My husband had often said that someday he would like to adopt an orphan. He had never forgotten when he had seen about 100 orphans standing behind a fence when he was a child, and he asked his father about them. His father said, “They all live here,” and he explained that these children had lost their parents, so they were brought to this fenced-in building called an orphanage. Demitri’s heart broke for these orphans, and he had hoped that when he grew up, he would be able to give at least one orphan a home. I had a similar experience after visiting with orphans in Costa Rica when I was a foreign-exchange student in high school. I too had contemplated the idea of adopting a child for many years.
Eventually, Demitri and I summoned the courage to adopt. We both felt destined to do it. After much research on our foreign and domestic options, we chose to work with a reputable adoption agency that was dedicated to orphans in Romania and Russia. The woman who owned the agency had adopted children herself, and she became an expert on adopting children from Eastern European orphanages. She required her clients to take 15 hours of classes on all the problems that could occur with adopted children from these orphanages. She insisted that we go into this venture with our eyes wide open, and she would not accept clients until they had completed this training. She wanted all her clients to honestly assess whether they had the courage, the stamina, and the resources to parent abused and neglected children. Her classes were brutally honest, including videos of the horrific conditions of the orphanages. This training had effectively scared us away. We decided not to pursue adoption after all.
A couple of months later, while we were on a vacation, resting on a beach, I thought about our decision. Apparently, my husband was thinking about it too because when I blurted out, “We made the wrong decision,” he responded without hesitation, “Yes, we did.” Both of us remembered the promise we had made to each other from the start of our marriage that we would never allow fear to stop us from doing what we wanted to do. Both of us realized how much we wanted another child, and in that one flash of mutual insight, we decided to proceed with the adoption. We were ready to put our spiritual faith in fourth gear, pray for an army of angels to help us, and the minute we got home, start the adoption process again.
Most of the process entailed waiting. Months went by, and every day we prayed. About a week before Mother’s Day, I experienced a vision of our son in a dream. I was flying over the mountains, rivers, and towns of Romania. I had never been there in real life, but intuitively, I knew I had flown over the Blue Danube River. At one point, I sensed that someone had been hiding our son. I grew frustrated and angry. I landed for a brief moment and met a stranger. I demanded to know who had been hiding my son. She gave me directions to the orphanage. I took flight again, and, suddenly, a toddler’s face appeared from behind a cloud. I saw his innocent face smiling at me. Then I woke up. I knew I had just been given a vision of our son. I had seen every detail of his face, and I remembered it vividly. On Mother’s Day of 1999, at 8:00 in the morning, I received a phone call from our adoption agent. She cheerfully announced that two toddlers had become available, one, a blonde, blue-eyed boy from a Russian orphanage, and one, with dark skin, dark eyes, and pitch-black hair from Romania. She told me I would have to choose. Because of my vision, I knew instantly which one was destined to be our son—the toddler from Romania. The wonder of this synchronicity astounded me. The divine universal energy had prepared me for this decision!
I told our agent about my vision, and I asked her about the strange sense I had that someone had been hiding our son. She responded, “Oh, wow!” Then she disclosed that someone had indeed been hiding our son. She explained there were a couple of orphans in Romania that had been intentionally taken off the list of available orphans by a corrupt judge. He had been “holding these children for the highest bidder” because they were considered to be the healthiest and most desirable orphans. His corrupt behavior had just been discovered by a higher government official who managed to get this judge impeached, and the children were put back on the list for adoption. One of them would soon become our son.
In July of 1999, we traveled to the orphanage in Transylvania, Romania where our son had been residing since he was four months old. Just two weeks before we arrived, he had turned two years old. When the worker at the orphanage brought him to me, I held him close and whispered in his ear, “Te iubesc.” It was the one Romanian phrase I had learned from a Romanian co-worker in the United States. It means, “I love you.” After hearing these words, our son used all his strength to grip my shoulders with his tiny fingers, and he would not let go. The worker at the orphanage had to pry his fingers off my shoulders to be able to put him in the clothes we had brought for him. He had been wearing dirty and torn rags. While we waited for the caregiver to return our son to us, we spoke with the director of the orphanage and tried to get all the information she had about his biological parents. We knew the day might come when our Costa would want to know more about his homeland roots. The director was able to provide the mother’s name and the fact that she brought Costa into the orphanage when he was four-months old. The director stated the mother had informed her that she had been breastfeeding him since he was born. However, the mother would not reveal the father’s name, and all she said about her reasons for giving her baby to the orphanage was that she was too young and too poor to be able to take care of him any longer. The mother was 17 years old at the time. Since our Costa was born in July, we speculated that she had been homeless and could no longer care for him when the weather became cold four months later. The mother did not provide any address or contact information.
This was the typical story of women giving up their children for adoption in Romania, which had been suffering many long years under the rule of the dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, who made birth control and abortions illegal while impoverishing the Romanian people to the point of starvation. Our Romanian host family with whom we had stayed while we waited for the Romanian adoption paperwork and our son’s visa to be processed, filled us in on this tragic history. The young-adult son in this family spoke fluent English and Romanian. He had come with us to the orphanage to be our interpreter, and he filled us in on all the tragic history as we drove from Bucharest through the Carpathian Mountains to Transylvania. As I listened to his stories, I gazed out the window soaking in the breathtaking landscapes of mountain meadows filled with sunflowers, and I had to wonder how such a beautiful place could have been the home of such a cruel human condition.
The Ceausescu family’s greed and abuse of power had destroyed Romania, and when the people finally became fed up, they put an end to Nicolea and his wife’s reign with a firing squad. When giving us a tour of Bucharest, our host showed us the bullet holes left in the sidewalk where Nicolea and his wife had been killed. They left those bullet holes there as a reminder that the Romanian people would never again tolerate such abuse from their government. Our Romanian host also gave us a tour of the remains of statues of Nicolae, which were mere stumps at this time. He explained, “You see, Romanians are not warriors. We are lovers. For Romanians to become so outraged to do this, tells you how bad life had been.” He explained that nearly all Romanians were desperately poor, and when they were not able to have access to birth control, thousands of children were born whose parents felt the only chance their children had to survive was to put them in orphanages. Our host explained, “This was Nicolea’s plan. He wanted to build a big army with these orphans, and he made sure they would be desperate enough to be willing to do anything for a loaf of bread. This is why he also made sure they were neglected and abused, so they would have no self-esteem and no emotional connections to other people. He thought this would make them perfect soldiers who would not care about killing people.” Our host also stated that Romanians were still suffering from poverty and struggling to get back on their feet, but things were slowly getting better.
When we took our son out of the orphanage, he held on tight to me, and he sat close with me in the car. During the drive back to Bucharest, he gazed in astonishment out the window. I pointed to things he was looking at and said their names. I said the words, "mountain", "cows", "flowers", "sky", and "cloud". When he heard the word “cloud” he turned to look at me and gleefully repeated it. “Cloud” was the only word he was interested in learning that day, and given that I had seen his face coming out from a cloud in the dream I had, I found this synchronicity uncanny. I felt he was trying to tell me he had seen me too during that dream. Maybe, we had the same dream.
At two years old, our son weighed only 15 lbs. He had been suffering from starvation, tonsillitis, giardia, and lead poisoning. He was so weak he could not lift his head from his bed after waking up in the morning. We stayed with a Romanian family in their modest apartment for about a week. The family’s matriarch was a retired nurse and a godsend. She knew exactly what to do to bring our son back to life. She gave him a shot of penicillin every morning to treat the tonsillitis, and she gave us mashed bananas in a bowl to feed our son the only food he could digest to come back from starvation. If our son had been deemed one of the healthiest orphans, we had to wonder how ill the other orphans were. We also had to wonder if Costa would have survived had we come for him even just a few weeks later.
However, Costa proved to be remarkably resilient. Within a week he was strong enough to run around the apartment, laughing and enjoying our attention. He began to eat a variety of foods. He also learned 20 English words during this week. When we flew home from Romania, Costa quietly sat on my lap and slept peacefully through the entire trip.
Costa is now a young man who has overcome many of the obstacles of his early childhood, proving to be resilient throughout his life. The hardships and traumas he experienced during the first two years of his life could have destroyed him, but he has been determined to survive and thrive, proving that what doesn’t kill us can make us stronger. He is not only successful in his career; he is also a good man--empathetic, kind, and loyal. May he keep on growing and learning with the guidance and protection of an army of angels, and may he know our love will always be with him.
Photo Credit: Yoel J Gonzalez
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