I cannot thank this organization enough for surprising us with this blessing!

Please help them to help our special children by purchasing during the month of May!!

At any given time they are feeding up to 35 or so children each day. Our schools in America cannot come close or touch how absolutely delicious and fresh this food is here at the HOA. When the volunteers eat here, they eat typically the same things as the children. There is one cook here and she has a little help in the kitchen, but she’s an amazing cook.

The children eat fresh eggs, fresh meat and fresh vegetables bought from the market. They have fresh bread each day. There are soups and some rice and pasta and wonderful dishes. They snack on fresh fruit.

The great thing about the food here is that it is are minus the chemicals and food colorings and dyes that Americans like to preserve and beautify their foods with. Let’s face it, us Americans love to junk up our kids. I’ve been very careful with mine though, I know as I’m gone they are taking full advantage of the fast food places! Since my children came to me in full nutritional deficiency, I’ve become a post adoption feeding expert of sorts and know how much the feeding in the orphanage is essential to proper body balance.

Since the day we opened House of Angels, these children inside these doors have gained weight, and thrived and grown consistently. This is the only consistent thing in some of their lives and so very important. Their lives depend on it. This is why some of the children who seem to be so sick they should have died, are alive.

This most excellent nutrition has provided the ability for the children to grow properly and develop the brain in the best way. This facility has fed hundreds of children over the year and it always has had excellent nutritional results. The children are always on a customized and balanced feeding program with fortified foods rich in natural vitamins and minerals.

Being the most vulnerable of the population the at-risk of abandonment children and the orphans usually have nutritional deficits in this country. It is usually expected those deficiencies are severely magnified managed care facilities. So depending on where the child started or currently resides, their nutrition is a key factor in their development. I have seen first hand how the nutritional deficiencies in a child’s early life can affect the brain development and cause delays in growth and many other medical conditions caused from malnutrition such as anemia, bone growth, eyesight and rickets.

You will not ever see nutritional deficiencies caused here at the House of Angels. We’ve been combating these problems and winning each and every year the House of Angels has been open! I’m proud to say that we’ve fed some of the neediest children and the most wonderful volunteers and had fabulous results.

The state care facilities are less lucky and do not feed the children well. You can tell immediately the difference in the children the HOA has fed for a year and the new children. But the new children have started to thrive and grow so fast. It is amazing what a good healthy diet can accomplish!

There are always so many children that steal my heart. Some children take a part of my heart forever. Roxana is going to be one of those children. I can’t wait for you to hear about her. I think she’s about 11 years old, golden thick wavy hair cropped into a boy cut. She has the fairest of skin and a few freckles and blue eyes. Her features are very thin and frail. She doesn’t speak. She appears to have some institutional autism and major sensory deprivation and disorder. She has auditory and tactile sensory issues. She cannot touch things easily and she reaches out with much trepidation and recoils her hand a few times before trusting. She is thin and shuffles when she walks. I don’t feel she is truly autistic, she does engage and make eye contact and smile but she is terrified of the world around her. She’s so physically delayed and completely mute as far as I can tell. I love to make her smile. She loves to smile. She spends most of the day fearful of the sudden actions and sounds of the other children. She sits in the corner and rocks. I have talked to Simona to get her some one on one time so we can assess what her real abilities are for the future. This is why we need volunteers. We’ve given some plastic surgical brushes to the nurses to “brush” her skin so she can become more tolerant. I’m giving her some big deep hugs, the kind that reach right into the soul too!

Tonight I took Roxana around letting her touch the plants inside the House of Angels, letting her feel the different leaves and textures. She adored this truly. She held my hand firmly and loved the walk up and down the stairs. She was very worried about the stairs but she did so well we did it again on the other side of the hall. The stairs are marble. There are 23 of them. I walk them night and day along with the rest of the nurses and employees.

We took Roxana to the donation room. All the children were in ill fitting clothing and shoes. It was time for Roxana to get her new shoes. Roxana was smiling because I’d given her a new teddy bear and now we were trying to dig in huge boxes of shoes for something for her to wear. Her feet were too long. She got afraid when Gelu (House of Angels Director) started tossing shoes around on the floor. I held her tighter and comforted her. Finally we found something for her but I think I’ll go and buy her some newer shoes too. We found a sports suit for her which was brand new and she smiled. I asked her if she liked it in Romanian…but there was no reaction. I know she did like them. Thank you for the new sports suit and shoes, from Roxana. She truly loves them. Please pray for the restoration of the emotional and physical health of Roxana.

This is where I’d love to thank the donors for all their donations, however, there were so many unusable shoes in those donations. Please be mindful if you send donations, we need very gently used and new clothing. We cannot use shoes with holes and soles tearing off. These children are often growing fast and hard on their shoes. What we can really use is rubber crocks or slip on sandals that the children can wear socks with inside. These are the absolute best shoes ever for a child placement center. They wear socks all the time and the rubber shoes are necessary inside so the children don’t fall on the tile or wooden flooring.

Speaking of shoes and feet and such…I know this is silly but I painted my toenails very bright florescent colors before I left. They have polka dots on them in many patterns. The children adore them. I’m glad someone likes my feet, I don’t really care much for them myself haha. They always want to look at them! I’m wearing rubber flip flops here in the orphanage, I can’t handle wearing socks with crocks or sandals. I can go from the shower right to work in them Speaking of work…I hear a baby crying.

I awoke to the sounds of so many children! I’m staying in the House of Angels. How refreshing! I love little laughter. Giggles echoed down the long corridors of this place! When I walked out…little Christian whom I believe to be about 12 years old said “Good Morning Romania!” in perfect English. I loved that! The older boys are very clingy and love to be petted and hugged and kissed. They will even take your arms and wrap them around. As orphans in a disabled facility prior to coming here, they missed out on so very much. This may be the first time in their lives that people have truly cared about their little lives. I am holding and hugging and kissing and loving each and every one of them as much as humanly possible. They call me mama. One of the little ones is begging us to take them out in the village for a walk. You can tell that they really love to do that.

Today one of the little girls with Downs Syndrome kept trying to put a truck in the lens of my camera over and over. How could you possibly ever get upset with that sweet little face? I had to say “gata gata” which means enough enough or finished finished…so many times it is my mantra. She also begged to be held and loved it so much she frowned when I had to put her down.

I had to laugh because the founder of House of Angels, Simona, arrived last night here for the first time in 4 months. At 8:30 she was having the children sit down with markers and draw before bedtime. This morning they still had blue lips and green, yellow and red marks behind their ears and around their noses! Ha!

The older kids are about 3 and up. The children that can move around and walk are all in the same playroom. There aren’t enough caretakers for all the children and each caretaker has to take care of profoundly special needs children as well as children with minor needs. It is a difficult situation.

Today was still the Easter holiday so we had the after-school program kids all day. I think at any given time there are about 10-20 of them. For the longest time I couldn’t realize why none of the children were in school on a Friday! Finally someone was able to explain it to me.

I’ll tell a little about House of Angels and how it is set up.

First some of you may want to know the history of the House of Angels.

We started as an Emergency care facility for infants to three years of age. You can read all about that on the link I’ve provided.

In September of 2006 we had our grand re-opening. This time as an after-school facility and physical therapy center for some of the neediest school aged children in Dambovita County, Romania. At one time this county had the highest abandonment rate at 6% per 100 births. These children in the after-school program are provided with hot meals, helped with their homework, taught arts and crafts and music play. They are the at risk of being abandoned children, the poorest of the poor.

The Physical Therapy center run by the wonderful Radu, is given to those special needs children in the community, including orphans.

Today I spent most of my time receiving the physical therapy children and their parents, and working with the after-school program kids. They are each so very special. I don’t always remember their names, so many children have walked through these doors over the years, but their faces are forever etched in my heart. I’ll do my best on the photos with names.

The striking thing about the children of the Physical Therapy center from the community is that they all have such devoted parents. Had they not, it occured to me that I might be playing with them in the orphan room. In Romania there is a long held stigma against children with special needs. There is nothing set forth for the disabled here, and parents are often shunned. But there they were, bringing their children with smiles, doing all they could, doting on their children, the way parents are supposed to be. Not abandoning their imperfect child. I looked at the orphans in the next room and wondered what their fate would have been if their parents were as devoted. Such a stark awakening. My heart cried inside. I held back the tears as I watched so many of the careful mama’s wipe their children’s faces as they drooled and felt sad that no one was there to wipe the faces of those little unwanted abandoned babies in the room down the hall, in the beginning of their lives. These parents are all very active in their children’s therapies, and Radu has taught them how to work with their children.

Radu is simply put, an incredible young man. He’s finishing college for PT here and lives in Tirgoviste, travels to Bucharest for college and then travels three times a week to the House of Angels to work with all the children. And we complain about driving two miles to work! I believe he has also another job working at a spa. After a few hours of talking to him I was able to see his heart for these kids. He even commented to me when working with the most disabled children, his heart breaks inside, but he never shows it on the outside. This is so typical of the Romanian man, they are pure teddy bears inside, solid rocks on the outside. The children here are put into the most modern therapy with the little means and equipment Radu has available to work with. The greatest part of all of this work is, that results are coming. Profound results. Children that doctors said would never ever get out of bed are standing in their cribs and walking. Children with weak muscles are becoming strong, and parents are being educated. The stigma of disability is falling all around us here and it is beautiful to watch.

We have many children that come to the Physical Therapy Center. Some with minor needs, physical and emotional and some very profoundly special needs children. Some are driven from other villages to the center here because they don’t have transportation. This is why Gelu (George) has a new van! He made several runs today to pick up and take home. He not only is a tata to many children here at House of Angels, he’s like a dad to others in the community.

I have taken many photos today of the physical therapy sessions and I will post them up as soon as I get them ready. I know you will love seeing them and I hope they will warm your hearts. I also hope that if any of you are looking for that opportunity to help, to do more in this world, that this might be the exact vision you need to get started!

The first petitioner, the President of Amici dei Bambini Marco Griffini, explained in his speech the reasons behind the petition and his disappointment fo the inaction of the Romanian Government for coping with the worrying conditions of Romanian abandoned children, whose number cannot be absorbed by national adoption.

One of the solutions proposed by Marco Griffini consists of considering a gradual reopening of inter-country adoptions at least for certain categories of children who, because of their age, health condition and ethnic origin will not be adopted in Romania (special needs).

Romanian MEPs members of the Committee (Adina Valean, Elena Basescu and Victor Bostinaru) reacted sharply excluding unanimously the withdrawal of the moratorium blocking international adoption and urging the incompetence of the European Commission as well as the the European Parliament to deal with this issue.

The Chairwoman of the Committee on Petitions, Erminia Mazzoni, and the Italian MEP Patrizia Toia led the debate to more constructive channels and mutual understanding, stressing that the focus should be the interest of all to protect children and their right to have a family in Romania as well as in all other European Union Countries.

Thereby the Committee succeeded in reaching an agreement: it formally rejected the petition but it underlined the importance and the positive aim of this initiative.

The Committee decided that in the near future will schedule on the agenda of coordinators of political groups the issue of protection of children without families, recognizing its emergency as well as the need to address it at an European level.

Original link here.

Darlene Sullivan and her three children, oldest adopted in 1998 (the same year I adopted my Maggie) from Romania at the age of 3 years, and her two youngest adopted from Guatemala wanted to do more. We received the nicest donation in kind in the form of clothing etc. from the Sullivan children. Additionally a wonderful monetary donation for the House of Angels. We are thankful for their handwritten letter and we look forward to hearing from them again as they want to support as much as possible! It is so special when adopted children see the need and know what should be done to help! Thanks Sullivan kids!

Wish Upon a Star
Jeanette Dubanowski

House of Angels
Krishan K. Agarwal
Mr. and Mrs. Homer A. Gregory
Susan Berger
Marcia McHenry
Elwin Leung

Kazakhstan
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Clark, In Honor of Director Erbol Kapanovich
David Wilstermann, Shining Light and Semey Windows Project
Lex and Karla Moran, for Vasalisa in Shymkent

Ethiopia
Brian & Margaret Dillingham, BP Pino Hope Project
Louis Demarco, BP Pino Hope Project
Jennifer Hall, BP Pino Hope Project
Eduardo Sanchez, BP Pino Hope Project
Christopher and Ann Muehling, BP Pino Hope Project
Teresa Carnt, BP Pino Hope Project

Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund
Melany Bartholow

Little Miracles International General Humanitarian Fund
Just Love Coffee Roasters
Asset Value Investors Limited, Kimberly Lau
Anonymous, In Memory of Alan R. Elia and in Honor of Irene Elia

The House of Angels would like to thank all of their supporters, donors, volunteers, friends, prayer partners and the staff that work tirelessly for the children so gently entrusted inside it’s strong walls. Thank you for this year of hope, this year of dreams that seemed unreachable, thank you for your support and generosity.

On New Years Eve, it is a Romanian tradition to leave a lamp alight on the New Year’s night until the dawn. This light has shined eternal each year during all of the years of the projects we have done. The light will continue to shine again this new year with your help. Fie ca lumina sărbătorilor să vă rămână în inimi tot anul Toate cele bune! Un an nou fericit! (May the light of the Holidays be in your hearts all year long! All the best! Happy New Year!)

Now HOA shares with you their most extraordinary year in photos:

When the after-school program was opened at the House of Angels, there were two bright faces representing this poverty, 12 year old Ionela and 8 year old George Sandu. Ionela and George always worked very hard on their homework, working into the night by candlelight at home, and they’ve done very well in school. They are the first kids to come to HOA after school program and the last kids to leave in the late afternoon.

After seeing the conditions of the home environment of the children, something just had to be done to alleviate their home situation.

The Sandu family has always had modest expectations from life. Mr. Sandu often worries that the next month won’t bring enough money to feed his children. Mr. Sandu is a gravedigger for the local cemetery and regretfully is happy when someone in the community dies. He knows this will bring money to his family. Mrs. Sandu suffers from severe epilepsy her occupation is to sweep the roads in Gaesti, in front of the homes of the “wealthy” families.

Dambovita county Romania, the home of the House of Angels and the Sandu family, has in the past been recognized as having one of the highest child abandonment rates in the country. Under these very difficult circumstances, the Sandu parents never abandoned their children and they found great relief when HOA’s daily care center opened its doors for service to their children. Their hopes were to one day have electricity in their home so that Ionela and George will no longer have to do their homework by candle light. They hoped to one day have money enough to replace the plastic in their windows with real glass. And they hoped to one day get over the daily fear that they may not have enough money to buy food for their children.

The Sandu home was a one-room shelter made from cardboard, a completely deteriorating home-made adobe type dwelling with a plastic roof and plastic windows. Regardless of how fate treated the Sandu family, Ionela and George were children who were forever friendly and always smiling. They were never complaining, never saying they were too cold in the brutal winter.

Fortunate for these two, they had a special place to visit, a House of Angels where they would get hot meals and assistance with their homework. And it was at this House of Angels that they watched films of Hansel and Gretel. They were always hoping and dreaming that one day the angels would bring them a cottage like the one in the story.

In fact, the angels at the center had told them that indeed they would one day have their dream, they needed to believe. They asked without wavering through weeks and months on end, “Is it true?”. The answer was always, without wavering, a resounding “Yes!”

Those at the house of angels knew that money and bureaucracy were forever standing in the way. But the angels’ hope and faith also never wavered.

The situation turned suddenly. The Sandu family facing Romanian winter without electricity, was in danger of loosing this “home”. The shelter that housed them belonged to the grandmother of the children who at one time moved out with her two 40 year old handicapped sons into a kind of tent made of pieces of wood, plastic and other things. They now want their “house” back. If this were to have happened, the Sandu family would have had no place to stay.

Mother Sandu works hard to keep Ionela and George extremely clean and takes very good care of them but if they were to lose the “house” they currently lived in, the kids would immediately be taken by child protection to a foster family. The mother said if this happened “her life would be worthless because she only lives for her children”. Something had to be done very quickly to save the home environment of this dear family.

Finally… asking day after day, the dearest dream of all dreams of these children came true, they had a house that was truly a home!

Operation Habitat was launched in July of 2008. The funds were never raised to fulfill this dream. But during the desperate hours, House of Angels never gave up. With the knowledge that the Sandu family were soon to lose their home, a relentless search turned up a miracle. A company with a compassionate owner had a pre-fab type dwelling, and it was priced at 2,000 euros, the price was cut in half for the benefit of the Sandu family after he heard the story.

At 1000 euros (approximately $1,500 USD), a deal was finally made. There is continued hope that current negotiations with the Gaesti Mayor will result in bringing electricity into the house, something this family has never known. Since the family does not have a stable income, this poses a problem as well, but a simple light bulb and a heater would warm this family and create a really wonderful environment in which to raise children.

With no funds available to have the house transported or re-assembled, our dedicated Gelu “George” the HOA administrator and his generous friends recently disassembled the house and then transported it to the Sandu family to reassemble it there. Arriving late at night, time only allowed for unloading, so the family turned sentinel over the logs by night to ensure they would not be stolen.

The next morning the sun shone bright upon the labors of the workers. Gelu and friends spent the day putting the house back together, with the help of the family. Ionela and George refused to eat or do anything, instead staying close by to help.

Simona Stewart, House of Angels founder was amazed: “I noticed little George far-away in a daydream, thinking probably that he will have a real room for the first time in his life. The contrast between the old house and the new one was just stunning. It was desperation vs. hope. It was a revival of life. The family was so happy and grateful.”

Now we need your help. We must raise the $1500 to pay for the house since we decided to just go ahead with this dream with approaching harsh winter.

Can you please make this your covenant with us to be a part of this special dream for these children?

What would make this even better is if we had a donor generous enough to help us keep assisting this wonderful family as a sponsor.