Traveling to change lives

By D. Daniels, Globe Staff, 01/20/02

		Destinations  Where they went  Travel gear  Student travel  Sensible traveler

When Jack and Carol Martin of Cohasset read a woman's account in the Globe two years ago of her trip to volunteer at a Romanian orphanage, "It fit us to a T," Carol says. "Our two daughters aren't married, we have grandparent urges, and had fantasized about going into the Peace Corps. We called that day."

Only a few months later, in summer 2000, Jack, a clinical psychologist in private practice at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Carol, his office manager, were off to Romania on a "volunteer vacation" with Global Volunteers (www.globalvolunteers.org). The couple, both 59, spent three weeks in Tutova, a farming village, at a hospital-affiliated orphanage for failure-to-thrive children. There they helped care for the children, but mostly they played with and held them. What they experienced changed their lives.

"In addition to leaving little pieces of our hearts with the children, we found that these people were our friends," Carol says. They went back last November, and now say that working with orphans in Romania has become their mission. "It's going to be our second act," says Jack.

Of the first trip, Jack says, "They had huge wards and no medicine. They work off the backs of wagons drawn by horse, and grow their own food. This was only 11 years after communism. It is the Third World." The couple said more than 65,000 children are in institutions awaiting adoption; despite those numbers, Romania has placed a moratorium on international adoptions.

A chance meeting in 2000 is what encouraged their second trip. In the lobby of their spartan hotel in Barlad, where volunteers are based, they struck up a conversation with Laurie Lundberg. She and her husband, Scott, who live in Utah, had recently started Bridge of Love (www.bridgeoflove.net), a nonprofit humanitarian group formed to help move the orphans out of institutions and into foster and group homes. After exchanging e-mails over the next few months, Jack and Carol decided to go back, this time through Bridge of Love, and now are helping the group find US families to sponsor Romanian foster families. The Martins hope to go back again this year.

In 2000, they had spent all their time in Tutova, where the skeleton staff relies on foreign volunteers to interact with the children, who are fed from bottles and kept in diapers for the sake of convenience. "They're never held," says Jack, pausing to gather himself.

Bridge of Love has managed to get 12 children moved into foster care, and the Martins visited them last fall, remembering the youngsters from their previous visit.

"It's just amazing," Carol says. "They had been terribly infantilized. But now they're conversational and learning to attach." That, Jack says, is further evidence that the children should not be treated at hospitals. "Being an orphan is not a medical problem, it's psychosocial."

The local professionals are happy for the assistance, he says. "They're hungry for Western ideas. Until Ceausescu left office, there was no social work or psychology in the country." (Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown and executed in 1989.)

When asked if they have any relaxing travel planned, they both laugh. "We used to go to Maine," Carol says.

Jack says, "There aren't a lot of people who can do this work." And Carol says, "You just have to be in that moment. Because you know you have to walk away from them."

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