rooting hard for the Romanian gymnasts in these recent Olympics. So far...bronze all around and gold for the vault. That is cool. 

One of the people I met in Romania was a man named Alin. He is a gypsy, or, more politically correct, Roma. Alin was the nicest and happiest man I ever knew. This was something that always surprised me because he was also homeless. He had a recent falling away with his family and decided to move to the big city. Sadly he found no work and no place to live. For shelter he constructed a small hut out of garbage in the middle of a large dirt field. This field was a "community" of people in similar situations. He made his "living" by picking through garbage looking for old metal he could sell to junkyards. It was a heartbreaking situation.

Alin and I

To make it even worse Alin had two children, Alin Jr., and Denisa. They were the cutest little kids on the face of the earth, and neither was more than three years old. I remember one day I got invited to visit Alin. He was out in the field chasing stray dogs away and his kids were running around in the dirt. Little Alin Jr. was stark naked, barefoot, and all muddy. It was a deplorable and unhealthy situation for those children. Despite all of this Alin did everything he could to keep custody of his children, to keep them out of the orphanages. The thought of his children going there was terrifying to him, so they continued to live their sad little existence.

Denisa

My mission President and his wife Scott Lundberg and Laurie Lundberg, had started the Bridge of Love organization years before they were asked to serve in Romania. It is a great organization that has helped many of the abandoned or orphaned children find a better life among foster homes. In fact, their youngest son, Josh, is a native Romanian who they had the rare opportunity to adopt.

At the end of my mission my family and another missionary's family, came to visit us before we returned to America. They coordinated with the Lundbergs to bring supplies like coats, shoes, school supplies and such to the Bridge of Love foundation. We got to deliver these much needed materials to the foundation and spend a day with the kids and their foster families. We had games and activities. The children looked happy, and healthy. They were connected and had a greater hope for the future than Alin Jr. and Denisa did. Things were different than they had been. The kids had homes, they had toys, they weren't sitting alone in cribs banging their heads on the wall like they were when the Lundbergs first visited Romania. Things were good for them.

I got to see for myself the difference that the Bridge of Love has made for these children. I love the Romanian people, and I would be honored to be able to do something, anything, to help them. This cause is near and dear to my heart. I'm grateful for what I can do to help the Little Alins and Denisas who don't have anyone right now.  

My mom, Tanner carrying a bag of clothes, and my
little sister in the back

My little brother, my mother, and I with a group
of the kids

One of the Romanian boys

One of the Romanian girls 

Playing games

My little brother playing with the kids

The Cause: Bridge of Love

The cause I would feel privileged to involve myself with is the Bridge of Love. A non-profit organization created to help the orphans and foster children in Romania. I'm going to share what the Bridge of Love is and what they do just by taking straight from their website:

Our Story
Bridge of Love was created in 2001 by Scott and Laurie Lundberg, of Taylorsville, Utah. The Lundbergs and their children traveled to Romania to visit an orphanage during their Christmas holiday in 1999. There they saw a situation they could never forget. Babies and toddlers stayed in their cribs nearly all day, starved for love and attention. The bedroom walls were bare, and a cold breeze seeped through the windows of the poorly heated orphanage/hospital.

There were no blankets or toys in the room, and the workers changed the babies’ diapers in silence. The toddlers rocked their little bodies back and forth for hours, the only stimulation they could create. The older toddlers banged their heads on the side of the crib—over and over—creating a new noise and huge lumps on their heads.

Laurie described the situation as “children living in a zoo.” They each had their own cage from which they couldn’t escape. Most of the children had been abandoned at birth, with little or no information about them left behind. There were no plans for these children—they just existed. Nobody was their voice.

The Lundberg family quickly became attached to the thirty-two children in the orphanage. They determined to do everything possible to save as many of the children as they could. They persisted when told there was nothing that could be done for these children. They knew that each child was important and worthy of love.

Bridge of Love has spent the past ten years saving these abandoned and orphaned children. The foundation began its mission by working to find loving homes for the children and helping to place them, one child at a time, in foster care with Romanian families.

Currently, there are nearly 40 children in foster care who receive support from Bridge of Love, plus a group of six older teens and young adults who were abandoned as children. This is in partnership with a sister foundation in Barlad, Romania called Podul Dragostei, which is Romanian for “Bridge of Love.”

More recently, Bridge of Love has partnered with other nonprofit organizations in Romania to help even more children and families in need. These currently include a maternity center for young mothers and their babies as well as an amazing organization called The Heart of a Child Foundation, both located in Galati, Romania.

Here is a video describing a bit more about what the Bridge of Love is.