Day #3-

Today was our first work day in the hospitals. Me, Hannah, and Janice worked the morning shift while the others stayed at the hotel or went to a village nearby. The first thought that popped into my head was "this is it?". I tried to prepare myself for what I would see, but I don't think anything could have prepared me for what I saw. First off the building had chipping paint with a dirty walkway that led to the front door. When we entered you could tell that cleanliness was not one of their concerns. Everything was dark and dingy. There was no front desk area at all! We got to the 6th floor where our storage room was. This floor was probably the nicest floor in the whole hospital...(which isn't saying much). At our meeting last night, Mihaela told us we would be working with the Genetics Ward. She said there were some genetic disability kids there but most were just overflow. When I walked in, I thought "this isn't too bad". But when I looked at the first kid(one who had a genetic disability) I actually thought about running out right then and there. It was heart breaking to see this two year old child who looked like a 8-month old laying on it's back and whimpering. This poor child couldn't even cry audibly because of the junk in it's lungs. Every breath it took you could just hear the congestion. The clothing situation is interesting. In the U.S. you can usually tell the gender of the child by the clothing...but not in this case. So i'm not even sure if this child was a boy or girl. Well anyway when I held this child(sammil was it's name) my heart was crushed. Through big, tear-filled, crusty brown eyes I could see pain. Sammil looked at me and as I started humming to it, it started to calm down and snuggle with me. I have to admit, at first I acted like Sammil had an infectious disease and for that i'm ashamed. But this was just a hurting child that really got no love. The hospitals had gotten better since last year. There was one nurse who showed love to the children, and for that I was grateful. But most of the other nurses yanked the children out of their cribs and roughly carried them to wherever. I got to witness a pick-up and a drop-off. The pick-up was very interesting as the parents came in with a pile of clothes maybe a foot high. By the time the couple was ready to leave all the clothes were on the child. The most effective thing I saw so far was the drop-off. A puffy eyed woman came in to the room I was working in and of course I didn't really understand but the nurses chased her out. Not 5 minutes later, the supervisor(or someone higher up) came in a started talking aggressively with the nurses. After that the puffy eyed lady came back in, gave her baby to the nice nurse, and walked out. The screams of the child still echo in my head. This child was changed quickly and placed in a crib. He cried for 30 minutes. We didn't want to pick him up automatically because we didn't want him to get used to being held but after that grueling 30 minutes or so, we gave in. How anyone could treat a child like this baffles my mind. Feeding the children was just as interesting. The nipples of the bottles were the size of a regular straw. The milk looked like melted butter with chunks of oatmeal in it. The baby Janice held downed the bottle in 2 minutes. The one baby I fed, Viola, took a little longer. She coughed and spit some up every 2 minutes. You could tell by looking in her eyes that she was very sick. After five hours we were done with our shift. Right now Lindsay is on the PM shift. Keep praying for us as this is very exhausting; emotionally and physically! For now, BLESSINGS FROM ROMANIA!

-Lesloe