Day 41

The orphanage was good today.. there was the mean worker (i need to learn her name) but she was more mellow today. She even had a mini little school with the kids which blew me away. She usually reminds me of a child the way she disciplines.. she stomps her feet and screams and pulls kids around. Improvement though! When I first got to my room Jello stretched his arms out grasping his hands with the biggest smile on his face. It seriously lit me up. It was so precious to see that he not only knows me now.. but looks forward to me being there. he gave me a huge hug. I took AU in the computer room but it was a little frustrating because he was trying to tell me a word he wanted to spell but it is impossible to guess as he cannot speak.. so i spent 20 minutes asking every single romanian word that I knew only for him to shake his head no to each one. I never guessed it.

In the hospital there are two babies from our orphanage who are sick and are staying there temporarily. One just had a surgery on her cleft palate so her face was a scabby bloody mess and her hands were tied to her legs so that she could not scratch it. She is a very well mannered baby though so she was just kinda chillin in her crib. The other girl on the other hand has a severe attachment disorder and is incredibly fussy.. I made the coolest contraption though that is a hands down success with all the little kids. All kids love balloons but the problem with balloons is that they are hard to hold onto and can lose interest very quickly.. especially when the child is too young to really know how to bounce a balloon up into the air. I keep a ton of balloons and pipe cleaners handy so I will tie a fuzzy pipe cleaner around the bottom of the balloon and into a loop so that the kids can hold onto the balloon and have a cool little fuzzy contraption. I am really proud of it actually. Today, i made a little pipe cleaner flower and tied the stem to the babies ankle so shed giggle watching it bounce around as she kicked her legs. We played with these two babies for a couple hours and then the fussy girl started to scream.... and scream.... and scream. A nurse came in and was like 'you need to go'. so.... we were forced to leave.

We found another baby on the 5th floor. She was so cute and the other mom in the room was saying that she had a mom but because gyspie moms are not very welcome in the hospital, that the mother left the baby here for now and will pick her up after. We see a lot of racism against gypsies here. Gyspies are never put in the same room as the lighter Romanians I noticed.. There are also smaller rooms for the gypsies with a lot more beds and people stuffed together. Anyways.. this baby had some nasty brown stuff on her head... it looked like tons of moles or something. The mom spoke english and was saying that the baby had that because the mother did not clean the baby off thoroughly when she was born... so it was like amniotic fluid crusties. We also saw similar things around the belly button.. like part of the umbilical cord or something. THe thing though is that The baby was 6 months old. so sad. The baby was super happy though.. she seems a little delayed with the milestones as she cannot yet sit up very well but at least she seems very content. The mother in the room was the first really dedicated mother i have seen in the hospital.. her husband walked in and you could tell that they had such a great relationship with eachother and their son. It made me so happy to see because I usually see all the sad stories all day long every day and so this gave me hope and made me realize that while I see these motherless children all day long, there are content and close knit little families as well. I think it can be easy to lose sight of that a bit.

Megan and I have been growing a lot closer lately and I have been loving it! We have been able to have a lot more in depth conversations about what happens in the orphanage, hospital and life in general.. she is a really great girl. Her and I ran the stairs today.. 10 floors 3 times! then we had an intense ab workout. Man i freakin love exercising. I feel so so so good!

We legitimately ran to FHE because we were running late. We played never have I ever and it was so much fun. There was an investigator there who I had never met before and he was seriously so funny. He was older and reminded me of a Pixar character like the man playing chess or like Scrooge in the animated scrooge. We were able to walk around and start to look at all the stands for Iasi days. I cannot wait for this week to look around here more and the rest of the city!