Roberta and Cody
A brittle bag of bones rocks back and forth in her crib, alone. No toys, no color, no company to draw a smile. “Don’t touch,” a nurse informs our LOC leader. Don’t touch.
Love
A stark room with white walls, white floors, white cribs, white pajamas, and silence. You are now in a Romanian children’s hospital. We visited one, I thought, to bring the babies and children there surprise special entertainment for the day. I didn’t know we would be their only entertainment.
In Times of Trial…
Hospitals like this one in Ludus have become a haven for abandoned babies and young children. Parents habitually drop them off here, leaving them under hospital care for weeks, months, even years depending on when they feel like coming back to get them. Often, parents will drop off a child here for a while, then take him or her back, then leave them again.
The hospital, itself, devoid of color, compassion, and life provides the roughly 20 to 30 children with the bare essentials to survive minus one. Touch.
As we entered the room of ‘babies’ ranging several months to over two years to feed them, even more unnerving than the unnatural deafening silence of the babies, who should be crying and flailing, was the nurse who demonstrating feeding time; Shoving a bottle into an open mouth, then moving down the line to the next. Their little aged eyes, which have already begun to cross due to lack of being held, try to focus but aren’t used to the stimulation.
These children are not held. That’s why, we’ve been told by few volunteers who make weekly visits, the children have stopped crying. These babies, who on average look about two years younger than they actually are, learned it doesn’t do any good. Even as we cradled and tickled each child one by one, for the most part, they lacked any emotion in their small, fragile faces.
A grim truth, however, is that more often than not, the children who reside here in Ludus have a far better life than if they remained with their parents.
…There is hope
Even as my heart broke every minute I remained, I was filled with hope. In the next hour we spent playing with the older children, three years to eight or so, the pallid, wan faces came to life. Roberta, Simona, and those whose names are unknown delighted even in the smallest fraction of attention. The two-year-old bag of bones whom we were advised not to touch, came alive with the simplest hand stroke and gentle hug. Hearing laughter within these chilling walls, seeing smiles and being squeezed so hard by little fingers it’s hard to breathe, reminded me that even in the most hopeless and downtrodden situations love can conquer all.
“He shall cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you shall take refuge.” Psalm 91:4.
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