Romanian Orphans Thriving 15 Years Later
Dec. 22, 2005 — -- More than 15 years ago, Toby McCarroll, the leader of a Catholic lay community in Northern California, traveled to Romania and discovered hundreds of HIV-infected babies left in orphanages.
By 1990, the situation in Romania had grown dire, and McCarroll made a direct plea for help on "Primetime Live."
Susan Belfiore was watching that broadcast in her New Jersey home.
"It was the right time in our life," Susan remembered. "They were asking for someone … to come and to be with these children. Not just to send my money, although we were willing to do that, but I felt like he was speaking directly to me."
Susan traveled to Romania, initially planning only to help care for sick children. But eventually, she and her husband, Bill Belfiore, became adoptive parents to four HIV-positive children: Ramona, Ionel, Lora-Dana and Mihaela.
The children were physically frail and emotionally scarred from their time in the orphanage, and they weren't expected to live into their teens. But now this extraordinary family is enjoying the ordinary days and teenage milestones that most people never expected these children to see.
All four of the children were infected with HIV at birth, through either blood transfusions or unclean needles, not through their birth mothers. But their parents lacked the means to care for them, so the children became wards of Romania's notoriously neglectful state system.
Susan remembers the tentative first steps of getting to know the children.
"Mihaela, when I first got her, every morning she would push open the curtain and look at me," she said. "She wouldn't let me hug her. She had been too long in the institution … by herself. So I would go up to her and she would put her finger up to my finger like this and that was the connection. And just by doing that finger to finger, she would get so deep in my heart."
Lora-Dana's grip on life was even more fragile than Mihaela's. At 2½ years old, she weighed only 8 pounds -- she didn't walk, didn't roll over and couldn't sit up by herself.
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