ARCHWAY Romania Who We Help

    1.Giulesti Area(Ciurel Bridge, Sector 6): – In this area 12 poor families and 32 needy children live and survive in an abandoned building. Since Ceausescu’s time, the building has had no roof, the windows are improvised from plastic materials, and without running water. The residents have to collect water in plastic bottles and barrels to wash themselves and hydrate. Due to poverty, discrimination, and bullying, parents don’t send their children to school anymore. Without a property, the authorities cannot issue identity papers to the parents. With no identity papers, parents cannot find a job so they can survive together with their children. The hygiene is very precarious in this area, they have to share a toilet built by them with plastic materials and wood, very difficult to sanitize and clean; and unsafe living conditions for children.

    2. Popa Rusu Area ( Sector 2): This area has 6 families and 14 children who live in an abandoned building. The building has the windows covered with wood and plastic materials. The parents don’t have a stable job or a legitimate address so they can’t send their children to school anymore. Due to extremely poor sanitation they all have health issues – especially their children, who have no access to medical services. It is very hard for the parents to raise their children in safety conditions and keep them healthy.

             3. Ferentari Area – Cola (Sector 5): This is an area on the edge of the Sector 5, located next to a neighborhood full of apartment buildings. Next to those buildings, 10 families and 28 children live in shacks made of wood and plastic materials, without electricity or heat. All the residents have to resort to dangerous and unsafe methods so they can prepare food for their children and stay warm during winter. Due to poverty, discrimination and bullying, and without any help from the authorities, the children drop out school at a very young age.

    4. Valtoarei Area – Claudiu( Sector 5):  This area hosts 3 families and 6 children. Claudiu and Elena, who spent their childhood in the “Casa Noastra” orphanage of the Archway Romania Foundation, live there. In the present, they each have their own families, and their children go to school. They are being helped and supported by Archway Romania so they can offer a better life to their children and a chance for their children to be educated without dropping out school because of poverty or bullying.

5. Razoare Area ( Sector 5): In this area 6 families and 15 little children live in an abandoned building with very poor hygiene conditions. They don’t have electricity, drinking water, or running water of any kind. Residents live together with their children in poverty very unhealthy living conditions. The building in which they live is very old, and the material from which it is constructed has started to fall from it – it is crumbling. Living there is very dangerous and getting more dangerous every day, making it very hard for the families and children to live in it. The parents can’t send their little children to school, because they don’t have an address, the means to buy them the required supplies or even clean and appropriate clothes. This makes the little children feel very sad.

6. Chitila Area (Sector 1): In this area 3 families with 8 children live and survive in an unsanitary building with 2 rooms. The house in which they lived together caught fire almost a year ago. Not having any help from the authorities of Sector 1, not even to clean the place, they live among the remains of the burnt house. Now the parents, together with their children live in 2 rooms, without electricity, running water and heat. In order to have light in the building, they connected a bulb to a car battery.

7. Grivita Area(Sector 1): – In a central zone of Bucharest 4 families in social difficulty and 8 children live in an old abandoned building  in very difficult living conditions. These families come from the countryside, and they don’t have the possibility to make identity papers in Bucharest. They also have health problems – especially their children, who don’t have access to medical services. The parents of the children do not have stable jobs and work whenever and where ever they can.

8.  Sabinelor Area- Kalu (Sector 5):  It is an area in which 5 families and 15 children live in an old abandoned building in very hard living conditions. These families have health issues, especially their children but they cannot have access to medical services because they have temporary identity papers. The children’s parents do not have stable jobs, living from the different occasional jobs they do, not having the possibility to offer to their children a decent life and a chance for an education.

9. Vacaresti Lake Area(Sector 4): In an area located on the outskirts of sector 4, 6 families together with their 16 little children live in shacks made of  wood, cardboard and plastic materials. staying together with their children in an unsafe environment and poor hygiene conditions . These shacks can’t have running water, so they need to collect water in plastic bottles and barrels to wash themselves and to hydrate. The parents, together with their children who live in this area, have built and improvised a common toilet made of wood and plastic materials that they all share. The parents do not have jobs, surviving only with the monthly allowance of the children from the government (which is never enough for growing children) and from different occasional jobs they find. One source of income is collecting the empty bottles and recyclable materials from the streets. This makes the children suffer very much.

10. Petrechioaia Area-Oana(Voluntari, Ilfov): In this area outside of Bucharest, in Voluntari, Petrechioaia village, Oana lives, a girl who stayed in the orphanage “Casa Noastra” of Archway Romania Foundation during her childhood. She now lives together with her family and children and with other 2 families in the same yard. A few years ago, Oana’s first child, a little girl, died at the age of 2 after swallowing something she picked up in the yard and choking to death. This was a huge tragedy for Oana, who went trough this very difficult period of her life with great anguish.

        11.  Carol Park Area(Sector 5): This area hosts 5 families and 17 little children who live in an abandoned building in unsanitary and precarious living conditions. The building, like so many others, has its windows covered with wood and plastic materials. Without electricity and heat, families have to resort to unsafe and dangerous methods such as open fires to make food for their children and keep warm. Due to poverty, discrimination and bullying, and without any help from the authorities, the parents can’t support their children in safety and can’t send their children to school anymore.

We would like to thank our donors and volunteers for their dedication to the “Social Street Support” program of Archway Romania.  We’ve been helping needy children and poor families who live in the streets, in heating sewers, abandoned buildings or in improvised shacks made of cardboard or plastic materials for 25 years. Our programs have changed and been refined dependent on situations in Bucharest, political focus of politicians, and donations to our kids. As you can see, the  socio-economic challenges of our second generation of street children are the same as with the first generation of abandoned children

• Poverty
• Homelessness
• Disease due to a lack of sanitation
• Lack of education
• Lack of government aid
• Lack of involvement on the part of the World

Archway, Romania is working hard to shed light on the injustice and tragedy of its abandoned Romanian children. Now that you’ve seen the evidence of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’, please help us to spread the word that no child should be neglected like this and every child deserves a chance at happiness and love.

    Together with the donors and volunteers of Archway we want help needy children to do their lessons after school, to learn how to write in a specially equipped room and to help them to do their homework, to learn English, mathematics, and we will have a computer room special equipped with several computers where they can do their school projects and where they can play on the computer.

TRIBUTE TO RADU GRAFIAN NICU

This is a tribute for Radu Grafian Nicu, one of the children helped by Archway Romania. I remember, on one of my visits to Bucharest, sitting in a small park watching this scrawny little kid jumping in and out if a fountain to escape the heat. At first I thought he was just having fun then I realized he was trying to get clean from all the dirt and grime of living in the streets. He did not have other clothes or a bar of soap or a towel but he was intent on getting a little cleaner and cooling off. Out of the corner of my eye I saw two security guards running toward him so I jumped up and motioned to him to get out of the fountain (which he did) and run away. That was my first introduction to Radu Nicu Grafian-one of the abandoned children who lived in the streets and tunnels of the capital city.

I had seen a program on TV and decided to go to Romania to further investigate the children who had been put into state institutions by their parents when the Berlin Wall fell (in 1989) and the stark reality that occurred to an already impoverished citizenry that they could no longer feed the children they had because the government subsidies had ended and birth control was still illegal. Of course, no one in Romania was about to reveal the government’s dirty little secrets so I was never given any information about the kids I kept tripping over on the stairs going down to the subway or hunkering down in the parks. When I finally, in desperation, went to the American Embassy to find out who they were, where they lived, and to whom they belonged, I was told by an embassy guard that I shouldn’t worry about them because they would be dead soon anyway. My Radu, the scrawny little kid I watched playing in the fountain, was one of those kids. He never knew his father but he lived with his mother until she got a new boyfriend who did not want Radu around so she put him out to fend for himself. It took us years to learn his name and for the longest time we just assumed he didn’t know what his last name was. That was until he surprised Gica and me years later by writing in perfect cursive Radu Nicu Grafian.

Radu became an important part of every visit I made to Bucharest. I used to get on the subway at night and walk around on the streets of downtown looking for him. Or Gica and I would get into the van and go searching for him. One day we were searching for him and he was being harassed by three thugs who were following him down the street making fun of him. I jumped out of the van and got between Radu and the three thugs and started screaming and carrying-on like a crazy woman. I don’t know if these three creeps thought I was crazy or whether they were afraid of getting into trouble for harassing an American but, either way, they turned around and ran in the opposite direction.

 Radu never asked for anything. He was very proud of the fact that he did not beg and he never stole anything. The only thing he ever wanted that we could tell was a little transistor radio that anyone could buy in any store in the area. He liked to listen to the music when he was falling asleep at night. I must have bought dozens of those things over the years because they would break or he would lose them or give them to anyone who would ask him for them. He also liked to go to McDonald’s for the Happy Meal. He liked the little toys that came with the meals. When we couldn’t find him I used to go and sit in the McDonald’s Restaurant at Universitate because that was one of the first places we found him after a long absence. On several occasions I didn’t see him at all because he would stow away on a train and go to the Black Sea where he said he was vacationing. At Christmas time we would press Radu into service as an elf (which was a role he cherished). Gica who would supply him with toys and food for children Archway had not discovered yet and POOF, Radu became Santa’s Little emissary.  Everything we gave him to deliver went directly to the children for whom they were meant. He never took anything that was not intended for him and he was adamant that every child got something for Christmas. We had lean years but somehow, Gica and Radu made sure every child got something soft and warm Christmas morning.

Several years ago I got an e-mail from Gica telling me that Radu had died. He had fallen asleep outside on the street by himself and when his friend went looking for him he was gone. I don’t know the reason (it was cold and I don’t know if he froze – or his heart simply gave out). Gica claimed his ashes and he found him a little plot in a nearby cemetery. Of course, me being a garish American had to get him a headstone  like none of the rest of the markers in the part of the cemetery for the homeless. But we go there every time I go to Romania and we pay our respects and leave our love. I am so grateful to Gica and all our Archway friends for the kindness and compassion shown to Radu Nicu Grafian. The inscription on Radu’s headstone reads:

Adam Lindsay Gordon

Rest in peace, my child and never forget you were loved.

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