Albanian Orphan

Posted by Linda Leedy Schneider in HandPrints Stories & Videos | 4 comments

A green-eyed child in torn shorts asked for the gum from my mouth as I waited at customs in Tirana, Albania. I had just arrived with a group of volunteers who had been asked to work in and assess orphanages in what was then “the poorest country in the world.”

Since a child born out of wedlock was not accepted in this country, and “no man raises another man’s child,” we were told the orphanages were black holes where babies and children were warehoused. At an orientation we were told that women were expected to wear long skirts and cover their bodies carefully in this Muslim culture. My black skirt dragged on the ground as I bent to give the green-eyed boy, who did not look old enough to be alone, gum from my backpack. That black backpack had been carefully filled in Michigan. It held one other skirt and blouse, a notebook and pen and soap that had to double as shampoo and detergent. I didn’t know yet that water was “sporadic,” which meant that it flowed only when there was rain in the mountains where cisterns gathered water for the city. “Don’t lather up too much. The water can turn to a trickle at any time, and you will be left soapy till the next rain,” I was told later. My backpack also held suggested food. I

Author, 1.22.208 Albania

An acrid smell rose from piles of Communist books smoldering in the street. We were greeted at the door of the building where we would stay, by a pubescent guard cradling a Russian AK 47. When I got to my room, I found a feverish woman from Indiana asleep in the only bed. She and I shared that double mattress on the floor for the rest of our stay. We were given antibiotics and a sleeping pill by a doctor in our group that night Jan said, “Just take the antibiotic. I didn’t.”

That next morning four of us left for the state orphanage in Skodra, near the Adriatic Sea. As I emerged from the back seat of our windowless blue van, I saw a moving pile of brush pass by; behind it were two ox-drawn carts; across the street a boy held up a handful of writhing eels, a medusa head; to the east on a hillside a man wearing what must have been a donated three-piece suit made for someone twice his size leaned on a shepherd’s staff and watched over five sheep.

We wore donated T-shirts, announcing a 5K race in Chicago that had been run six months earlier. We were told to wear the T-shirts over our clothing whenever we were in an orphanage and might have physical contact. We could then leave the “disposable” T-shirts behind when we left and know they would be used. As we climbed the stairs to that second-floor orphanage and left the dusty street, the sunshine, and the salty smell of the sea behind, sunlight struggled through a broken window and touched a hole in the floor next to the landing.

“It was the bombs,” someone said. “Be careful. If you break a leg or become ill in Albania, you must get on a plane to Italy. The hospitals here are full of rats and predatory cats. There are few medications. People die in the hospitals, and babies are born.”

I passed through the door of the first room into silence and saw babies with clubfeet, cleft palates, hydrocephalus, impetigo, ringworm, crossed eyes, and missing limbs. How could I assess, hope for contributions from the United States, and picture a new clean orphanage in the twilight of this room—more than forty iron cribs, and no crying.

I was drawn to Agim, ten months old. He just lay on his back and stared. He wore a too small Bugs Bunny sleeper that had probably once been yellow. His eyes met mine, but when I came near he turned away to the peeling green wall beside his crib. There were paint chips on his fingers. I stood near him quietly, talking, singing, and finally offering him toys. When I wound a red music box, he raised his hands to me. We swayed together, and he made a sound, a kind of hum.

At the end of that Friday, I left Agim under a soft quilt in a sleeper that fit. The music box played, “It’s a Small World.” When I walked down the stairs back into the bright sunlight, a reporter from our Michigan news station began to question me with a television camera rolling. Later, I realized that his harsh questions were prepared to bring out my emotions. I did wipe away tears that day as I looked again at the hillside where the shepherd now slept under a fig tree surrounded by his sheep.

I had resented this “media accompaniment” before the trip. I was wrong. Later the fifteen-minute segment they fashioned was shown on local television and used to solicit funds to build and maintain new group homes for the children, as well as train staff. Several of us were involved in planning these new group homes, and I felt great joy when I returned two years later to help move the children into their new homes. A program to facilitate adoption of orphaned and abandoned Albanian children was so begun. Many children, some with special needs, were later placed with loving families in the United States. I like to think that Agim was one of those children.

I continued to seek donations of formula, powdered milk, diapers, sheets and medications. As I made these calls and wrote letters from my home, where the water always flows and sunlight and music fill the rooms, I remembered Agim. Today the smell of the sea, the touch of a blanket, an offer of chewing gum, a basket of fruit, the warmth of a shower, the brush of a hand, a child in my arms, all take me back to the melody of that music box, and that brown-eyed boy who raised his hands to me.

Albania Day Fourteen She follows the winding path from the state orphanage to the Adriatic Sea, which is clotted with oil on its Eastern shore. A boy passes and holds up a fistful of writhing eels, a Medusa head, like the eel they ate the night before, while a blind guitarist played and fried eel was offered, followed by fig cake studded with fly legs. Because the road to Skodra passed over a ravine, they had walked a rope-hung bridge one by one to get to that State Dinner. It was a time of war, gunfire over the mountains in Kosovo, infants dying for lack of IV tubing— rickets, ringworm, cleft palates, crossed eyes and eels. So last night when the music started and that man said, “Come,” she did and danced til it all was gone. Nothing but two bodies and the beat. —Nothing but bodies.

© 2008 Linda Leedy Schneider