Toward the Kids

(Actually written 18 June 2009 in my journal)

Picking up where I left off, I spent a day of rest in the Children to Love International apartment in the heart of Bucharest after my long night at the airport. The following day I caught a train to Cluj. I lived in Cluj before I ever came across the orphanage I love. It’s where I learned to speak my first Romanian sentences. My Romanian friends there have grown from acquaintances to kin.

I had an awesome four days in Cluj. I saw babies that had been born who were only a twinkle in their father’s eye two years before. I found childless friends were now pregnant. I listened to great conversations, fertile ground for Romanian language growth. Overall, I felt genuinely spoiled by Livia and Coco who escorted me everywhere I went, let me sleep in their bed, cooked great food for me, let me wear their clothes, and gave me a cell phone to borrow.

While visiting Cluj I got word that the orphanage children would be gone when I returned to Bucharest. They would leave to summer camp in the mountains before I’d return to Bucharest. I had gone with the children to camp the past two years. Summer camp is a week of being with the kids 24/7. My comfort zone is totaled and my patience is pushed to the limit, but somehow I look forward to the challenge. Even with the support of American teammates and Children to Love International Staff, the camp can be quite intimidating because the special needs of the children require patient care and lots of attention. Also, unlike many American camps, there’s not always a schedule of activities, and finally, the bathroom/shower conditions can be “unfamiliar” (dirty squatty potties and … what is that I just stepped in on the floor of the bathroom? I hope it’s just thick mud … we ran out of toilet paper with five days left of camp. There’s no soap either, just water … and you were hoping to wash your hand after you held the hand of the girl who had her finger in her nose).

Anyway, when I discovered this mountain camp was nearer to Cluj than Bucharest, I aimed to go straight from my small trip to Cluj to the mountain camp. I took the train from Cluj to Sibiu, a city near the mountain camp. I was so nervous because I was traveling through the country by myself to a place I had never been. I looked out the train widow all the way there while the travelers in my compartment slept, and made a switch to a different train for the second half of the journey. I waited at a bus deport for over an hour, again – not investing the time by reading, but just waiting, so that I could be sure I caught my bus. The bus took me way, way up in the very green and very silent Romanian mountains, past a German town, now occupied by Romanians, I imagine, and then on to windy mountain roads. Finally the bus driver’s daughter pointed down the road we stopped at.

“See that road?” she said. “Go straight, straight, straight ahead for a long, long time. Don’t switch to another road and then you’ll see the camp you’re looking for on the right.”

So I walked to the road and got two phone calls on my borrowed cell phone along the way, Lili wondering if I was there yet. It’s amazing to me that a girl who has no sense of direction and still doesn’t know the streets in her own city can follow directions Lili sent her on-line to a small children’s camp on a lofty Romanian mountain peak.

I saw a group of people on the left-hand side of the road. It was the kids and the orphanage workers I had traveled thousands of miles to see. They were sitting and mulling around by the side of the road.

As I walked into the group, I wished I could slowly look each child in the eye one by one and let them know they were so special, but the atmosphere somehow didn’t allow for that. Kids came up to me just as though I had never left and continued their conversations as thought I was returning from a brief trip from the bathroom and not a ten-month absence in the U.S. I would stop them in the middle of what they were doing/saying, look them in the eye and say their name slowly. Then they would smile, as though maybe they realized that they had been missed, and I had been gone.