Embracing the Forgotten Ones
By Adrian Ciorna

As a young man, I dreamed of becoming a successful businessman -- but God soon changed my heart.

After graduation from university in Timisoara, Romania, I moved back home to Beius, to help care for my sick father. Gradually, I came to know the outcasts -- the orphans -- in my hometown better. Some reports say the number of orphans in Romania -- 135,000 -- is higher today than before the 1989 revolution. Why? A United Nations Development Programme report says that in 1999, some 7.6 million Romanians -- more than a third of the population -- live below the poverty level. Since the revolution, an organized agricultural industry was dismantled, heavy industry crashed after the loss of the former Soviet Union and Eastern European markets, and reform and privatization were slow. Now, more than ever, poverty and unemployment force mothers to abandon their babies in the hospital maternity wards.

Life is tough for these orphans: They are turned out on the streets at age 18, there is prejudice against hiring them, they are under-educated and have no life skills.

Gyongy Horvath recalls: "When I was 18, I was put out of school. I had no money, no clothing, I owned nothing. I didn't know where to go. I slept in the train station of Beius for six months with other kids. I was hungry."

Her friend Nicolae Kocsis had much the same experience. "I was only 17 when I found out I had to leave the orphanage together with 60 others. I had no money or goods. ...I stayed on the streets. It was a terrible experience, freezing, often with no food."

I learned a lot about their tough life, and God changed my world view -- from focusing on my business career to serving people in need. I founded a local orphan integration program called Good Samaritan Beius in 1993, with the goal of finding international sponsors for these young people to help support them while they learned skills and established an employment history.

Soon, through part-time volunteer work as an interpreter, I learned of Habitat. I thought it was an amazing opportunity to help people help themselves.

Even so, it was, for me, a dark day when I left my full-time work with the orphans to join Habitat as national coordinator in late 1995. I wondered, "What will happen with the orphans?" Until I had served the illiterate or blind, street kids or poor, the homeless and hopeless, I didn't know love's depth.

In 1998, Francisc Salomon, an 18-year-old orphan, came to me. He said, "I know you use volunteers, but give me some work as well. I need to survive." God opened the doors. Some of the orphans came to work on the Habitat site in a one-year employment opportunity. Francisc, Gyongy and Nicolae now have hope, direction and new goals. The street life is behind, and the future is bright.

For others, like Lenuta Moga -- herself an orphan, and her husband as well -- Habitat made the dream of homeownership a reality. A mother of three, she rejoiced on New Year's Eve 1999. "I don't leave home to visit, I don't! I've waited for these moments for 12 years. Everybody who wants to come to us is welcome," she says.

Habitat has changed the lives of orphans a great deal. It has offered many of them for the first time a decent environment in which to work and be loved. They became respected in their community because of their work with Habitat, and local employers are changing their once prejudiced mindset. Most of the orphans have learned wood and concrete construction skills, in addition to human relations skills.

They receive a lot of love on the Habitat site... love they have been missing for a lifetime.




Well-educated and ambitious, Adrian Ciorna early on set his feet to a path of business and success -- until he saw the poverty of and discrimination against the orphans of his country. Now 33, Ciorna decided to dedicate his life to service to orphans in 1993. Later, a chance encounter with Habitat for Humanity would change his path -- and the plight of many orphans as well.



Reprinted from Habitat World Magazine, April/May 2000.
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©2000 Habitat for Humanity International