One Woman Proves You CAN Make a Difference
By Dianne McCarthy

From the moment Angie Thomson climbed down into the sewer tunnels of Bucharest, Romania and encountered the children living under the ground, her life has not been the same.

Angie first went to Romania in 1992 out of curiosity. Working for five years in a high-pressure job in Silicon Valley at Digital Equipment Corp., she decided to accept a buyout and visit her parents, Lyle and Dorene Thomson, missionaries working in Brussels. From there, she joined a humanitarian transport delivering supplies to one of Romania's many orphanages just outside of Bucharest. The trip was a mission in itself.

“It was an ordeal” she said. “It took 26 hours in December through snow and ice. The van we were in kept breaking down. ”

When she arrived at the orphanage she was shocked at what she found: children starved for love, sleeping on cold metal beds with no heat. Angie cried for weeks.

“I saw children living in the middle of the icy cold winter with no heat,” she said. “The boys in the orphanage had no warm clothes, many of them had shoes with holes in them and no socks on. A couple of the boys had hepatitis.”

As bad as the conditions at the Priboien orphanage were, however, they hardly prepared Thomson for her fourth visit to Romania. A short time after her initial trip, a friend showed her an article in a French magazine about the street children of Bucharest, who found refuge and warmth against the bitter winter weather in the city's underground sewer tunnels. Angie wanted to see if the article was true and took another trip to Romania in 1993.

“I crawled down into the sewer and several children came out from where they were living,” Thomson said. “They pleaded ‘Take us. Don't leave us down here in the cold.’”

The children, as young as seven and eight years old, were addicted to glue sniffing to mask their hunger pangs and the bitter cold, Angie explained. She later discovered many of the abandoned children of Bucharest had been forced into prostitution and had contracted the AIDS
virus.

Four years had passed since the 1989 revolution and the overthrow of the communist dictator Ceausescu. Angie began to grasp the extent of the crisis facing the street children of the country's capital city. The children were the products of a decree put forth by the former dictator, that all Romanian women must bear at least five children or be severely taxed. He also banned all forms of contraception, believing the policy would ensure a strong work and military force. Instead, it filled the streets with runaways and abandoned children whose parents could not support them. To survive, the children beg for money or prostitute themselves. At night they sleep wherever they can find refuge from the elements. The lucky ones find a home underground in the sewer tunnels.

As Angie saw the reality of their bleak existence, she asked herself, “I wonder what I can do to help these children?”

Angie is the youngest of three daughters in a close knit missionary family. Growing up she lived in Washington state, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Florida and California. When she was 12 she realized she wanted to do missions work, and had the opportunity to meet Mark Bunting, a missionary who worked with Mother Theresa. Listening to him that day changed her life.

She majored in vocal music at Bethany College in Scotts Valley, CA and did missions work during the summer. After graduation she had to pay off student loans and took a temp job with Digital Equipment Corp. in Palo Alto, California. Within a few years, she became a field test manager in charge of presenting the company's latest products. She was making $50,000 a year and living in a comfortable apartment in San Jose. On weekends she played softball, shopped at Nordstroms and enjoyed lattes. However, something was missing from her life.

That's when Angie took her leap of faith. She was able to make connections with some powerful Romanian political leaders. Meeting with two Bucharest mayors and the city council, she proposed establishing a shelter for the children. Soon after, city officials donated a building to the her and in 1994 Angie founded the Children's Relief Network to raise funds for the project she was beginning.

Angie made a lifelong commitment to these children - there’s no turning back. She does not deal with adoption. Her focus is to raise the children in Romania and teach them skills that will help them give back something to their country. The children are proud to be Romanian and want to help the other children that are left on the streets.

Today, with a staff of 40 in Romania and seven in the U.S., Children's Relief Network operates two children's homes. Children, ages 2 to 18 reside in the homes, which have a combined capacity of 50: House of Hope provides a home for girls and Villa of Hope for boys. In addition to providing shelter and food, the staff aims to provide the children with a future through educational opportunities.

After five years most of the children are in public school. “It's very difficult when you have 12-year-olds who have been on the streets for four or five years, so if necessary, we tutor them at home." Angie says.

" Education is a major focus because without it the children will have no future in Romania.”

A third program, the Hope Rescue Center, provides hot meals, warm clothing and medical assistance daily to about 200-250 children still living on the streets.

“Hope Rescue Center was started to keep the children alive,” Thomson said. “At least it allows the children to have some point of hope in their lives.”

The organization has recently started a fourth program for orphaned girls who have outgrown government institutions. At age 17, the girls are turned out of the state orphanages and often become street girls and prostitutes to survive. The Refuge of Hope is a rehabilitation phase of the project. A small group of these girls are employed as domestic workers for the other programs. Housing and vocational training is provided for them.

Future plans include building a “Village of Hope” where more street children will be able to live in individual homes with house parents. There will be a vocational center, a school, a medical center and a hotel which will provide training and employment for the older children as well as other Romanians.

How does Angie cope with the sadness? Just as the street kids have honed their survival skills, Angie takes strength from the Bible and prayer. She is strengthened by words of encouragement and support from family and friends when times get rough. The children in her homes and at the Rescue Center are also a constant reminder that she is making a difference in these children's lives.

Being a missionary kid, Angie has seen much poverty, especially in Central and South America. “The difference,” she said, “is that these kids were living with their immediate or extended families, having someone to hold and love them. Also, the weather is relatively mild compared to Romania. When I saw Romanian children as young as four- and five years old who were left to survive on the street in the middle of winter I couldn't imagine a worse situation on earth. I had to do something. I knew I couldn't save them all, but decided to try to save as many as I can. I still see street children dying in winter and it breaks my heart.”

While the Romanian government is committed to making improvements for the street children, the need is overwhelming and there are few resources inside Romania. Currently, foreign non profits and social agencies supply most of the funds to help these children. Through financial contributions people can made a huge difference in the life of a child. Angie said, “People should realize each one of us can do something very tangible.”

For more information about Angie’s ministry, contact:
Children's Relief Network, International
221 G Mt. Hermon Rd.
Scotts Valley, California 95066
or call (831) 430-9070.
E-mail: coh@romanianchildren.org
http://www.romanianchildren.org .

Angie Tells Her Story
By Angie Thomson

Thousands of abandoned tiny children are living today in the sewers, streets, and train stations of Romania. During the icy cold winters, children as young as four and five years old crawl down into the sewer holes to find the only warmth available to them.

Seventy percent of these children are addicted to glue sniffing, which numbs their hunger pangs while destroying their young brains. Countless of these young children have been exploited into prostitution, and some as a result have been exposed to the AIDS virus.

Romania is known as the “land of the orphans”. This reputation is largely due to the legacy of its former ruthless dictator, Ceausescu and his pro-natalist policies.

Ceausescu, the former communist dictator made it mandatory for women to have five children and banned all forms of contraception. All this was done in hopes of building a strong nation. Unmarried women over 25 years of age and married couples without children, were severely taxed for not producing children.

Ceausescu robbed his nation economically, thereby making it impossible for families to care for their own children. As a result of this, thousands of children were abandoned.

Many women also died during child-birth because of terrible nutrition and poor medical conditions in the country. Thus the legacy of the Romanian orphans.

I began working in Romania during the fall of 1992, just shortly after having left a successful high-tech management position in Silicon Valley. I worked coordinating relief transports to an orphanage in Pitesti, Romania, via a fellow Christian relief organization. What I experienced on my first trip to that orphanage in Pitesti, changed my life forever.

I saw children living in the middle of the icy cold winter with no heat. They had no warm clothes and a couple of the younger boys had hepatitis. However beyond their material poverty, they had no one in the world to love them. After that first trip to Romania, I literally cried everyday for about two weeks.

As horrible as I thought the initial conditions at the Pitesti orphanage were, they did not at all compare with what I was soon to discover about the Bucharest street children.

Soon after my first trip to Romania, a friend of mine handed me an article in a French magazine about the Bucharest street children. When I read how these street children lived in the sewers during the winter, I had to go to Bucharest and see for myself whether or not this was true.

My friend, Cristian Soimaru is a Romanian attorney and had been working with street children on his own. He was also trying to launch a project for them. I asked him to show me the street children so he took me down to the North train station in Bucharest.

I wasn’t prepared for what I saw that winter night in Bucharest. Many of the street children live near the North train station. Cristian took me to several sewer holes in front of the train station. When I peered down into one of those manholes, I saw a young girl holding a bag of glue over her mouth climbing up out of the sewer. After she climbed out to meet me, ten or twelve other children followed.

I couldn’t believe my eyes, children as young as seven and eight years old, filthy dirty and high on glue fumes suddenly surrounded us and began begging for food, money, and any love and attention they could get.

After seeing those children crawl out of the sewer hole that bitterly cold night, I committed in my heart to do something for the Bucharest street children. Shortly after, God in his miraculous design allowed me to meet a man by the name of Peter Dugulescu.

Peter Dugulescu is a member of the Romanian parliament and hero of the 1989 revolution that overthrew Ceausescu. His story is told in Chuck Colson’s book, “The Body”. When I met Peter he told me that just one week prior to our meeting, a sectoral mayor of Bucharest had approached him requesting Peter’s help in solving the great problem with the street children in Bucharest.

After that first meeting with Peter, he suggested I come to Bucharest to meet with him and the mayor. I did so, and several months later, the City Council voted to donate a building to us for the development of a home for street children. Our goal was to establish a city/campus where needy young people’s physical, educational, spiritual, medical, and vocational needs could truly be met.

The building was donated on February 16, 1994 under the condition that we were to have the building renovated and the project started by the beginning of August. I had six short months in which to raise funds to renovate the building, acquire all furnishings and equipment, hire staff, enroll children, and raise my personal funds with which to get to Romania.

After much prayerful consideration, we named that building “Orasul Sperantei” (which in Romanian means City/Village of Hope). The day the building was donated, I had no financial support nor any full-time staff to help me. I knew I had to work hard, pray hard, and believe God for some fast miracles. God performed miracle after miracle and brought people into my path that literally helped make Orasul Sperantei a reality for the street children of Bucharest. A building team from the USA came and transformed the old, filthy, run-down building into a beautiful home where orphaned children could come and receive shelter.

The project was completed on August 29th, the next day we set out to bring in our first children to Orasul Sperantei.

At about 10 p.m. on August 30th, Cristian and I kneeled in prayer asking God to direct us that night to the children that we should initially take into Orasul Sperantei. We finished praying and as we left the building and rounded the corner, there immediately in front of us was a child lying in the middle of the sidewalk playing with matches. We asked little Florin if he would like a home to live in where people would love and take care of him, he said yes! Florin was our first recruit!

We then went to the North train station to a group street children who had been sleeping there during the summer. A group of us from Orasul Sperantei had been bringing food and clothing to the children every night for about a month. We had told them that we had been preparing a home for them to live in called “Orasul Sperantei”. Every night the children would ask us, “when is the home going to be ready?”. Well, that night when we went to feed the children, they asked us, “when are you going to take us to Orasul Sperantei?”, It was one of our greatest moments to be able to tell them they could come to their new home that night!

As we approached the train station, a boy named Sorin, was sobbing and holding his foot. Someone had thrown a large stone at him and broken his ankle. God had sent us that particular night I believe, just as Sorin was in so much pain. Cristian took Sorin into his arms, we gathered the rest of the children, and rode the subway across town to our new home, Orasul Sperantei.

The children had no idea what to expect, but they were excited! When we arrived at Orasul Sperantei we took them in tobe showered. Many of the children needed three or four showers to get all of the dirt off. All of them had head and body lice, and other body sores. We washed their hair with lice shampoo and rubbed their skin down with body lice lotion.

The children were so excited to receive their own set of clothes and shoes. After they were cleaned and clothed, we took them into the dining area for their first meal. We let the children eat and drink until they were stuffed.

Finally at about midnight we took the children upstairs to the rooms we had prepared for them. They were so happy to have their own beds! I don’t think they settled down until about 2:00 a.m. What a night! A miracle had truly taken place. God had allowed us to rescue these children out of the dark pit they had been living in!

The following days and weeks proved to be the most challenging of our lives. Most of the children had been addicted to glue sniffing, and accustomed to running the streets day and night. They had no practice of keeping themselves clean, no toilets, most of the food they ate was found in the garbage, so needless to say they were going through animmense transition.

Because the children were going through withdrawal from glue sniffing, many of them were violent. A couple of the boys jumped out of the windows, some punched their hands through their bedroom windows, some of them cut themselves. Some of them cut me with glass, others would bite us. They were truly going through cold-turkey. It was very difficult to see small children going through such suffering.

Beyond their glue sniffing addiction, they suffer from terribly painful emotional scars. Each child has a different story of their background, but every one of them is either an orphan or has been abandoned. When the children first arrived at Orasul Sperantei, they would hide in the corner and rock back and forth or just repeatedly hit their heads against the wall. Much of their behavior was due to the lack of affection they had in their lives.

At the time we were under-staffed to respond to the needs of the children. We were on a shoe-string budget and couldn’t afford to hire additional people to work with us, and therefore worked around the clock with these children.

We really had no idea what a tremendous challenge it would be working with these children and their unique needs. We absolutely needed God’s strength and wisdom in dealing with these children. We turned to God in prayer hourly asking for his miraculous power to begin healing these children’s emotions and bodies.

God was at work! After taking the children for medical check-ups, we spoke with several schools in the area about enrolling the children in school and the special needs they might have.

The first group of children we took in that night of August 30th were able to be enrolled for this present school year. They were so excited to be able to go to school. Many of our children have been living on the street for several years or most of their lives and are behind in their educations. The staff at Orasul Sperantei spends many hours after school in helping the children with their school work.

The children are making such incredible progress in every area of their lives. They are truly beginning to understand that they are loved and that Orasul Sperantei is a permanent home for them.

They receive love and understanding from the now Orasul Sperantei staff and are given individualized attention. Their bodies have settled down from their glue-sniffing withdrawals, and their emotions are beginning to be made whole. These children are not the same children we took in that August 30th night. They are truly beginning to feel as if they are part of a family.

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