Real Life Injustice

You know the musical Les Miserables? About people that try and try and try to have good lives, but ultimately, they're just always miserable, because they are poor, and hungry, and starving, and it's because life was just unfair to them?

Well- that's reality. For lots of people here in Romania. In America we can rationalize suffering of others away with, "Oh, well they probably don't work hard enough" or "They could have more money if they actually saved some." And with the American Dream as a reality, sometimes, sometimes, those rationalizations can have some truth. 

But here in Romania, I'm just not so sure. Is it someone's fault if their life is just really, really, really hard?

Case in Point #1

An orphanage worker talked to me about how when Romania was overtaken by Russia, her grandfather got sent off to Siberia to the Gulash work camps for 8 years- and it really tore him apart, as well as their entire family. It's crazy that things that we learn about in our history textbooks that seem too bad to be true- actually happened, to real live people, that are still alive. 

#2

My Romanian teacher at BYU lived in Romania when communism fell in 1989, and there was no government. Her little brother looked outside to see "Fireworks", but then her mom said they were gunshots, and they had to hide in the bathtub for a few days while the streets were getting shot up outside. I only hid in a bathtub in Amarillo when there were tornados- not because the streets were getting shot up. Crazy.

#3

I finally found out what the problem is with all my kids. Most have fetal alcohol syndrome, and heart problems. It just makes me angry at the mothers. Did they know when they were high and laughing and having the time of their life at a club late one night that as a result, an innocent child would live in an orphanage because they, the mother, wouldn't be able to afford or be able to take care of their child, and that child would struggle to ever be adopted, because they'd struggle to walk, to talk, to eat, to sit up, to reach all the regular child milestones, because that child's entire body system failed to develop properly because of the alcohol. Talk about injustice. That child did nothing, and yet they suffer every day physically and emotionally- because families don't want to adopt kids that can't say "I love you." Was the mom thinking about that? And, was she punished at all? If she had hit someone with a car and given them a broken leg she would have had to pay some type of legal price I'm sure. What about it she gave multiple disabilities to her own child? Doesn't justice demand that she is punished? And yet- she's not. 

#4

At the hospital we leave diapers for the orphans, but we're not allowed to give them out. Gypsies ask, but if they really need diapers, they seem to have plenty of clothes, beautiful scarves, dangly earrings that they could sell to buy their child diapers. Or use cloth diapers. Not ideal- but there are options. But today, in a room that we visit a child in, there was another girl- she looks out age, who is a friend of the mother of a baby in the hospital and is staying there with the baby. She's been fine the past two days, but the mom hasn't come back for 3 days and she's out of diapers. She asked us for some today, and we're not allowed to through BYU, and it's a good thing Madeline told her no-, because I don't know that I would have been able to. It's crazy to think that some people really don't have the ability to provide in that way- and they can't call their family, because neither does their family. They really don't have enough. Or babies that are crying because they only get milk twice a day and the other is a meal they don't like- so they just don't eat. Even just the phenomenon that 8 children in that hospital legitimately do not have parents or caregivers. Just the state and the nurses. That's the family they have. 

#5

A lady that speaks English in the first room we visit in the hospital told us about her friend that has 6 children, but who did prostitution because she didn't have enough money to pay for her children because her husband left her, but in the process she became pregnant with another several children that were miscarried, and then the last had multiple disabilities.

Unfair lives really do exist. For real people. Why do they struggle with that, and not me? I wish there were clear answers.