Today was a simply fantastic day. The kids at the orphanage were great. I made progress with V. He is the one with severe autism. Even looking at him will cause him to throw whatever he has in his hand. Most of the time it is only a stuffed animal or a ball. Sometimes, he has had a truck or another large toy in his hand and I have to run as quickly as I can over to him before it gets thrown across the room, directly at me, or at one of the other kids and we end up with problems. I couldn’t figure out how to teach him. Even calling his name, he doesn’t respond most of the time and he doesn’t speak at all other than an occasional mumble. I have been trying to figure out a way to teach him how to just set the toy down. Finally, we had a breakthrough today. He understands what “Stai jos” is – which means sit down. Today, I put two and two together – he and I were playing with stuffed animals and I would point to the animal, look at him straight in the eye and immediately say, “stai jos.” Rather than throwing it, he would set it down on the bed. I kept working on this for a good 10 minutes with him. I’m hoping it wasn’t just pure luck – but that he was actually making some progress!
Later at the hospital, we went to see “Jacob” who was sound asleep when we arrived. We haven’t had a lot of other kids on the floor, so we decided to ask the nurses again if there were any without mothers. The nurses told us she had some older kids if we wanted to go visit them. They had family, but it was a really bad family situation. I'm guessing it had to do with their parents. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but I thought we may as well give it a try.
They pointed to the room and we opened the door just far enough to see in and saw 4 older kids lying in beds. Here, the kids don’t have their own rooms. Sometimes you will see 4-5 kids in the same room. With visitors, parents and nurses, these rooms get a bit crazy. This room only had two twin beds and a crib. One of the older boys was sleeping in the crib, two of them were sharing and their sister was on the other bed. When Kala and I looked in the room, immediately we were a little intimidated. Sometimes the older kids are hard because they know Romanian very well, we don’t know it very well and there is not a whole lot we can communicate with them. On top of that, I didn’t think Mr. Potato head, pinwheels and bubbles were going to entertain them. We opened the door and decided to make our best attempt.
We asked them their names and how old they were. They ranged from 10-17 years old. There were 3 brothers and 1 sister. We started trying to speak to them, and it wasn’t going anywhere. If anything, we looked ridiculous just standing there and me fumbling through my dictionary to ask them a simple question. As I stood there thinking to myself – “what are we doing?!” I remembered that I had packed the card game Uno in my backpack. (Typically I just bring my bag and go, but because we had switched partners yesterday, I decided to recheck my bag. I remember zipping my bag and feeling like I should pack Uno. I thought that was kind of weird because we had only had older kids once and we had been working with our same baby boy for the past two weeks. Nonetheless, I unzipped my bag and packed uno right before I left. Definitely a tender mercy.)
I pulled out Uno and asked them if they wanted to play. They seemed excited. We arranged a place on the bed and handed out the cards. Knowing only a few words, we were able to teach them how to play Uno and they loved it. Then, one of the older boys told his brother to grab something out of their drawer. He pulled out some face cards and asked if we wanted to play. They taught us a whole card game. It was amazing to see these kids playing together. I know nothing of their family situation, but I do know that they are incredibly close as brothers and sisters. You could tell that they looked out for each other and had an amazing bond. The older boy was always watching out for his brothers and even for his sister who is a few years older. When we entered the room, they were all just laying there in silence. After we had been there a few hours, they were laughing and joking around with us and with each other. It was amazing. I couldn’t believe how close they were as a family. I kept thinking about my own brothers and sisters and hoping that if I were in that same situation, we would be close enough to stick up for each other and to really be there for each other. It made me realize that I need to do better as a member of my own family and that family really is the most important thing that we have. For these kids, all that they had was each other.
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