Leslie Hawke with Alexandru Craciun at Stefanita, his first school

As I sat on my new balcony enjoying a cup of tea and contemplating my first week as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I noticed two little urchins, one of them barefoot, begging for money from the cars stopped at the corner traffic light.  I had seen this activity before, but not by such small children and not on my very own corner.  The little one had to stand on his tiptoes to get his head up to the car windows.  About one out of five times he got something from the driver. I found it very unsettling to sit on my porch and watch this, so I took my tea and went inside.   

The following day, when I got home in the afternoon the boys were playing in the traffic again under my window. The bigger one seemed to be drinking something out of a plastic bag. I wondered that nobody in my building had contacted the authorities. These kids were so little and this is one of the busiest intersections in Bacau. Who are these kids? Where are their parents? Where is the Department of Child Protection?  

I got back the next night about 9 p.m. and the kids were still working the corner. I picked up a bag of Oreos someone had left in my apartment, put some milk in a small plastic Coke bottle and went down to the street. The boys were not the least bit reluctant to take food from a stranger. Alexandru, who looked 5, said that he was 8, and that Marius was his 10-year-old brother. As I talked to them, a storekeeper with whom I had developed a nodding acquaintance, interrupted us to show me a wounded baby bird he was holding in his palm. “You shouldn’t talk to those kids,” he said in English, “they’re bastards.” And then he walked away cuddling his bird. 

            Two days later, after having bought him more food and a pair of sneakers, I was taken by Alex to meet his sister Corina.  She was lounging on a park bench a couple of blocks from Alex’s spot on the street. She said they were from Buhusi (pronounced “Boo-hoosh”), a town 20 kilometers away, consisting of a few slummy blocs and two large abandoned factories. The father was dead, the mother was “on the road.” I asked Corina if she had heard of Casa Pistruiatul. She said yes. I told her I wanted to take Alexandru there. She nodded. I asked if she wanted to go with us. (It occurred to me that in essence I was on the verge of kidnapping a child.) “De ce?” she asked. “What for?” At that, Alexandru and I headed off.  

Casa Pistriatul is a children’s shelter established by FSC, the non-profit organization I had just been assigned to work for by the Peace Corps. Located in a former soup kitchen, it is small and shabby but very clean and the atmosphere is friendly, more like a disorganized working class household than an institution.  In addition to a small kitchen, a “surgery” (what I’d call a nurse’s office) and the director’s office, there is one big all-purpose room and two small bedrooms, filled wall-to-wall with single mattresses on box springs. They were supposed to get bunk beds from a church in England, but the shipment hadn’t arrived.  

After giving him a few minutes to get used to the place, the nurse took Alexandru into the shower room and started the hygienic detox process. The other kids were having their morning lessons in the main room so Gabi, the director of FSC, and I went into the office to wait.  There is a law in Romania that if children don’t go to school for two years they become ineligible to attend school at all. Consequently, most of the kids that pass through Pistruiatul aren’t allowed in the Bacau schools.  Pistruiatul offers a kind of make-shift school for them.  After about half an hour, we heard a commotion outside. I looked through the window to see Alexandru’s sister ranting at Laura, the Pistruiatul social worker.  Gabi and I went out. I couldn’t understand the words but Gabi explained later that she was cursing me up one side and down the other.  “She lied to me,” Corina shouted in Romanian. “She said she was just going to buy him shoes…”

Corina explained that they lived in Buhusi with their mother, everything was fine, they had a very nice family and we had no right to take Alex.  Fortunately, Alex was in the shower at the time. After a few minutes she seemed to lose steam.  Laura quietly went back inside, then Gabi went in and motioned for me to do the same.  In a little while Corina left.

The nurse spent over an hour working on Alexandru, who resisted nothing. When he finally emerged in pale pink jockey shorts his beautiful shaggy hair had been completely buzzed away and there were patches of scabies covered with ointment dotting his torso.  With his feet now clean, sores and cracks were visible on the soles and between the toes.  The nurse spent another half hour cleaning and bandaging his feet.  Alexandru didn’t even wince.  She told me that when she gave him a toothbrush he hadn’t known quite how to use it.  I asked her why she cut off all his hair and she indicated it was full of lice.

Gabi and I stayed for lunch.  Alex was still looking a little shell-shocked. The other kids were very welcoming and one of them, who turned out to be Alex’s cousin, also from Buhusi, put his arm around him and led him to the table.  There were eight kids between the ages of 6 and 14. The children were in charge of setting up the tables and chairs and serving the food. Without being told, one of them turned off the TV when lunch was ready and another stood up and said grace. Alex silently took in everything going on. When the food arrived his face broke into a huge grin. Lunch consisted of soup, hot potato salad, and bread. The other kids dawdled over it but Alexandru intently ate every bite. 

Of course, the story was only beginning. Three days later, Alex’s mother arrived in a state of considerable outrage and took him off.  (Laura noted that when Mama arrived Alex had run into the bedroom.)  She promised to take him back to Buhusi, but later that day I felt a familiar tug on my jeans as I left my apartment – Alexandru was back on our street corner. In the course of the next week, Alex was brought back to Pistruiatul several times and his mother came to retrieve him, promising each time that she would take him back to Buhusi and not let him beg. Child begging is illegal, so the police were called in to help ensure her cooperation. In one deposition she made to the police, it emerged that Alex had lived in an institution from age three months to five years, at which point she took him out, apparently to start him on his present career. At another time she revealed that they needed his income in order to survive, and proudly stated that he had been known to make as much as 100,000 lei a day. (That would come to 3 million lei a month, close to what I get from the Peace Corps.) He had shoes, she said. He just preferred not to wear them while he was working.   

I didn’t see Alex on the street for several weeks after that. Then he began to show up about once a week, always alone.  Sometimes I’d buy him a sandwich.  He’d smile shyly, gladly accepting my offering but making no attempt at further contact.  Laura said that when she came across him in town, he ran the other way.  More than likely he got some severe beatings over the “Casa Pistruiatul” episode. 

            I felt terrible that I might have made Alex’s life even worse through my spontaneous, but ignorant, attempts to help. But I now understood some of the complexities of the problem and was more determined than ever to do something about it. FSC initiated the Doinita and Stefanita programs to support both children and their mothers in finding a better way to support themselves. We started a US charity to help raise money for these projects and named it “The Alex Fund.”

             We didn’t see Alex all winter but the next summer he showed up at Pistruiatul again off and on.  That August when we started the Doinita Mother’s work training program we tried to recruit Alex’s mother.  She came to only one meeting – but after that she let Alex stay at Pistruiatul, so something must have clicked.  Alex started school that fall and this year he is in the second grade. After school he comes daily to the Stefanita after-school program for homework help and activities.

                                                                                                                  March, 2003

Alex holding a 'Certificate of Achievement' for the completion of the summer school drama program.