Out of Reach : Family Is Forbidden to Visit Crippled Romanian Orphan

For the Cook family in Simi Valley, life has returned to normal in the 10 months since a crippled Romanian boy they had hoped to adopt was abruptly taken from their home.

Debbie Cook has dismantled the bedroom at the top of the stairs that she had decorated especially for 7-year-old Alexandru Ivanescu.

She has taken down the photo--placed prominently on top of the living room TV set--of the frail, blond boy posing with her own two young children.

And, Cook said, her children--Lara, 6, and Bob, 4--have stopped asking about Alex quite as often as before.

But Cook said she still has one piece of unfinished business with the Romanian child whom she treated as her own for three months last year.

She wants to say goodby.

Alex spent his first three months with the Cook family after he was plucked from a Romanian orphanage one year ago to come to the United States for surgery on his severely deformed feet.

Then volunteers for the nonprofit agency sponsoring the boy suddenly removed Alex from the Cooks’ home after a series of disagreements with the Cooks over the boy’s education and other matters regarding his care.

Now living at the Reseda home of a Romanian couple, Alex is supposed to have a second and final surgery to correct his deformed feet at Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital.

And, because he is in the United States on a medical visa, he is expected to be sent back to his native country after his surgery, possibly to the state orphanage where he grew up.

“The main thing I want him to know,” Cook said, is “when he gets older and decides where he wants to go and be in life, my door will always be open.”

But volunteers from the nonprofit Free Romania Foundation have put off Cook’s requests to visit the boy.

Fullerton resident Christine Nelson, the foundation volunteer who has guardianship over Alex while he is in the United States, said she is worried the boy may become upset if he sees the Cooks again. “He missed them for a long time” after being taken from the family, she said.

It was Nelson who arranged for Alex’s treatment at Los Angeles Orthopaedic, raised money for his trip out of Romania and prepared for the Cooks to be his host family during his U.S. stay.

Then, following his arrival, Nelson and another agency volunteer, Nicolina Markou, had continuing arguments with the Cooks over what was best for Alex, including a dispute over whether he should attend first grade, as the Cooks wanted, or kindergarten.

One weekend in late September, Markou picked Alex up from the Cooks’ home for what was supposed to be a two- or three-day visit to her home in Reseda. She never brought him back.

Nelson said later that she and Markou had decided a few weeks earlier to remove the child. Free Romania Foundation officials at the agency’s Boston headquarters stood by Nelson’s decision.

Although Nelson now says she has never second-guessed her choice to move the boy, she regrets that her dream for Alex to be adopted by an American family such as the Cooks will apparently not be fulfilled.

“I walked into this favoring an American family from Day 1, with the idea of this child getting a home in a completely different atmosphere, a whole new life,” she said. “I was very sorry from the beginning that things didn’t work out.”

But she still holds out hope that she will find a way to keep Alex in the United States permanently.

When Nelson began looking for a host family for Alex while he underwent treatment at the Los Angeles hospital, she didn’t have to find the Cooks. They had already found her.

About 2 1/2 years ago, Debbie and Steven Cook began exploring ways to adopt a Romanian child after they saw TV reports on the thousands of crippled and unwanted children warehoused in institutions around the eastern European country.

The children, of which more than 125,000 remain in such institutions, were victims of deposed President Nicolae Ceausescu’s failed fertility programs, which sought to increase the country’s population by prohibiting abortion and contraception.

After Ceausescu’s 1989 execution, the orphanages’ existence and their squalid conditions grabbed the international spotlight.

The Cooks’ search for a Romanian child eventually led them to Nelson, the Los Angeles representative for the Free Romania Foundation. Free Romania volunteers were raising money for medical treatment of Romanian children.

The foundation recently merged with the World Assn. for Children and Parents, a Seattle-based nonprofit group that plans to continue working on behalf of Romanian children.

With the merger, Nelson and Markou are now on their own, without the financial support of any organization.

Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital officials said Markou continues to bring Alex in for periodic checkups.

“He’s doing fine,” said Maria Aguilar, the hospital’s international children’s program coordinator. “He’s growing. He’s a big boy now.”

When Alex arrived last year, doctors said the boy had one of the most severe deformities ever seen at the 81-year-old hospital. Each of the Alex’s feet was “literally like a Z,” one surgeon said.

After the first surgery was less successful than they had hoped, hospital staff tried to straighten the boy’s crooked bones with a series of casts.

Aguilar said Alex is walking much better than he was when he arrived. But Nelson said she and Markou have been disappointed by the results and see no progress.

Although doctors want to do a second surgery, Markou is first exploring other avenues, including physical therapy and genetic tests to determine the cause of the deformity.

Nelson echoed Aguilar about the boy’s tremendous progress in other ways. “He’s doing great,” she said.

At the orphanage, Alex was confined to a cot and deprived of virtually all contact with adults. He had barely begun walking when he arrived in America at 6 years old. And his speaking ability in Romanian was equivalent to a 2-year-old’s.

Now, Nelson said, he is speaking English, attending public school special-education classes and behaves more and more like a normal 7-year-old. In 13 months, he has grown 15 inches taller.

But Nelson is concerned about letting the Cooks visit Alex, primarily because she and Markou told the boy that the family had moved away.

Cook said she is upset that Nelson and Markou led Alex to believe the Cooks had abandoned him.

But Nelson said she and Markou lied in an effort to ease the pain of his separation from the family, the first family he had known since his mother took him to the Romanian orphanage when he was 2 years old.

“Nicolina told him they had to move away, they had no choice,” Nelson said. “We told him they loved him very much and the kids loved him very much and they’re going to miss him as much as he’s going to miss them.”

Nelson said they may decide at some point that Alex is emotionally strong enough to be told that the Cook family has moved back, allowing Debbie Cook to visit him.

Even with the various setbacks that Alex has suffered during his U.S. visit, Nelson said he has kept his buoyant, cheerful spirit.

“Alex is a happy child,” she said. “He will be happy anywhere.”

And Jetta Bernier, the former president of the Free Romania Foundation, pointed out that Alex is luckier than many disabled Romanian children who will never leave their orphanages or receive medical treatment.

“Let’s face it,” Bernier said. “This is a child with many, many difficulties. This child now has a chance at living a fairly normal life.”

Compared to the fate of many other Romanian children, Bernier said, “this story is having a happy ending.”