Tug of War : U.S. Couple, Romanian Agency Battle Over Disabled Boy

Wearing gleaming new casts over his twisted feet and ankles, 6-year-old Alexandru Ivanescu gazed up at an older boy in an arm cast who was crying quietly.

“Don’t cry,” Alexandru said, then turned abruptly and clumped briskly down the hospital hallway, forcing his nurse to run and catch him.

Alexandru, who was plucked from a Romanian orphanage for free treatment at Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital, has one of the most severe deformities seen in the facility’s 81-year history, doctors say.

But the boy seems propelled by a buoyant spirit that draws smiles from hospital staff.

In a visit to the hospital last week, Alexandru was as cheerful as usual, apparently unaware of the conflict swirling around him.

Last weekend, the nonprofit agency sponsoring the boy’s stay in the United States removed Alexandru from the home of a Simi Valley family who wanted to adopt him.

Officials at the agency, the Boston-based Free Romanian Foundation, said they are looking for another host family, but not a family interested in adopting Alex.

The boy will go back to Romania, the agency said, and possibly back to the orphanage where he has lived most of his life.

The problem was that Steven and Debbie Cook treated the boy as if he were their own, thus overstepping the role of a host family, said Peter Clegg, the foundation’s executive director.

But the Cooks say that foundation representatives knew from the start that they were interested in adopting Alexandru.

Both sides agree that friction between the Cooks and local agency representatives made it difficult for them to work together on the child’s behalf.

One hospital official said the contrast between Debbie Cook and foundation representative Nicolina Markou is like Southern California casual versus Old World European.

Meanwhile, Alexandru--or, Alex, as the Cooks call him--is caught in the middle.

Born to a mother too poor to care for a crippled son along with her other two children, Alex was taken to the state orphanage when he was 2.

About 125,000 such children continue to live in state institutions in Romania.

They are victims of former President Nicolae Ceausescu’s failed fertility programs, which sought to increase the country’s population to 23 million through such methods as prohibiting contraception and abortions. Ceausescu was executed in Romania’s 1989 revolution.

Alex is the first Romanian child to be accepted into the hospital’s International Children’s Program, which treats poor, disabled children from around the world.

Hospital officials say the boy’s problems are far worse than they had assumed based on photographs and medical records provided by the Free Romania Foundation.

Each foot “is literally like a Z,” said Dr. Chadwick Smith, director of the International Children’s Program at the hospital.

Doctors first are tackling the problem of straightening the front halves of the boy’s feet, which initially pointed directly toward each other.

Although an operation two months ago was less successful than they had hoped, doctors are gradually reshaping Alex’s feet with casts that are replaced about every two weeks.

And Alex will probably have to undergo at least one more operation to straighten his ankles, Smith said.

“He will be able to walk” when his medical treatment is complete in three or more months, Smith said.

The boy already has moved out of a wheelchair and is walking with the support of special shoes attached to his toe-to-knee casts.

But the boy’s feet aren’t his only problem.

Alex’s head and mouth are also deformed, and he has a learning disability similar to dyslexia, Smith said.

In addition, he has been plagued with an ear infection since he arrived in the United States, leading to hearing problems.

“He’s not going to be normal,” Smith lamented.

But changes have occurred in the three months since Alex was carried off the airplane at Los Angeles International Airport and into the glare of TV cameras.

“I think it’s amazing, his progress,” said Eloise Helwig, executive vice president of the Los Angeles Orthopaedic Foundation, which funds the children’s program.

Because Alex and the other children in his orphanage had virtually no education or interaction with adults until recently, his speaking ability in Romanian was roughly equivalent to that of a 2-year-old when he arrived here, according to Iuliana Grigorivici, the Romanian nurse who accompanied him to the United States.

Now he speaks simple sentences in English.

“Don’t touch it,” he said to the doctor pressing the boy’s foot into a new cast at Orthopaedic Hospital last week. “ Doooooon’t touch it!”

“Say ‘please,’ ” Grigorivici whispered into Alex’s ear.

“Please,” he said.

Hospital staff members say Alex also looks better than he did three months ago. His face is tanned and plump instead of translucently pale and almost skeletal, as it was when he arrived.

And a wardrobe of brightly colored shorts and T-shirts, bought mainly by the Cooks, have replaced the old-fashioned long checked pants, clashing shirt and button-down sweater he wore when he was carried off the airplane.

The American wardrobe, the tan and the improving English vocabulary all seemed to have a part in Alex’s future until last week.

Markou, head of the Los Angeles chapter of the Free Romania Foundation, was supposed to take Alex only for the weekend.

But while he was at her home, a telephone conversation between Markou and the Cooks erupted into an argument, and Markou declared that Alex would stay with her.

Christine Nelson, a Fullerton resident and the foundation board member who arranged Alex’s trip here, said she and Markou had been considering moving Alex from the Cooks’ home for weeks.

The couple said they got along well with Nelson during the eight months they were preparing for his arrival.

But once Alex and his nurse were ensconced in the family’s home, the problems began.

Debbie Cook began calling Nelson complaining about Grigorivici’s treatment of the boy, such as the time she put him to bed with underwear wrapped over his hands to prevent him from sucking his thumb.

Grigorivici acknowledged that Romanians have stricter methods of child rearing than Americans. But she and Debbie Cook said that they gradually worked out their disagreements.

Later, arguments broke out when the Cooks enrolled Alex in the Simi Valley Unified School District as Alexandru Cook instead of Alexandru Ivanescu.

Then, a few days before Alex was moved from the Cooks’ home, Debbie Cook agreed with school officials that the boy belonged in special-education classes.

Markou insists Alex would do better in a regular preschool than in a special-education elementary school class.

Simi Valley school officials wouldn’t comment on Alex’s case because of confidentiality rules.

Tanned, big-boned and often clad in T-shirts and shorts, 33-year-old Debbie Cook is a full-time homemaker who was moved to adopt a Romanian child after she saw a news program two years ago about the state institutions.

She acknowledges that she is strong willed but said she is confused about why the Free Romanian Foundation objected to her making decisions about Alex when they knew from the start that she was interested in adopting the boy.

Pale and angular, the 50-year-old Markou fled Romania as a political refugee in 1977 and lives with her husband and mother in Reseda. Although she had some medical training in her native country, she works here giving manicures and pedicures in private homes.

She became involved in the Free Romania Foundation last year and now works 30 hours a week raising funds and trying to get other Romanian children into the Orthopaedic Hospital program.

Markou said Alex and his nurse will stay with her until the foundation finds another host family.

She sidestepped questions about whether it might have been better for the boy to stay with a family who wanted to keep him for good.

“This child is not for adoption,” Markou said. Agency officials have said their efforts to bring other children to the United States for medical treatment could be harmed if the Romanian government believes the children will be lost through adoption.

The government cracked down on adoptions after they found that many of the infants going to American and European families were not from Romanian orphanages, but from poor Romanian families who were paid for their children, the foundation’s Peter Clegg said.

Now, Markou worries that the publicity about Alex’s move will hurt the foundation. “Debbie does not realize that through her ego she is hurting thousands of children” who could be eligible for U.S. medical care, she said.

And Alex will be fine, Markou said, even if he has to return to the orphanage after his medical treatment.

“He was born a fighter,” she said. “You have to be a fighter to survive” in the orphanage.

“Alexandru is one of the luckiest children” because of his medical treatment, she said, but Steven Cook disagrees.

Alex “would languish in an orphanage” after experiencing the warmth and sustenance of normal family life, he said.

“It would be the cruelest thing you could do to him.”