Wednesday, September 27, 2006

I finally was feeling mostly better, so I got up early and went with Shannon to Dancu for the first time. We have to leave the apartment at 8:15 and catch a tramvite from Tirgu Cucu. We take it all the way to the end of the line and jump out on the end of the line tracks at the station. It takes us to pretty much ghettoville Romania where the dogs that roam the area are starving and hide behind trash bins glaring at you and where there is trash strewn EVERYWHERE. I’ve already seen a few dirty diapers ripped up and littered upon the ground. I think the street dogs must get into them. Anyway, I love it, but it makes me really sad. We don’t have to walk very far at all to get to the apartment building. We just find the big blue door that signifies it and ring them to let us in. The apartment itself is surprisingly nice. As far as I can tell, there’s a living room, kitchen, two bathrooms and two bedrooms. All of the workers who I’ve met thus far have been really nice to us. A few of them are even really intent on helping us learn the language, which is great. When we get there, we change into our scrubs and then go into the living room where all the kids are, and where the kids pretty much stay all day unless they are sleeping. The workers generally just leave us to do whatever we want and only once in a while do they come into the room and play with the kids for a few minutes. There are four kids in the apartment and all of them are fairly low functioning. First, there is Constantine. Constantine is a product of incest (his mentally challenged mother was raped by her father) and was also premature, so his problems are a product of being born underdeveloped and having bad genes. He is fairly frail and bent and lays on the couch or in his bed all day. He can move his head, possibly all the way from one side to the other, but with some difficulty. Also, he can move his legs and his arms somewhat, but usually will just move his hands around. He’s also at least partially blind. He doesn’t speak, but instead shows all of his emotion through either crying (sounds more like whimpering or whining) or laughing. Most of the time while he’s on the couch he’s usually fine just sitting there, but sometimes he’ll start crying. When he does you just have to try a few things until you figure out what he wants. Generally he’ll either want a massage, want to be tickled, want to be held or want to be turned around. If none of those, the stimulation from being in that room with the other kids may just be too much for him. In that case you would just take him to the back and spend a little one on one time with him there. Petrica has down syndrome, and though we’re probably not supposed to have favorites, he’s mine. He is fairly skinny, has brown hair and brown eyes and is 6. When I first went to Dancu, I couldn’t get him to interact with me like at all. I’d sit in front of him and try to get his attention, but he’d never look at me or acknowledge my presence in any way. He can sit up on his own, but often just flops to the side or flops forward. He’s incredibly flexible, but kind of lazy and unmotivated. He’s kind of off in his own world a lot of the time, which makes it really hard to teach him anything, because, well, he just doesn’t care! He’s always happy though and it doesn’t matter if he just fell on his head or what he’ll always laugh. He’s really ticklish, especially on the sides and in the armpits, so when you put your hands on his sides to pick him up he tenses up and gets this huge smile on his face. He’s also cross-eyed and just plain adorable. We’ve bonded and he totally responds to me know, but I’ll get to that later. Mihai has cerebral palsy, so he is very physically limited but he’s pretty much all there mentally. What I mean by that is that his mind would be just as far advanced as any other kids if he hadn’t been institutionalized and had physical limitations on top of that, but he’s definitely behind. Physically, he can move a block from one side of him to the other, but he can’t do much more with his hands because he doesn’t have much control over them or much strength. He generally just lies on the ground because he can only sit up unassisted for a couple of seconds, but he can roll over fairly easily and do an army crawl with difficulty. He’s also got sandy blond curly hair and blue eyes and is 4. Lastly, Iuliana, the princess, has short straight light brown hair and brown eyes. She can’t sit up on her own or crawl or do any of that, but she can roll over and grip many things in her hand. She has sever institutionalized autism and looooves sound and vibration. She screams whenever she isn’t getting her way and is actually pretty insane in a very loveable way. She’ll be off by herself in some corner scratching something and she’ll scream several short screams, then just start laughing. Always interesting. She’s also 4. Oh, and I forgot, none of these kids can talk. Anyway, that day we just played around with the kids and did whatever. We didn’t work on Brigance and we didn’t have any kind of a plan. It was alright, but I was a little bit disappointed because Shannon had already been with the kids the day before and so she like knew all about them and was so excited and already had all these ideas and stuff and I felt like I was robbed of the chance to start off with them like she did. Like I never got the chance to just get to know them on my own and get all excited about them and have my own ideas because from the very beginning I was just already trying to catch up with Shannon and think about what she was already thinking and I felt like if we’d both started off at the same time I’d have been able to contribute and have ideas on my own too. The only other thing I can think to say about the orphanage was that the workers fed us lunch and wow, it was nasty. We had bread and soup. The soup was really oily and had these white things that we decided were some kind of meatball, but we never could decide what exactly was in them, we could only see stringy tendon looking things from some type of meat. The bread was the nastiest bread I think I’ve ever tasted, which, upon closer examination, we decided was because it was covered in a layer of white mold. Mm mm good. So after leaving the apartment we took the tramvite home. At first we were going to try to not speak English while waiting for the tram every day because it’s a bad area and we thought it would be safer to not let them know we’re American. We’ve scrapped that by now though because half the time we go straight to the hospital and leave in our scrubs, which is pretty obvious. After we got home I ate a bit then went to the hospital with Jessica and Megan. When we got to the hospital I can’t remember exactly who I worked with but I think I may have worked with Maria. All I know is that I feel like I was with Maria a lot that week. I worked with Maria and lot and Iulia a lot and other than that did a lot of trying to find stuff to do and just walking to different floors. After the hospital, some girls went to outreach, but Shannon and I were both going on Thursday, so we talked a little bit about the kids. I think we started looking at brigance, but at the very least we talked about the kids and bonded, but in general just didn’t get much done.