The goal of our Family Assistance Program is to prevent child homelessness, alleviate child poverty and to stop the cycle of multi-generational poverty in Romanian children and families.

We implemented the Family Assistance Program in fall of 2005 in response to a number of difficult conditions in Romania.  Our number one concern was the increasing difficulty and cost of maintaining the Miracle House, our children’s home and shelter.  In our effort to place orphaned and abandoned children in a better environment we ran into a great deal of red tape and corruption within the Romanian government.  This forced us to consider alternative methods of helping Romanian children.

After spending years visiting with and talking to children and poor parents, we found that most child homelessness is the result of child abandonment and not the death of parents.  Fifty years of communism fostered a cultural acceptance of abandoning children to orphanages.  Many of these children run away from orphanages because of the poor conditions that often include poor diets and verbal, physical and sexual abuse.  These children live on the streets until they are caught by police and thrown back into an orphanage, only to repeat the cycle.

We focus our efforts on preventing child homelessness by correcting the poverty and value system that leads to abandonment.  By fall of 2005 we were in contact with several families living in desperate poverty.  Two of the families were widows, one with nine children and the other with four.  We began by immediately providing them with food to feed their children.  This was the birth of the Family Assistance Program.

The most pressing concern is the dietary nutrition and overall health of the child.  Many of the children entering our program haven’t eaten meat in months.  Some haven’t even eaten fresh fruit or vegetables in a long time.  All the sponsored children in our Family Assistance Program receive bags of food either once or twice a month consisting of a variety of fruits, vegetables, meats, cheeses and when necessary vitamins and baby formula.

The second most important concern is the living conditions of the child.  We believe all children should grow up in a home that is safe and clean with enough space to be comfortable and healthy.  When necessary, we will help families build a home, renovate their current home or relocate them.  When the Dragomir Family first entered our program, the parents and four children were living in a small, moldy one room (not one bedroom, the toilet, and bed were about four feet apart) apartment in a condemned building with no electricity, water or heat.  Crime including drug dealing and drug use was out of control.  After much searching we relocated the family to a much cleaner and safer home in August of 2006.

We firmly believe that food and shelter alone don’t meet all the needs of a child.  Children need strong family relationships and a sense of security in their home and family.  We organize a number of events to strengthen family bonds and develop a sense of community with other families.  All of this serves to improve the lives of the children.  These events include family camps, a mothers’ support group, and Bible studies.

We also believe in striving to reach Christian ideals for our families and communities that include loving one another, respect for all and the eternal security of a strong faith in God.  We don’t require any beliefs or participation in Christian activities as a prerequisite for help but instead seek to evangelize and share our hope and joy by openly declaring our faith and leaving an open invitation for prayer, Bible study and Christian fellowship.

It is important that we provide the means to stop the transfer of poverty from parent to child.  The ripple effect of ending multi-generational poverty reaches countless families in the future and improves the community as a whole.  We believe education and vocational training is the most effective means of accomplishing this.

The poorest children need help while they are young to succeed as self-sufficient adults.  Romania has a large workforce of very poorly paid men and women with no education or training beyond high school.  Currently schooling is mandatory only through the 10th grade.  Most Romanians finish school without the ability to pass university entrance exams or the money to pay for tuition.

Our after school mentoring program addresses this problem.  We team up mostly college aged volunteers from local churches and the community with children to help them with schoolwork and to be positive roll models.

The initial results in this first year of the Family Assistance Program have been more amazing than we expected.  Seeing the improvement in children’s lives and the gratitude of their parents makes all the effort worthwhile.  We look forward to giving positive progress reports about its continued success.

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