DIGGING UP THE PAST (part 1 of 2)

I learned today that Nicolae Ceausescu was 'trending' on my Yahoo news and had to discover why--his was a name I haven't thought of in years. It turns out they exhumed the alleged remains of the former Romanian dictator and his wife for verification this week.  All day I have been digging around in my own past, reliving the memories of the months when I was a witness to the tragic ripple-effects of his communist regime. 

 I arrived in Bucharest in 1995, five and a half years after the revolution, as a relief worker to a country still in chaos. I'd flown over alone under the premise of orphanage and pediatric hospital work for a relief organization founded by adoptive parents. I was a soon-to-be graduate of Cornell University's social work program, didn't speak the language and knew nothing of the country's tarnished past. I only heard that there were babies to be held and I knew I could do that. 

My first day in the infamous Orphanage Number One, of the 20/20 exposé and the Michael Jackson playground, I was given fifty infants. I thought I'd misunderstood the number, surely she'd said five, or fifteen? Fifty. No, I stood firm, if I was to do any good, fifteen.

I arrived every morning to find my charges listless in their cribs, often doubled up because of crowding. One eleven-month-old boy's head was severely misshapen and I figured out why: taped to the oatmeal colored wall over his crib was a cut-out from some wrapping paper: a faded Santa Claus. His head had flattened diagonally as he craned to see it.

I carried them all to a dingy supply corridor with industrial carpeting, the INFANT STIMULATION CENTER and dumped a bag of toys on the floor.

I learned to feed four babies at once by putting them head-to-head alongside my lap and managing two bottles in each hand. I used rolls of blankets or my own legs to augment the physical therapy wedge. They were all severely delayed from hours unattended in their cribs--one-year-olds who could not roll over or even hold up their own heads, muscles stiff or atrophied.

I sang to them, held them, manipulated their bodies, and bought toys from the street vendors that disappeared if I didn't take them home with me at night. At noon, I carried them one at a time back to their cribs, where I kissed them and promised to come back in the morning.

On my lunch hour, I ate bread and goat cheese from the market as I rode the rattling trolley across the city to the pediatric hospital. I had met an infant there--her name was Veronica but I called her Maimuta, which means 'monkey' as she looked just like one of Dr. Harlow's infant rhesus subjects. She was two months old, barely five pounds, abandoned by her mother at birth. "Shameful; gypsy," the nurses told me when I asked about the circumstances. They said when Maimuta was healthy enough, she would be transferred to Orphanage Number One, where I was already familiar with her fate.

Something in Maimuta scared me; she had an angry tension in her wiry, eight-week-old swaddled self. She refused to meet my eyes and I thought of something I'd learned in basic child psych--children have roughly eighteen to twenty-four months to decide if the world is a good place or not, if they want to be active participants or sociopaths. Already Maimuta seemed to be making up her mind. So I held her every lunch hour. I sang to her. I got right up in her face, so that she had to work hard, crane her neck, NOT to look at me. I insisted they let me hand-feed her the bottle of vegetable soup they hung, like a guinea pig's water bottle, in her crib for nourishment. The nurses rolled their eyes. I cradled Maimuta, stroked her cheek with my fingers, walked her over to the window and showed her the giant noisy crows lined up in the tree outside, mocking us. She set her stubborn little chin, no bigger than the pad of my thumb, and looked the other way. 

 I unwrapped her while I was there, my fingers milking her stiff limbs, the best I could remember from a nanny job where the mother had shown me infant massage. I asked the nurses to leave one of her arms unswaddled, tried to teach her to suck her own thumb. 

But I only had an hour, and then it was on to my job downstairs on the preschool floor of the hospital. One day, after I had been there several weeks, I caught Maimuta sneaking looks at my face when I was pretending to talk to one of the premature twins on the other side of the room. And then another day a few weeks later, I reswaddled her and put her back in her chicken-wire crib, and her face crumpled, and she cried. The nurses were furious--now she was going to make noise if she wasn't being held! I counted this as a victory. But the next day when I arrived, excited to reconnect with her, I found a nurse holding Maimuta upside down by her ankles as she vomited, tomato broth shooting from her nose and mouth. 

"What are you doing?" I cried. 

"I just changed her swaddles," she said in defiance, pushing past me for a mop to clean the floor. "This way I don't have to change her again."

When I scooped Maimuta up, used my pinky fingertip to clear the vomit from her tiny nostrils, her eyes darted to mine and then away, furious. We were back where we had started. 

Downstairs, the situation was somewhat happier. I adored the sun-filled afternoons with the preschool patients, generous with me as I struggled to learn their language, delighted to see what my backpack, my Mary Poppins bag, might hold. I'd arrive as they were supposed to be finishing up their 'naps', tied by their ankles in their cribs while the nurses huddled around an Italian soap opera in the back. It was refreshing to see that they could all untie themselves, and then post a three-year-old sentry at the door to keep watch as they jumped between their cribs and paddled in their pee pots. If Marius spotted a nurse, they would leap back into bed and retie their ankles, feigning sweaty, smirking sleep.

To be fair to the nurses and aides, they worked hard and the conditions in the hospital were miserable. The hours were long, the plumbing cranky, the medicine in short supply, and a nurse could expect to take home the equivalent of $15/month. The midday soap opera and a cup of Nes, instant coffee swirled with evaporated milk and sugar, were their escape.

 

After naps, I unlocked the hospital playroom, stocked by the fledgling US-based relief organization sponsoring my time there, and it would be proper preschool mayhem. Sometimes, if I bought bubble solution and the nurses agreed, we could go out to the courtyard and play, but this was where the hospital incinerated their trash and medical waste, and 'find the needles in the ashes', their favorite game, wasn't really safe with the high AIDS rate in the country. 

 

The children were patient and eager to teach me their language so that I was able to understand perfectly when a seven-year-old boy was transferred from an orphanage in Brasov in near complete kidney failure, weighing just twenty-five pounds. "Make a horse," Romi told me so that he could be carried to the playroom on my back. 

"You're so light!" I said as I galloped down the hall with him.

"Yes," he sighed matter-of-factly. "In my orphanage it is like with the dogs--the big ones eat, and the little ones don't."

After that, whenever I was on the preschool floor, Romi was my miniature jockey, whispering instructions and encouragement into my hair with his sweet, milky breath. I started to think... maybe, though I was only twenty years old and single, hadn't even graduated from college, just maybe I should look into international adoption, or if he couldn't leave the country, making Bucharest my home, getting certified as a foster parent for Romi.

At the end of the day, the preschool children raided my backpack for anything--a pen, an envelope, a roll of stamps, a punched trolley slip, a spoon. Romi slipped a black hair band around his wrist like a bracelet. They snatched these objects back to their cribs, "So you will have to come back tomorrow."

(TOMORROW: Part 2, "Examining What Remains.")