A Personal Journey Into The Darkness

“Do you have a current passport?” asked my photo editor, John Sale.

So started the journey that took me and staff writer Julie Sullivan on a life-changing assignment to Romania. For two weeks in late August, we accompanied a group of 13 Spokane volunteers on a mission to help repair a dilapidated orphanage called Suta Dragodana.

A few days before leaving for Romania, team leader Anni Ryan Meyer warned me what to expect. “Colin, people will come up to you after you get back and ask you if you had a fun time in Romania. You will not have the words to describe what it was really like.”

She was right. The 17 days I spent in Romania gave me my first true glimpse of the darker side of humanity. As someone who has spent the better part of his 35 years in the safe embrace of Spokane, I was at times overwhelmed by what I saw. But in the end the experience changed me in ways I am just now beginning to understand. It changed me as a person. And as a photojournalist.

When we first arrived at the orphanage, we heard shrieks coming from the cracked windows of the kindergarten. Our Romanian translator, Emil Coman, said, “I must warn you. It smells pretty bad in here.”

Pretty bad did not begin to describe it. Stepping inside, we were blasted by warm air that reeked of raw sewage and unwashed bodies. From every doorway came dozens of rushing, screaming orphans. Within seconds each team member was surrounded. We came loaded with candy and gum, and when the children realized this their scab-covered hands were all over our bodies searching for the treats.

As I tried to take photographs, children grabbed the cameras and licked and fingered the lenses. I had to find some space. By walking into one of the rooms off the hallway, I thought I would have more space to take pictures.

But this room was filled with the weakest of the orphans. Most were naked, sitting along the walls in puddles of urine and feces. I have seen malnourished children on a visit to Africa, but those children were not like these orphans. Rail-thin, bones protruding from scabbed skin, they looked up at me with smiling, wanting eyes. Yet they were too weak to come to me. I squatted down next to one child and put my arm around his bony shoulder. He groaned a smile as I handed him candy. I thought about how soft and smooth the shoulders of my own 3-year-old daughter felt.

That night, after returning to our hostel, Ryan Meyer pulled me aside. Like a prosecutor, she started working on me. “So was it like I said it was going to be?” she said. “What did you expect, Colin, a walk in the park?” She started peeling away my layers of defense. I knew the questioning was her way of making sure I could be trusted with “her children.” As the days wore on, I realized that I could hide nothing from her or the rest of the team.

Living conditions were tight. I shared bunk rooms, showers and sinks with the men on the team. As a group, we ate together, shared the same bathroom facilities and were attacked by the same bed bugs. I worried that the bond forming between me and the team might prevent me from reporting objectively about the efforts of the group.

By the fourth day, I was emotionally spent. That day when I arrived, the orphans were already in the play yard. As I entered the gate, children grabbed at me, tripped my camera shutters, stuck their hands down my pockets.

I wanted so much to give them something - anything - but my job was to be an observer, a photojournalist. Just as things calmed down, a small child came rushing up to me. Smiling, he held out his arms. He wanted a hug. I was horrified. His hair was alive with lice, and scabs covered his arms. A mucus slime from god knows where dripped from his hands. I panicked, and as I recoiled in disgust, I slipped on a child’s fresh feces under my shoe. I fled.

For four days I had put up the wall of the observer, the documenter of injustice. But that wall had become breached, and I surrendered to my emotions. I have not cried like that since I was a child.

I wore a path in the basketball court, pacing for an hour, trying to collect myself because I knew I had to go back into the orphanage. As I returned, I saw Florentina. She had ripped her clothes off and was scratching at the scabies buried in her skin. Immediately I went for an aide to help Florentina. For the first time on this trip, I didn’t even think about making pictures.

Something changed in me after the play-yard incident. I knew why I was in Romania. For the first time in my career, I knew my photographs could make a difference.

The intensity never let up after that. Each hour I spent at the orphanage brought some new vision of horror. One night I had a dream. From behind a concrete fence, in a dark surreal scene, three naked, screaming children beckoned me with outstretched arms. With a jolt, the dream woke me.

As the wheels of our airplane left the tarmac of the Bucharest airport, I felt a deep sense of relief. My film was safe, as was the rest of the team.

I was happy to get home. My wife, Kim, was understanding and gave me the space and time I needed to readjust. When I got off the plane, my 1-year-old daughter greeted me with a big smile. My 3-year-old hit me in the stomach. She was angry at me for being gone so long.

At work, it was hard trying to tell co-workers what Julie and I had been through. People would pass me in the hall and ask, “How was the trip?” I could never seem to get beyond the answer “It was hell.”

I dropped 98 rolls of film off at the newspaper’s film lab and waited patiently for the first contact sheet to come out of the processor. The tension in my stomach was high; I breathed a sigh of relief that there were images on the sheets. But then I felt disappointment. Something was missing. It took me a while to realize that the smell of the orphanage wasn’t there, and neither were the sounds of the crying children in the play yard. It was frustrating trying to convey to editors what I saw through my pictures. It wasn’t until I read the first draft of Julie’s story that I realized how much my photographs and her story complemented each other. Where my pictures failed to convey the smell and the sounds of the orphanage, she captured it in her writing.

It has been three months since I returned. The aftermath of this assignment has taken me a long time to sort through. In a way I felt sucker-punched. Ten years of shooting pictures for The Spokesman-Review has been an incredible experience. But I now know this last decade had changed me in ways I regret. Years of seeing too many car accidents, shooting victims, and people who had lost everything to house fires, had left me feeling cynical at times. My camera became a callus that protected me from feeling too much for the people I was photographing. Emotions, I was taught, got in the way of objectivity.

My trip to Romania renewed me by peeling away several layers of cynicism. The orphans of Suta Dragodana forced me to feel their suffering. Even when I ran from them, they chased me in my dreams. They made me realize that human kindness and dignity are paramount.

Because Romania was so awful, any inconvenience since then has seemed like no big deal. We were without power for a week because of the ice storm, and I just worked around it. I spent the night at the Libby Center shelter last week taking pictures. It reminded me somewhat of Romania. The conditions were much better, but the people were numb with shelter shock. My experience in Romania helped make me less shy and less judgmental as I photographed the shelter people. I felt more compassion than I would have before my trip.

In these last few months I have truly come to appreciate the many gifts that my life here in Spokane offers. I realize that wherever my camera takes me in the future, the eyes of the children of Suta Dragodona shall be forever with me. Photographer Colin Mulvany posing with the “Five Amigos” - (from left) Constantine, Sonja, Ionita, Nicu and Marton. Survivors all, the boys and girls were the strongest of the orphans. Photo by Julie Sullivan staff writer

, DataTimes