Adoptive Parents Await ‘Angel’ From Romania : Family: With the fall of the Ceausescu government, a Camarillo couple has high hopes of bringing their new 4-year-old daughter home.

Every night before bedtime, Jessica, 4, kneels before one of the Orthodox faith icons in a large, dimly lit apartment and recites “My Angel,” the Romanian prayer she has learned by heart:

My Angel be good to me and protect me all the time.

For I am weak and you are strong.

Dear God, help all the children of the world.

And help me go as soon as possible to my mother and father.

Jessica’s adoptive mother and father, Ilona and Thomas Scott, live thousands of miles away in Camarillo, Calif. They have a room, filled with toys, waiting for the little girl with the mop of dark brown hair who prays so hopefully every night. But except for a few happy weeks last summer in Bucharest, she has never lived with them.

The Scotts have new hope, however, that the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu last month will mean they will be united soon with their daughter after three years of waiting.

There had already been suggestions from provisional Romanian vice president Dumitru Mazilu, a human-rights activist, that their daughter and 250 other adopted children would soon be freed. And over the weekend, the situation brightened even more when the Romanians allowed the release of 61 children for long-delayed adoption by families in France.

“These years have been a nightmare for us,” said Ilona Scott, 43, an architect in Oxnard, in a telephone interview. “We hope to have our little girl with us here soon.”

The couple already has bought airplane tickets for Bucharest to accompany the girl, born to a 16-year-old unwed mother in 1985, when she finally gets permission to leave.

A spokesman for the U. S. Embassy in Bucharest said recently that release of the girl and three other children adopted by American families is one of the highest priorities of the American government in its dealings with the provisional National Salvation Front government that replaced Ceausescu.

In recent years, the desperately hard living conditions drove many women to send their children to orphanages. As a result, Romania became an important center of adoption for childless couples, mainly from Italy, France, Israel and the United States.

The Scotts picked out their child, then named Corina, in September, 1986. Ilona Scott, who spent 21 years in Bucharest and who speaks Romanian, felt she could help the child make an easy transition into American life.

But at the end of 1987, Ceausescu suddenly refused to grant passports to the more than 250 orphans who were being adopted by foreigners. Some diplomats here think he was reacting in a pique to sensational and unsubstantiated foreign news accounts of baby trafficking in Romania. The change in policy, like so many decrees and edicts issued under the Ceausescu regime, was never officially explained.

The children, who range in age from 2 to 12, are heirs to some of the cruelest legacies of the Ceausescu regime.

Most of them live with other orphans in crumbling, ill-equipped state-run homes. In Bucharest alone, more than 2,000 orphans, mostly abandoned by young, unmarried mothers, live in the homes.

On a recent visit to the largest home, Creche No. 1 near the Romanian Arc of Triumph on the northern edge of the city, a foreigner found more than 700 children living in chilly, ill-lit rooms without adequate supplies of basic needs, such as diapers and vitamins.

As the visitor entered the wards reserved for toddlers, the children ran toward him with their arms outstretched. The staff appeared to be caring but too small to give the children much individual attention.

To soothe themselves, the children rocked back and forth, shifting their weight from one foot to another until they looked like a flock of tiny little bobbing penguins in pajamas.

French psychologist Claude Lefevbre, who visited Creche No. 1 recently, said the rocking motion exhibited serious untreated psychological problems. He said the hospital had severe shortages of calcium, vitamins and antibiotics. He expressed fears that some of the children may have been permanently retarded by their years in the orphanages.

“You have to worry when you see a 6-year-old just sitting there rocking,” Lefevbre said.

In some ways, the Scott family has been more fortunate than others. Last summer, they received permission from Romanian authorities to spend several weeks with their daughter in Bucharest.

She stayed with them in the Bucharest Intercontinental Hotel and they even traveled as a family into the mountains of Transylvania for a picnic.

But Romanian authorities refused to let the little girl accompany her parents to California.

Farewell for the family on this trip was very difficult, her parents recall. Jessica had learned to say, “I love you” as her first words in English. She cried for days after her American parents left for California.

At the end of October, the Scotts had another break. By falsely informing authorities that she was a relative of the child’s birth mother, Jovana Katz, Ilona’s cousin, was able to retrieve her from the orphanage Oct. 29 and take her to her run-down but spacious apartment in the center of Bucharest. Under the repressive Ceausescu regime, the lie could have cost Katz dearly.

What has happened since has given some encouragement to the family.

“When Jessica first came here,” said Katz, “she could hardly speak. She could only point at things she wanted. She was afraid of the telephone because she had never seen one before. She was filled with fear that she would be taken to Mother-Director,” the name the children gave to the supervisor of the orphanage.

But only two months later the little girl bubbles with words, delighting in them as though they were new toys. She has memorized the poem “My Angel” and has added her own poem about a naughty doll with pale skin who will not drink her milk and who only wants cake. When the phone rings now she hopes it is one of the weekly calls from her parents.

She has learned to say, “I love you, Daddy” when her adopted father is on the phone.

There were some problems during the fierce fighting that occurred during the early days of the revolution here. The Katz apartment is located directly across the street from the Ministry of the Interior, headquarters of Ceausescu’s dreaded secret police.

On Dec. 22-23, considerable gunfire outside the apartment seemed to concern Jessica. But Katz reassured her with a Romanian saying: “That is only the wolf outside throwing stones,” she said. “And we are safe inside our home.”

And somehow for a little girl who had spent most of her life in an orphanage, that seemed to be a soothing thought.