ROM appears in the Nashville, TN paper The Tennessean! 
Address Orphans Romania PO Box 148145, Nashville, TN 37214-8145
Phone Oprhans Romania telephone: (615) 478-3203
Email Orphans Romania e-mail: roministries@bellsouth.net
Orphans in Romania PDF Print E-mail
Why is there such a problem with orphans in Romania? This question is difficult to explain and hard for Westerners to understand. The following paragraphs are generalities but give a good overall picture of the lives of orphans in Romania; however, every single case is unique and every orphan has a different story. This makes understanding and explaining the problems in Romania challenging.


Poor family

Poor family
Right now there are nearly 100,000 children in the orphanage system in Romania and more children are abandoned each day. Why is this? Until 1989 Romania was a communist country ruled by the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. During his rule he imposed harsh economic restrictions on his people causing mass poverty.


Poor village

This fact, coupled with the poor spiritual condition in Romania, made abandoning children to the orphanage system an easy solution as abortions were outlawed. Now that communism has fallen and people are free to do as they wish, Romania is second per capita worldwide in abortions.

Technically, many of the abandoned children in Romania are not orphans; they have parents. But their parents have rejected them and do not want them. This fact may elicit compassion from you and me, but generally it is not so in Romania. Orphans are looked down upon and are not helped like disadvantaged people are helped in America. They grow up in orphanages without role models or mentors. They are psychologically, emotionally, and physically abused. They are taught little about life skills and then when they finish school, most of the time around eighteen years of age, they are forced to leave the orphanages.



Street kids in park
At this point the government offers them no help. Unless some organization steps in and helps them, many become outcasts of society. Almost none are capable of making it on their own. Having been taught nothing about money, a work ethic, how to find a job or a place to live, paying bills, manners or even simple hygiene, many cannot fend for themselves and become jobless and homeless on the streets with other orphans. They beg and steal for food, become addicted to drugs and, worst of all, are lured into the underground world of prostitution. The children who are prostitutes in Romania could be considered fortunate in comparison with the many that are made sex slaves and taken to other countries where they are never heard from again.