A Daring Adventure

I read a quote the other day that said, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” Well, I have been in Romania just more than a week and I can already tell that this summer will be a daring adventure.

I figured it was about time that I explained what I am doing over here in Eastern Europe. Let me fill you in. Each morning we get ready and head to an orphanage. We work at the orphanage taking care of the children there for the first half of the day. Then we walk home to have lunch. As soon as we finish lunch we walk about thirty minutes to a nearby children’s hospital. At the hospital we go from floor to floor asking the nurses if there are children without parents there. For the second half of the day we take care of the children in the hospital who have been left or abandoned. When we are done at the hospital we come home and eat dinner, pass out, wake up, and repeat. It’s a hard, exhausting, beautiful life here in Romania.

The children in the orphanage are divided into rooms based on age and level of disability. (Many of the children in the orphanage are severely disabled.) I work in the room with the most severely disabled children. They are all bedridden, most are in cribs. I spend the morning stretching and massaging their tight, deformed limbs. Some of them are ticklish. I live for their smiles.

The orphanage is a beautiful place, but it is hard for me. I feel so many emotions there. I feel anger towards the people who have abandoned these children. I feel extreme respect and love for the workers in the orphanage who devote their lives to them. I feel fear that I will do something wrong and hurt the children and fear that what I am doing doesn’t matter. I feel loneliness because I am often the only worker in the room and none of my children can speak. I feel sorrow for the children: that they have never known life outside of these cribs, that they have been rejected by the people who should have loved them the most, and I feel sorrow thinking about the lives they “could have lived”. And then, there are short burst of perfect joy. Smiles. Songs. They hold my hand.

The hospital is very similar. Lots of emotions. Beautiful moments. Yesterday at the hospital I spent two hours holding a newborn baby. He was left there and has nobody to take care of him. The nurses do what they can, but there aren’t enough workers to be with all of the children. I named the baby Neo.

I have hope for these children ONLY because of my belief in God. I believe that He loves every child in that orphanage and every child in the hospital. Because of the poor choices of others, these children live hard, dark lives. But I know that someday, somehow God will lift them out of it. Someday they will be happy and whole and strong.

All of us will have that day.