A Step Toward a New Life : Charity: A Simi Valley family will house and care for a Romanian boy, 6. He is in the United States for orthopedic surgery.

One and a half years ago, Simi Valley residents Debbie and Steven Cook watched TV news stories about the thousands of crippled and unwanted children who are warehoused in institutions around Romania.

This week the couple brought one of those children into their home.

Six-year-old Alexandru Ivanescu will stay with the Cooks and their two children for at least six months while he undergoes a series of operations at Los Angeles’ Orthopaedic Hospital to correct severe bone deformities that make it difficult for him to walk.

He will be the first Romanian to benefit from an Orthopaedic Hospital program that provides free medical treatment to poor, disabled children from around the world.

The pale, thin boy is expected to need four operations to straighten his feet, which now turn in toward each other so sharply that they nearly touch when he walks.

Debbie Cook, 33, said she’s been warned that most families who host children for the hospital program get discouraged.

Besides dealing with the language and cultural barriers, the Cooks will also help in Alex’s medical recovery, including driving him to Los Angeles three times a week for therapy.

They will have help from Iuliana Grigorovici, 35, a Romanian nurse who accompanied Alex and is also staying with the Cook family.

But, Debbie Cook said, “I know that it’s going to be hard work and more. From the very beginning I’ve just had the mind-set that this is my son. I’m going to treat him like I treat my other children.”

The family is already considering trying to adopt Alex after he has healed.

At their five-bedroom home, Alex has a room of his own, with a bed covered by stuffed animals, a chest full of toys and walls dotted with pictures of the Cooks’ two children, Lara, 5, and Bob, 3.

On the dresser is a photo of Alex that was taken in Romania and sent to the Cooks. It shows a bony, pale boy, naked from the waist up, with haunting, deep-set brown eyes that stare inquisitively into the camera.

“There is no bigger gap” than the one between Alex’s life in Romania and the one he’ll have here, said Christine Nelson, a Fullerton resident who volunteers for the nonprofit Free Romania Foundation Inc. Nelson’s group arranged Alex’s trip and helped finance it.

Alex is one of 125,000 discarded children who still live in the state institutions set up in Romania by the country’s former president, Nicolae Ceausescu, according to a spokesman for the Los Angeles Orthopaedic Foundation.

Alex’s parents are alive, Nelson said. But “his father doesn’t want to hear about him. His mother has a whole new family and she doesn’t want to take care of him.”

He has spent most of his life in a state hospital with 200 other disabled children, where he sleeps in a room lined with three to four beds against each wall.

Until recently, the children had virtually no education or interaction with adults.

Alex only began to walk a few months ago. His speaking ability in Romanian is roughly equivalent to a normal 2-year-old’s, primarily because he has had virtually no contact with adults, the boy’s nurse said.

After arriving Wednesday night, Alex spent Thursday morning at the Cooks’ home watching cartoons on television, which he has never seen before, playing with a toy robot and eating.

“He eats like nonstop,” Debbie Cook said as she watched him sit at the kitchen table devouring his fourth bowl of chicken noodle soup for lunch. Breakfast had been three bowls of oatmeal with mashed bananas.

Alex can only eat soft foods. Until recently, his only nourishment came from sucking bottles of unfortified milk, which caused his teeth and gums to develop improperly, said Grigorovici, his nurse, who speaks English.

Considering the physical and emotional deprivation that the boy has suffered, Steven Cook, 33, said he is impressed by Alex’s curiosity and spirit.

On Thursday, for instance, he grabbed a camera from a news photographer and protested when he was coaxed to return it.

“He’s very independent,” Steven Cook said as he observed the scene. “Very independent. I guess he’s had to be.”