Night time in Bucharest

Music

01.00.00

Reporter: Chris Clark

v/o:  Night time can mask a little of Bucharest's shabbiness. But it also reveals a darker side, a side which tells not just of the failures of the past, but of a troubled future.

Street kids

Most of these children either don't have a home to live in, or home life is so traumatic they've opted for the streets. Sniffing glue, varnish, whatever dulls the hunger pangs and protects against the cold.

Government figures put the number regularly sleeping on the streets at about 1,500. Unofficial estimates say it could be double that.

Map Romania

Music

Clark crawling into service shaft

v/o:  This is where you sleep, yeah, in winter.

00.50

Vali:  This is where I sleep. Over there another couple of guys sleep and beyond them, a boy and a girl.  Two more sleep over there. When it's cold outside in winter seven people sleep down here.

Vali interview

v/o:  Vali's journey to the streets began with his parents break up and time in a state run children's home.

01.51

Vali:  I was much younger then and the older children used to beat me so I started making trouble, hoping they'd kick me out - and eventually they did. Once I was caught by the police  and put in another children's centre behind bars for four months. It wasn't exactly a gaol it was a place where they put street kids - hooligans, thieves. Kids are put in there until their parents collect them.  Nobody came for me, so eventually I was released.

Vali washing car window

v/o:  His days are spent washing cars - making the money he needs to get by. And on a good day, he might make ten dollars.

02.07

Vali:  If I do more than six or seven cars a day I can get about 30 or 40 thousand lei a day.

Question:  What do you spend the money on?

Vali:  What can I do with the money? I go to cinemas, to watch movies. After the movies I buy some varnish to sniff and I play electronic poker.

Vali collecting water from river

v/o:  Vali has slipped through the state run welfare net and through efforts by foreign aid agencies. He's now in a sort of limbo, experienced enough to survive, but facing the prospect of an adult life spent permanently on the streets.

02.43

Night in Bucharest

Car horns.

03.00

Anca visiting street kids.

v/o:  It's ten o'clock, and Anca Dionese is on the first of her nightly calls.

She's with the Romanian branch of Save the Children, working with those who live on the streets.

Achievement is measured in small ways. Getting someone to stop glue sniffing in return for some clean clothes.

Anca:  I'm going to confiscate this stuff.

Boy:  I'm prepared to die.

Anca:  Take off the trousers and you can have the glue. Look what he'll do for a bottle of glue. Okay, okay, keep the trousers.

03.20

v/o:  Most of the people in this group have stopped sniffing. But they're still sleeping rough in the stairwell of an apartment.

v/o:  Much of the work that people like Anca do is aimed at building trust through regular contact.

Boy:  Careful, they're loaded dice.

Anca:  I wouldn't even think about playing with you.

Bucharest at night

v/o:  She has various groups she visits and although each has different needs, many have one thing in common.

04.20

Anca in car

Anca:  I don't know if you ever find on the street a child who never had a sexual relationship. Okay, maybe 95% were abused, either in their families, before coming on the street, either by some other street children. Because after a child is abused, usually he becomes an abuser also. Everyone is using street children because no one is protecting them. For some of them it is better to stay in the street than in their families, because they bad parents, who are actually living on what their kids are winning on the street. And they are forcing them to beg and even to go to prostitute for money.

Street kids

05.10

emerging from service shaft

v/o:  Near a suburban metro station, Anca sees a young woman, Maricica, who's gone back to visit her old street friends, and fallen back into old habits.

Anca:  Maricica, Maricica. Leave the bag and come here!

v/o:  These children sniff glue as others might watch television.

Anca:  It's warm enough to sleep outside! Why stay down there in the hole?  It stinks.

v/o:  This is a nightly ritual which regularly descends into farce.

Anca

Anca: Which of you will give me your plastic bags? Maricica, I didn't come here to be mocked.  Thank you very much.  Come on, forget the games. I'm not three years old.  Are you mocking me? Are you?

Boy:  I think Maricica has it.

Anca:  Maricica, do you think I am an idiot?

05.59

Boy sniffing glue

v/o:    Apart from the long term health effects of glue sniffing, children frequently injure themselves while intoxicated. But to stop them sniffing means solving the very core of the problem itself.

06.37

Anca:  I can force them to stop sniffing. I can do it. I can take them away from the street and put them two weeks into a hospital, let's say. But as long as I cannot take them out from the street, where they are cold or they are hungry, where they have no dreams, no illusions, I cannot tell them to stop sniffing. Because when you sniff you don't feel anything any more.

06.54

Street kids

v/o:    The aim is to get children off the street and keep them off. But there simply aren't the resources to do it all at once.

07.11

Anca

Anca:  I have children who want to out from the street, and I have no place to put them in the centres. And actually, my aim is what? I'm going on the street, I'm trying to convince children to leave the street, at least for a centre, to move in a centre. Okay, and I have some of them who want to go, and I have no place for them.

Anca with street kids

v/o:  In the meantime, often the only help is comfort and companionship.

Hand tries to snatch glue bag

Anca:  Let me kiss you. I haven't seen you in such a long time.

Anca:  What are you doing?

Children's centre in Bucharest

Children's house number 5 in Bucharest. Home to about 120 orphaned or abandoned children. The government says it's reduced the number of children in care, from 50,000 six years ago, to just under 30,000. The ban on contraception and abortion under the old regime left an expectation, still widespread, that the state would look after unwanted children. Official government policy now is to return children to a stable family wherever possible.

07.56

Man from Ministry

v/o:  And the man from the Ministry of Education says the bad old days are long gone.

08.30

SUPER: Traian Vrasmus, Romanian Education Ministry

Vrasmas:  We've increased the number of children's homes.  We no longer have places with seven or eight hundred children, like we had before  when children lived in military-style barracks in poor conditions with forty to a dormitory.

Orphanage

v/o:  Romanians have been stung by criticism of their child care system. There've been changes, it's true, but much remains to be done.

The head of Romania's Child Protection Committee is in charge of coordinating child care efforts across the country.

Laudatu

Super:  ECATERINA LAUDATU

Child Protection Committee

Laudatu:  We are trying hard to create social services at a local level which will protect children.  We're trying to support families who have problems - to stop the flow of children to institutions and generally to prevent children from leaving their families. We offer financial support as well as expert advice and help.

09.22

Open House Day Centre

v/o:  Even with the government's new child care program, foreign aid organisations will continue to form the backbone of efforts to get children off the streets and into care. And there is hope.

09.50

At the Open House Day Centre, run with French backing, we met some of the young people we'd seen on the streets the night before. Among them Maricica, who was glue sniffing with her friends near the metro station. And Eduard, who's off drugs and is trying to persuade others to quit too.

Children juggling

They're trying to build a haven here, a staging post on the way to a normal life - education or a job.

And they're taking their message to the streets by showing what can be done with a little help from friends.

Super:  MILOUD-OUKILI

House Director

Miloud:  We want to offer the kids a chance to trust themselves - to believe in their life, to laugh - and also to have a chance to do something artistic.

10.41

Stilt walker

v/o:  This is just one of a number of programs for street kids run by foreign aid agencies.

Most of them are small affairs, and they concentrate on trying to solve individual cases.

Miloud:  Maricica has a house, but no parents and her sister lives outside Romania.  She's a normal 16-year old girl like any other with some good days and some bad days.

11.27

Music

Miloud:  I've known Eduard three years, Maricica four years and Laurentiu two years. They're reintegrated now. Before, they were just street kids. Maricica is working, Laurentiu is in school and we're trying to find a job for Eduard.

Boys diving into water

v/o:  But those like Vali, who remain outside care, are left to their own devices.

12.25

Summertime is as good as it gets for him and his friends on the street. They have their own survival system.

Vali:  The older kids become friends with younger children asking them if they want to be their comrades and asking them to collect money and offering the younger kids glue in return. The young ones collect the money and the older ones supply the glue.

12.48

v/o:  Vali has a routine which allows him to live with the only certainty he has, that tomorrow will be just like today.

Vali

Vali:  After I see a  movie I'll sniff glue and I can imagine the film all around me. In dreaming that I can see the movie on every wall.

Kids glue sniffing

v/o:  There isn't a quick fix to the problems facing Romania's children.

13.29

Anca:  These are not nice children. They are not children who are used to any kind of authority. If you don't convince them to love you, they'll never listen to you. The only proper relationship is the emotional one.

v/o:   Of course most aid agencies can ony deal with the problems after they arise. They can't stop new children coming onto the streets. Ultimatley, Romanians must put their own houses in order.

Laudatu

Super:  ECATERINA LAUDATU

Child Protection Committee

Our National action plan is a long term programme.  It's a whole process of

change and development which depeneds to a large extent on money. Of course we have successes and failures but on the whole we think we've chosen the right path.

14.05

Vali coming out of subway

v/o:  Vali thinks his last hope might be conscription into the army. That could finally be his ticket out.

14.40

Vali:  I don't think I'll live on the streets forever - maybe just until the people from the army come and pick me up. You know, maybe after I finish military service - maybe in the army - I'll learn to do a job.

v/o:  For too long, Romania's children have been last on the long list of deserving poor. Unless that changes the country will produce generation after generation of the permanently dispossessed and disenchanted.