BREAKING THE CHILD ABANDONMENT CYCLE DUE TO POVERTY
Help a single mother, a poor family to raise their own children and not leave them in a placement center due to poverty. Help a child in a family placement to have the means to live a decent and happy life. Provide for their basic needs of food, clothes, shoes, medical services, occasional financial support.
Through this program we help three categories of disadvantaged people:
- Single parents that have reduced income to raise their children, especially such single parents who have many children and no family support from their parents or relatives. These are families where children are at great risk to be abandoned in a placement center due to poverty. We provide them with in-kind donations to cover their basic needs of food, clothes, shoes, hygiene; medical services and occasional financial support.
- Very poor multi-member families, some of them of gypsy origin. In the Gypsy culture girls marry at a young age. Because they begin early and because Gypsy girls are usually not sent to school often at all, some have as many as fifteen pregnancies over their lifespan! Not having possibilities to earn their bread (women do not work while men are undereducated and with less job opportunities), many beg or steal to survive. Many of the children are sick or die at a young age; others are abandoned at birth. Because of the poverty of most Gypsy families, they are incapable of caring for so many children and so, child abandonment and abortion are easy solutions. Around eighty percent of abandoned children in Romania are of Gypsy ethnicity.
- Abandoned children who are in a so called simple family placement (maternal assistants). It means that the biological parents keep their rights while in the meantime the child is with a family. Usually, to care for the child, such maternal assistants are paid through employment contracts with the Romanian state, as well as, receive monthly allocation for the child needs. In some cases though when the parent (maternal assistant) retires or his/her certification expires the family does not receive any more the monthly allocation from the state. They receive rather symbolic help of 90 lei per child/month (20 Euro/27USD) which is very little to cover all their needs. Under the financial burden of the family (maternal assistant) these children are at permanent risk to be returned back to the state. In spite of everything their “family” desires to keep them due to the special bond they have created. We would like to prevent them being returned to the state care again or growing up with a family in poverty conditions.
