Carrie Garavan – Comber

Carrie (47) lives in Clare and is a trained nurse. She spent a year in Videle orphanage in Romania from 1990-91 with Comber –for a future without orphanages (formerly Comber Romanian Orphanage Appeal). She has worked in public healthcare research and education since the 1990s, mostly recently with the University of Limerick.

 I was back in Dublin, we’re going back now to the early ‘90s, and I was studying for a Public Relations Graduate Diploma in Dublin and through that I became involved in some, if you like, public relations work on a voluntary basis, so fundraising… Well, as it happened, I ended up at the Comber office. So I was working in the office and the task was fundraising and working with events. I mean there was a million pounds raised in the first week – I still have the newspaper clipping somewhere at home. It was huge! I was on the phones – people were terrific. I became involved in the organization and then after my exams I decided to go and work for the summer in Romania as a volunteer with Comber. So I left for Bucharest with a friend of mine in June of 1990, World Cup year! I was probably 27 at the time.

It was just after the so called revolution in Romania, it was just six months after independence. And the idea was that, a number of us we would at that time, that we would come to work in Videle which was an institution housing 160 mentally, physically, and emotionally, ‘handicapped’ was the word that was used at the time, children of all ages from a few months right up until…there were adults, quite a lot of them, living in the institution. I decided I was only going to stay for 3 months originally but then stayed the whole summer and was offered a post I think come that September as a coordinator. So I came home I think and picked up some more stuff and headed back and stayed for the whole year.

I suppose originally when I went to work in the orphanage, Comber had been there for a number of months but the conditions were dreadful. I mean the first thing that hits you I think when we got there are I suppose the smells and the silence, even though we’re talking about an institution or a building that had 160 children…we didn’t know where they were. And originally, we were only allowed access to the bottom floor which has the youngest children and gradually, as we moved through that and got it organized and refurbished, we were allowed access to the second floor which housed the 8 to 12 year olds. And then on the top floor were very much the older children up to 18. They were adults really. And the situation at the time was that they turned 18 and became adults they were moved to psychiatric hospitals. So a lot of them were lost. We never really actually knew what happened to them.

What do I say? I loved it, oh I think I loved the work I mean there’s no doubt about it. I probably still would describe it as one of the best jobs of my life, I think it was great. But it was hard, you know it was very hard… When we got their first I mean we didn’t have any fresh food …Romania back in the early ‘90s was quite a different place than  it is now, and there was very little fresh food, you had to queue for everything; there was no bread, milk, eggs, anything fresh, so we really lived off canned food which came in trucks from Ireland. Our heating was an issue, our transport was dreadful, and we were travelling to Videle every day which is about an hour and a half’s drive so we would leave every morning before 7 and we didn’t get home sometimes until about 8, 9 at night, so there were long days and I think it eventually takes its toll in you.

A lot the children they were not toilet trained … First of all we have to go back, there were no toilets. So once the toilets were installed, we had to toilet train a lot of the children. When we arrived, they were using just rags and nappies, the laundry was in the basement, none of the machines worked so in terms of hygiene, the conditions were dreadful. So, you had to look at the big picture first …  you have to  start with the basics -  in terms of cleaning up the environment before you can do anything else.

So what we had to do initially, was we had brought in nappies from Ireland, trucks and trucks of them which was fine … so obviously we could clean up the environment in terms of toilets and training and faeces and urine in cots and so on and now we had disposable nappies.  But then there was the huge issue of getting rid of the disposable nappies, so we had to bring in the idea of having skips, you know hiring of skips and sort of waste management companies… But then you had the skip but you couldn’t get rid of it which would be full of used nappies and attract vermin and so on and even some of the children would scavenge in the bin because that was just a way of life for them. So issues like that came up.

So we had a programme for toilet training and potty training and it all had to be coordinated and once we started with basics and the other things we didn’t have a dependency on disposable nappies which was quite some progress you know.  So very much focused, focused again on this idea of retraining so meal time had to be very much timed and on time. So 12 o’clock was lunch so you start to get them ready, you do the hand washing, they were toileted before lunch, hand washing sit them down and then to teach the younger ones to spoon feed themselves, feed themselves, stay with their own dish… All of that took a lot of time, it took a lot of time.

Well I think on hindsight now I’d we looked very much the primary needs…I mean what was going to improve the conditions these children were living in and that was very much  physical.  I mean there was no need for antibiotics and bandages and band aids and blood pressure equipment and high tech equipment. Often I think there’s a huge confusion there about what is actually needed and I think that a needs assessment is very important when you go into the situation at first.

I would say physical environment first and its almost like you work from the outside, in so physical in terms of the building itself leaking, glass for the windows… Laundry, there was no laundry – it didn’t exist so you had 160 children – a lot of them, most of them , probably half of them not toilet trained and all of these rags were going down to this laundry which didn’t work. You know you had to look at their environment where they lived 24 hours a day so we would do things like painting murals on the wall, simple cotton throws, and curtains, putting down lino, getting plastic tables and chairs, and then once we cleaned that up a bit…I think the Romanians could say, ok, even for them this was a pleasant environment for them to come into work every day and they used to work 12 hour shifts which was very long days for them.

Probably the second floor I would say with the 8 to 12 year olds was probably the most difficult because these were all kept, initially when we got there, they were all kept in corners. The carers worked as wardens really, and they stood at the door and kept all the children in the corner most of the time… naked and sitting on a couple of mattresses … and if they moved then the were beaten or shouted at.  So they were herded into a corner and kept like that all day so obviously that had to be changed … how would I describe, the mentality of the carers, we had to work with them as well.

So we set up training programmes for them to see these children as, well I suppose other than sheep to be herded, I couldn’t say like I wouldn’t use the word animals but they…again I suppose you had to look at the situation like it was easy to judge them but there was only one carer for maybe 30 children in one room? So, with no stimulation, nothing to play with, probably hungry most of the day, infestation of lice was a big issue, worm infestation, skin diseases, all of that, so it took time to work though it.

The thing was not to kind rush it, because they were very suspicious of us of course at first because people thought, now what are they doing here? Either they’re people who can’t get jobs in their own country, or they’re here to abuse our children or we were here in some way to take these children and steal them or sell them. So trust, the whole idea of building trust was very important it was very much working alongside the carers that I felt was one of the things I thought was important.

So that was very important I think to work with them and not sort of come in and take a top-down approach but my attitude was to work from the bottom up so we worked with them. We ran training programmes for them … now they all had children, it’s not to say they didn’t know how to train their own children. But we had to very much work on their attitude and their beliefs towards these children.            

So they very much bought into this – inclusion was very important so asking them first and then taking their suggestions …  It was very much, there was no point in all of the Irish doing it, you know that my philosophy had always been to train the locals and the carers working in the orphanage.

There s a hospital to the front of the orphanage so the water supply – if there was ever an issue with the water supply, the orphanage was cut off and the hospital maintained the water supply. What we discovered over time was that the hospital would just cut off the water supply anyway because they didn’t feel that it was needed. Again, there was this idea that…a lot of people never really knew what was behind the hospital and that’s really locally, that in this building there was 160 mentally and physically handicapped children.  So that was an issue, we had to go down and negotiate with the hospital – why does the water keep going off etc. So that took time to discuss and negotiate  and then to come to an understanding with them.

There was another foreign organization working with this hospital – and they didn’t know anything that was going on behind in the orphanage and there wasn’t enough communication and collaboration I thought so they didn’t know about this orphanage.  In the meantime they were sending these high tech high beds to the hospital but this was a hospital which  couldn’t deal with them, they didn’t have electrical  sockets in the wall to deal with these high tech beds. So there as a big mismatch there – they had to train the people how to use the equipment but then when something went wrong with the equipment there was no backup to repair it. There was a lot of issues there but we just spoke to the hospital and found out and came to an understanding, which was you know you provide certain stuff and we had all this medical bandages and you know dressings we didn’t need so we just we would give it all to them.

We had a big issue with the local gypsies because the volunteers would take the train into Bucharest and so there was distance to walk between the orphanage and the train station so the volunteers were being really….robbed and assaulted by the local Roma gypsies. They were very much ostracized in the community…so to the point that some volunteers wouldn’t take the train and they wouldn’t come to work so I though something has to be done about this. But, a couple of months prior to this, a little gypsy girl had turned up at the orphanage and she had been burnt. The hospital refused to treat her because she was Roma gypsy but this child was quite burnt. So the mother was screaming and crying and the carers at the orphanage said, ‘No get away, get away’, and eventually someone called myself and one of the other girls at the office and said, ‘Goodness the state of her’. And so she said, ‘Please please, you have all the medicines’…so we started to treat her burns every day for probably about a month we had her dressed every day and we had to have the Romanian translation which was …well the carers were quite resentful of this, they didn’t like it at all. But then as the summer came and we started to take the train, and there were still attacks happening on the volunteers and the only to deal with that is you’re gonna have to talk to who’s in charge. Well who’s in charge? It turns out he’s the king of the gypsies and lives down in the village.

So I got the translator I said, ‘Come on we’re going down, let’s ask him,’ because the volunteers were refusing to come to work.  So we go and the house is quite big compared to what the locals live in and we go in and we meet the king of the gypsies and it turns out his wife is the mother of this girl called Roxanne who had been badly burnt. So then you know they recognized us and so I said, ‘We have a problem’ to this big man and explained our problem to him and told him we wanted it to stop, and it did – just like that. There were no more problems and the gypsies would wave and smile at us now, and so our volunteers could now take the train which was a huge…it made a huge difference to us because the bus was off the road and there was no way of getting down to the village. So things like that work so the carers saw… they said, ‘Well how did you do that?’ and I suppose they themselves saw a different side to the Roma community because as I say there’s a huge I suppose gap I suppose, a divide between the two communities.

One of the things you had to be very cognizant of …a lot of the people who worked in the orphanage were seeing these children, they were called irrecoupables, receiving a lot of equipment that they themselves didn’t have. So I became very aware of that so I think the whole idea of bringing in all these trucks full of fantastic stuff from Ireland and other countries…it wasn’t to our advantage, it created a lot of resentment. So we started to source a lot of materials or equipment or resources locally and that actually was very good because it gave money to the economy locally…You have to work with people really to make progress. There’s no point in coming in and telling everybody what to do and having this fantastic building in the middle of nowhere in this remote agricultural village …when most of these people didn’t have either electricity or running water. So there is no point in creating this, ivory tower. It wasn’t going to work.

The only way it was going to work was if the local people who worked there worked with us…absolutely… and in the village as well. Anything we wanted done locally, repairs or like wise, I felt that there was need to get it done locally, get it repaired locally and pay the going price for whatever we needed. We’d go down to the market and we’d do our vegetable shopping there and this was great for the locals, you know, and we’d give money to the economy locally. I thought it was very important to cut down on this dependency on trucks coming from Ireland. 

I mean we got more value for money with having cash to spend there, than any amount of trucks coming from Ireland. And unnecessary things like medicines… you know there was this idea at the time that people would give medicines for Romania and Eastern Europe but most of it was out of date stuff. Or medicines, you know, diuretics, anti-biotics, the sort of drugs that would never be used for children at the time.

If there were issues or if they had difficulties the staff  could come to us as well and request something like…it could be very small but, for example we would get wheelchairs. All this stuff would come in trucks and a lot of it we never needed.  We didn’t need wheelchairs. And the wheelchairs didn’t work in the orphanage because there was no lift and the corridors are quite narrow and…so we had for example, a family would come and they had this sister who lived at home, they had taken care of her all her life and she was quite physically handicapped, so we gave her a wheelchair and for them that was huge… They knew than that it wasn’t all about the children and they were very appreciative.

We discouraged the volunteers, I did personally, from going home and bringing back gifts so that they were not allowed to be selective in which child they liked and so on. So that was very much discouraged, I didn’t encourage that at all. No favoritism or preferences because it created jealousy within the group … you have to remember these children had lived together for quite a number of years. There were difficulties with the children having their little possessions as well because the bartering and trading still went on, you know the pilfering was a big issue so everybody had to have the same thing. So you know it was a constant battle. So the more you give sometimes the more was taken from you so we had to be very basic really about what we provided.

We had difficulties with pilfering … you see there’s no point in bringing in all this beautiful stuff for these children who were never going to use most of it so pilfering was a big issue. Punishments were quite severe for those who were caught pilfering, not by us, but by their own superiors. So I think the way I say it we could put s system in place… for instance Aer Lingus had given away all their old uniforms, adult female uniforms – beautiful skirts and tops made by some big Irish designer.  They were no good to us so what we did was, we set up a little thrift shop so you could come in and buy things– the women could buy these uniforms for a couple of lei at the time, it wasn’t much but it was very affordable for them so it cleared our stock rooms and it gave them what they wanted also. So this sort of system, it worked quite well. But there was still a problem with pilfering… I remember once there were beautiful purple tracksuits came over, red ones and pink ones… all from Ireland but it was something that didn’t exist so a lot of these women would want them for their older children and so they would take them and sell them. So the only way to get rid of that was to buy local so it wasn’t attractive anymore to steal because it looked just the same as you’d get down the road.

I had up to 40 volunteers at a time and it was always changing, I think the minimum at the time was probably 20,  the turnover often …..it seemed quite quick, you know, you’d have people just getting settled and then they’d be gone and then another team would arrive and you’d have to spend another amount of time,  giving them the induction programme. We had some people who came that were completely unsuitable to the environment. It just didn’t work for them. It’s, you know you really have to it’s not to go out and see these awful conditions, some people just didn’t do well at all. Also, it wouldn’t be untrue to say that of other countries. If you go to the Middle East as well you have to live by the rules. You have to have some sense of the way people live and be respectful of it and not judge.

Sometimes, you know, volunteerism is a great thing, but people do it for a lot of altruistic reasons and they’re quite suitable for it, both mentally and physically. Other people can often be…it’s an escape from something. It’s a place to go to get away from a difficulty or an issue and they’re not suited, they’re too of fragile I think. We had a couple of people who had been through events in their lives, could have been a trauma, a bereavement, and decide, Ok, I’ll go to Romania, I’ll go to Africa. And they go but they’re too fragile. I don’t think it’s always the best time to volunteer because depending on when you go, you definitely have to be in the full of your health, as I say both mentally and physically to maintain or to stay with the team because it is hard. 

I suppose looking back, I probably would have said the best job of my life which brought a certain satisfaction, put it that way. I still look back at it and the vision I had of what I had to do, what I set about doing, think for me, I was very satisfied. That was a job; I mean it was time well spent. I achieved most of what I set out to achieve I think the changes that occurred while I was there were very positive.

But you don’t know… what happened to the children?  I do have books… I’ve kept all my books from the bottom floor where we kept a record of the progress of children. So, what they were like initially and their first assessment and then we assessed them and had progress so by the end of the year you could see that the non-talkative and non-interactive child was now moving around, had become potty-trained, knew how to feed themselves, had developed a certain self-confidence, were smiling…I have those records. You look back and you can say to yourself, yes there was….we must have made some impact.

I suppose of all the regrets I have… sometimes you think of this that you have done all of this for so long and how I suppose Comber was in there for 4 or 5 years in Videle and then (clap) that its it, the exit and we’re gone. There’s nothing. So that’s why I talk about sustainability so I don’t know how it closed in the end… was a gradual withdrawal? Or was it just all out and you hear this clank on the door and it all goes back to the way it was. I don’t know.

The idea of partnership with the institution that you’re going to work with is important because eventually, and it was true of Comber as well, that you eventually pull out, you leave, and you have to know that they can continue on their own now that you’re gone.  So you really have had to train these people when you’re there so that when you go, they’re not dependent on you. I think now that looking back, we didn’t, they were still too dependent on us by the time Comber pulled out that certainly is my sense.

I think it’s been phenomenal that the charity is still going. I think it’s changed course which is good – I think the group homes are fantastic – it had to change really… I think its great that its still going for such a small organization – you know it started you know quite small as a small group of people but obviously there was something … we used to have this writing above the door on the staff room in Videle – saying, ‘Everyone who walks through this door has a part in turning hell into heaven’ and everybody used to sign the wall.. It was very true you know because I suppose everybody came and gave something and I think a lot of people took a lot away… often they were very upset about leaving, they didn’t want to leave but again I think there comes a time when you have to move on.

I have great memories of living in Bucharest, of going to the opera and paying maybe 5 lei to go to the opera and this was fantastic, I’d try to go every Friday evening. And I’d get off the bus and go to the opera … I think it was fantastic and everyone was dressed – the women were in their furs …pearls so there was a whole other life – we lived really between these two worlds.  I mean we lived and worked 5 days a week in this incredibly difficult sad world and then you go to the opera and the ladies are in their furs and their diamonds and their beautiful clothing. I mean I have great memories of Bucharest as a city, I loved the city. It was very much I don’t know…going back in time I suppose. It was a very beautiful city, very nice buildings and most of the people didn’t know about all of these orphans and all these irrecouperables which was you know… the whole idea. I would never judge because its very true – we did know about the orphanages here …in Ireland and the way the state was taking care of our children…

I don’t know that we even questioned it you know? See, the way I see it, these people had very little, they were so focused on just getting through the day and having enough food and surviving. They haven’t time, they don’t think about all of those other problems… the whole day was just getting through each day and getting enough food for their own family. And that’s even true in Ireland today. People there are so caught up in their survival of themselves that they can’t and don’t have time to give to others. I think it would be too easy to criticize and judge.

I don’t know if I was ready to go back because probably because part of me thinks, well I hope this change is going to  be wonderful but of course the realist in me knows that its not. You know its not going to be perfect by any means yet. Probably has a long way to go. I do know that in terms of the social care structures, this has just started to be tackled… what do we do with children…unwanted children? I mean here in Ireland we have our own issues with that. I don’t think that the care of children will have changed much really. The idea of…the way we think of handicapped children in Romania, I don’t know that that’s changed. I don’t expect to see leaps and bounds.

Who wants to go now, Romania 2010? Volunteers going over today… I suppose maybe I’d probably try and ask why they want to it or if they heard about it first or how did they visualize it what do they think needs to be done there. I suppose what information are they working with? Are they working with information from the 1990s or have they more up to date information …because people still have that, you talk about Romania and they still think, ‘Oh my god all these starving children, locked up’. Is that the image to have, or do we say – ‘There is a modern Romania.’