Mission Impossible The Volunteers From Spokane Knew The Romanian Orphanage Was Too Damaged To Repair Fully, But They Struggled On, Hoping To Do Some Good Amid All The Heartache

THEY ARRIVE AT SUTA DRAGODANA on Sunday, a day later than planned, but not exactly when expected.

The Romanian orphanage looks abandoned. Half the roof is gone, glass chips sprinkle the walkway, concrete walls peel paint like old skin.

Inside is a hallway 60 yards long and the 13 Americans who enter are forever changed when they come out.

The floor is slick, sticky and slick, a wetness sliding under shoes from days-old urine, fresh feces and decades of neglect. In the greenish light are children, ages 3 to 8.

They are naked. Their heads are shaved.

Skin gathers at their bony elbows and hangs there. A boy scratches sores that lace his body from his buttocks to his heels, so does the girl next to him. They jump at the visitors, screaming with excitement so loud one girl covers her ears.

Two orphanage staff women hurriedly pull out clothing, grabbing arms and legs, covering emaciated bottoms.

The Americans offer handfuls of bubble gum and suddenly the children are everywhere, patting pockets, pulling straps, tripping camera shutters, reaching, shrieking, yammering, clamoring for something, for anything.

Only later do you realize someone was saying “Mama.”

Anni Ryan Meyer smiles into the orphans’ faces, but her eyes squint hard as slate.

She brought a repair team to fix the orphanage roof and is told that will not be possible. The team does not have the licensing and $47,000 it will take. She came to hold children starved for love and finds 49 starving for everything. She came to fix buildings and finds something far more serious is broken.

What does she need for this job?

“I need a million people with $1 million apiece. I need manpower, I need the U.S. Army.”

All she has is 12 volunteers from Spokane and two weeks.

THE STAINED GLASS MADONNA at Spokane’s St. Mary’s Catholic Church is a rounded mother, soft and loving, but also strong. Her hands are large and protective. Beside rushing waters, they keep the child safe.

The artisan who set artist Ken Spiering’s Madonna to glass knows it is the fate of mothers to suffer the wounds of their children. But Anni Ryan Meyer believes it is also their job to protect.

“You touch my children and look out,” says Ryan Meyer, who is 42. “You can do anything but don’t hurt my kids.”

The eighth child of the late Dr. Bernard Ryan and his wife Mary Ann, Ryan Meyer bucked her Catholic girlhood early, going from Spokane’s Holy Names Academy to hot-wiring cars. Her passions cut from roadsters to downhill ski racing, but eventually broke along two: glass and children.

Glass was mysterious, demanding, and a dropped sheet could cut her hand off. Her skill with it built the Ryan House Studio of Stained Glass, a career teaching at Whitworth and Spokane Community Colleges and a kaleidoscope of windows.

Children came less easily.

Two babies lost in pregnancy, before a healthy daughter. A third lost inexplicably in the sixth month before two more births. Then, the thousands lost in Romania.

To understand a woman who would leave her Overbluff Drive home, overbooked business and three young children to help the throwaway children of Romania, consider the glass Madonna.

It is a mother’s way.

“ARE YOU A SPORTS TEAM?” someone asks the 13 people wearing Northwest Medical Teams International T-shirts on the 22-hour trip to Bucharest. Not sports, they say, smiling. Not medical either.

“I’m not a doctor,” Spokane firefighter Ken Knutson says. “But I do know plumbing.”

Knutson, 42, was the last man on. When another volunteer backed out of the orphanage construction team in early August, he had two hours to decide if he could beg, borrow or trade his 24-hour shifts at Station 11 on Spokane’s South Hill. He immediately told his pastor, Tom Norris, yes. He then called his fire chief.

Norris, 32, who leads Spokane’s Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church, said yes right away himself at the Christmas program when his path, as the path of every other member of the team, crossed that of Ryan Meyer.

She was the only Spokane resident traveling with Northwest Medical Teams last year to cut glass, install windows and pour concrete at an infant orphanage in southern Romania.

Since 1990, the Portland-based charity has funneled supplies, medical and dental teams to the Balkan country’s orphans. Two years ago, unable to ignore the conditions the children live in, it began sending repair teams.

Ryan Meyer stopped nursing her youngest daughter to volunteer to cut glass. Halfway through her mission, her leader told her she should lead a Spokane team.

One year later, on August 23, she did.

Gregg Pryde topped the list of her former students. He loves the creativity of glass and made a Tiffany dragonfly lamp with 860 pieces for his wife, Barb.

A diabetic whose disease demands intense vigilance, he and Barb agreed early in their 24-year marriage not to have children. But they are pushovers for all things unwanted: difficult children, stray cats and messy gardens.

“Even the weeds,” Barb Pryde says, “need a place to grow.”

Their best times occur volunteering so they pitch in endlessly, at the Spokane Guild School, Spokane Civic Theater, Bloomsday.

When Ryan Meyer asks if they will cut glass and glaze windows at a Romanian orphanage, it doesn’t matter that they’ve never been to Europe.

They immediately say yes.

Marge Bland is cleaning Ryan Meyer’s house when she hears her employer on the telephone, planning the Romanian trip. “I’ve been a homemaker all my life. I don’t have any important skills. But Anni,” she blurts, “do you think there’s any way I can go?”

Bland, 54, doesn’t drink. Yet she’ll drive 75 miles roundtrip from Elk all winter to sell beer at Spokane Arena events to help pay for the trip. She gets in trouble for not being suspicious enough of IDs.

Ryan Meyer and her sister, Suzanne Nevers, also sell beer to raise money, but have fun being suspicious. They ask everyone for IDs so they can check their weights. They also hold a garage sale.

Beautiful Savior sends Pastor Norris with bushels of clothing and “$4 from Tyler,” age 6. Churches support Bland, and her daughter Kristie Smith, 27, a mother of two from Hayden, Idaho.

Kris Foster, 24, dreams of doing missionary work in Romania. A medical assistant who covers her head and dresses modestly according to biblical interpretation, she uses her income tax refund and donations.

Carolyn and Dr. Frank Walchak send the only staffer at Spokane Plastic Surgeons with more seniority than themselves: office manager Marlene Crow, 45.

Marv Frey, 44, takes vacation from his shipping job at the Inland Empire Paper Mill. Nurse Melody King, 37, does the same with her pediatric intensive care job at Sacred Heart Medical Center.

The only non-Spokane member, Bob Cummings, 65, of Silverdale, Wash., is retired. He went to Romania with Northwest last year.

The Prydes, who find it hard enough to ask for money for their causes, find it impossible to ask for it for themselves. They’ll pay for the trip over the next two years.

Together, the 13 volunteers collect or contribute nearly $50,000. They load 13 hard plastic packing boxes with pliers, heat guns, drills, wrenches, hardhats and candy. They stuff another 36 boxes and bags with clothes, shoes, soap, shampoo, combs, toothpaste, teddy bears and balls.

Some volunteers also, quietly, increase their life insurance. They hand wills to relatives. Group members leave 21 of their own children behind, most under age 15.

Over the next 17 days, the Spokane team will travel during U.S. State Department terrorism warnings to all Americans abroad. They’ll ride through a country suffering an epidemic of deadly meningitis. They’ll sleep in clothes to ward off bedbugs and mosquitoes.

Careful people, they feel prepared for anything.

Except what they find.

IN BUCHAREST, WEEDS SPLIT the concrete runway.

“It looks,” says Ryan Meyer, “like Communism.”

Once the “little Paris of the East,” the capital is faded and dusty, its 19th-century French-designed elegance cringing beside Communist concrete block.

On a bumpy bus ride 50 miles north, the team passes corn fields and steel foundries until reaching the hostel in Targoviste, a city settled before the time of Columbus.

At dinner, the local Ministry of Education director warns them of what they will see. They might wonder how such conditions can exist. She explains the Special School For Girls, at the nearby village of Suta Dragodana, is one of 720 schools in the county operating on a tenth of the budget it needs.

She never mentions the kindergarten.

The smell inside the kindergarten door is an invisible force field that team members must push through. Sour like a diaper pail, cloying like rancid grease. It reeks. The volunteers find the pig barn preferable.

Gregg Pryde isn’t fazed by the smell or much of anything. When the first child reaches him that Sunday, he drops to his knee on the sidewalk glittering with glass and gathers the boy in his arms. He puts his U.S. Bank hat on the child’s head.

“Lice,” someone calls. “They’re covered with lice.” Pryde puts the hat on another delighted child, and another.

He was orphaned at 8 after his mother was institutionalized with polio. He lived in the Clark Home in North Idaho and a series of foster homes. At 14, he developed diabetes, and was placed with a registered nurse whose care saved his life.

“A child like Gregg would not survive this,” his wife says.

On the way back to the hostel that first day, anger slams around the van like loose luggage. The volunteers lash out at executed dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, “amazing how much damage one man can do”; the community, “where are the volunteers?” and everyone at home who questioned why they had to come.

Few imagine a more desperate place.

“People who’ve never been to a Third World country hear poverty and think of Hillyard. They aren’t thinking of an emaciated child rocking in a puddle of his own urine,” Frey says.

Later, surveying the cache of stuffed animals and clothing they brought, everything seems ridiculously extravagant. Eighty pounds of candy for children who are starving. Toothbrushes for kids with no teeth. “We were thinking of our own kids,” says Kristie Smith, “who have everything.”

THE KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN have not been bathed in months. The hot water heaters broke in January.

“His arm smells like urine, old, old urine,” whispers Suzanne Nevers, a mother of six, as she squeezes a child’s hand.

One orphan, Nicu, has a cartoon sticker stuck on his forehead from an American team that visited in June.

He is 7, has large black eyes, a Valentino smile and AIDS. Another child also has AIDS, although it is impossible to tell which one.

Nearly two dozen children sit weakly against the fetid walls inside the school, or a wire fence in the schoolyard. One child’s belly is so distended, he must rock on his bottom like an old beer drinker to get enough momentum to rise. The orphanage doctor insists there are no serious illnesses, “only the usual colds and flu.”

Anguished cries one morning bring members from throughout the compound. Blue-eyed Florentina screams and writhes on a staff member’s lap.

King runs for her medical kit and dabs at the girl’s belly. She takes a step back, when she realizes the whole yardful of children are scratching and writhing. Scabies - the itch mite.

“The next time I come I am bringing buckets of medicine, and two action packers full of scabies medicine - minimum,” King vows.

Her one bottle of medicine is almost useless. Without delousing the communal blankets and clothes, without soap and hot water, the mite is unstoppable.

It’s a feeling worse than King’s previous two medical missions to Africa.

There is no healing here. No medicine. No disinfectant. Sores erupt on every child: scabies, mosquito bites, bedbug bites, infected boils that swell, ooze, bleed, scab and finally, scar over.

Smooth skin, the birthright of every child, is not found in Suta Dragodana.

AS A BUILDING MATERIAL, nothing is as transparent, as strong, as able to withstand temperatures or as cheap as glass.

It seals the sides of Ceausescu’s factories, lines the hallways of his schools. For decades, widely used. Now, widely broken.

At the Special School for Girls, hundreds of classroom, bathroom and hallway windows are split, cracked and broken. The school houses 200 older girls unable to keep up in regular schools or who are considered mentally retarded. They’re away at a state-run summer camp. The kindergarten boys and girls live in one long hallway of the main dormitory, under their own director and staff.

The complex, built in 1967 during Ceausescu’s crowning years, has undergone no improvements since.

Knutson and Norris find blue flames shooting from electric outlets, toilets that don’t flush, sinks with no water pressure, lead pipes at every faucet. The men don’t find the school’s maintenance workers.

They’re all out at the glass-cutter’s table.

Across from the pig barn, where today’s lunch just had its throat slit, Pryde is at the glass table, too.

It’s 80 degrees on the asphalt and his face is damp red. Before a crowd of silent maintenance workers, he handles a 75-by-63-inch sheet of fickle Romanian glass. Its greenish wavy surface indicates glass far more fragile and unpredictable than U.S.-made glass.

Pryde slides a $450 Japanese glass cutter across its surface. As he and Marlene Crow move to break it, a young Romanian worker joins in.

They lift up, snap down. The cut skitters into three jagged pieces, ruined. The young Romanian at fault drifts away.

“Glass always takes the path of least resistance,” Ryan Meyer says, leaning over and making two quick cuts to salvage some of it.

Pryde fights panic. He’s never cut glass this big. Three cases are propped behind him, 79 more sheets to go. “I’m scared to death we’re going to ruin this stuff and then we won’t be able to do anything.”

By quitting time, he bleeds from two sliced fingers.

Crow goes to bed worried she offended the Romanians trying to help. “Nothing I did today was politically correct.” She wonders what the team will accomplish.

By morning Bible study, the question is formal: Has anyone thought this might be futile?

“I’ve definitely had people tell me that,” King says. Years of caring for critically ill children give her the long view. To her, it’s enough to do a little good, alleviate some suffering, and live her own life differently because of the experience.

Norris says he doesn’t know the real impact, but trusts God that it will have a lasting effect.

Vicentiu Mocanu finally speaks. The Northwest Medical Teams’ Romanian coordinator, he left his wife and daughter in Bucharest to work with the Spokane group. He is 28 and the most effective tool the team has: from clearing customs to buying supplies.

“Most Romanian people don’t understand why you are here. They think just to put in glass is not so important,” he says. “But for the kids it is important. It’s like sunshine for them. All the time, they are running after you. Nobody plays with these kids, nobody. It’s more important what the kids are feeling than what a person on the street thinks.”

Inspired, the team goes back to work. Inside the school, the bucket brigade of windows flows. Team members remove entire windows, smash out ruined glass and - with heat guns blasting like hair dryers - chisel away ancient putty. They drop new glass in, anchor it, then smooth worms of putty in place.

The mood lifts as windows go in one after another. This, finally, is what Americans do: clean up and fix up, roll up their sleeves and work and work and work.

At the glass table, a determined Pryde meets with King, Crow and the young Romanian workers. Soon, they’re flipping through an English-Romanian phrase book looking for “Let me do it” and “not sufficient.” Someone turns on a boombox.

By midmorning, they’ve cut more glass than the previous day. They’re teaching the Romanians.

On breaks, they teach them to dance the Macarena.

THE PASTOR AND THE FIREFIGHTER turn into full-time plumbers. They tighten one leaking pipe under a sink and wind up replacing every supply line in the building - all the existing ones are lead.

“We don’t want kids drinking out of lead pipes,” Knutson explains. The lead-free replacements, like most of the supplies, came from Bucharest.

Norris trots down one stairwell, opens a door and stops just before stepping into total darkness. The blackness moves.

The basement is flooded to the brim, garbage floating on top. The whole compound has poor drainage and the pumps are broken.

“This is a very dark place,” Norris says again and again.

The school is among the worst Northwest Medical could find - that’s why the team is here. Earlier this summer, two groups of Oregon church and college volunteers repaired some windows and painted.

A freak June storm peeled the aging tile roof off the main dormitory, opening six girls’ dorm rooms to summer skies. For two months, the government did nothing.

Headmaster Pavel Stoicescu waited. A respected teacher, he built his reputation by flunking the children of Communist Party members with zeal. Now past retirement age, he was told to quit or take over Suta Dragodana. The Special School had endured a series of incompetent or corrupt headmasters, replaced annually, since the 1989 revolution.

Stoicescu proves a savvy choice. This week, he has the Spokane team fixing windows, coverage of the ruined roof on national television and a leading construction firm beginning to repair it - all without money or a telephone. The service was shut off six months ago because the school hasn’t paid its 1993-94 electric bill.

On the strength of Stoicescu’s word, repair workers appear like weather vanes on the steep ruined roof. They wear no harnesses or hard hats as they send debris smashing to the ground.

Fifteen feet from where it lands, sit the kindergarten children.

Gathered on rugs in the yard, they watch the demolition silently, rocking. A boy plays with an empty food tin, turning it over and over in the sunlight. He vomits in it and hands it to the next child - who drinks it.

A government delegation arrives in response to the television coverage and the Spokane team waits for a national uproar over the kindergarten conditions. None comes. Stoicescu’s job is threatened - for allowing the coverage and arranging the roof contract himself instead of leaving that to a ministry functionary, who’ll likely receive a “commission.” The only comment offered on the children’s behalf is that they need a mirror. Can the Americans help?

As the official asks, debris shatters near the children at her feet. A small boy sits unnoticed, rubbing a new toy against his lips, touching it with his tongue, pressing it against his cheek, enjoying the smoothness and coolness of a shard of glass.

“WHERE ARE THE MOTHERS GROUPS? Where’s the community?” Nevers asks. “Where is the staff?”

The kindergarten of 49 children has a staff of 30. Most are on a long summer break and the disinterest of the remaining “teachers” is chilling. Sitting on park benches outside the schoolyard, chatting or reading, they rarely touch, hold or acknowledge the chaotic children around them. The toy room inside is always locked.

Outside, boys and girls rock in a playground sprouting weeds and a rusting slide. A stream of black sewage borders one end. A single swing, occupied by the same expressionless girl, clangs incessantly.

“I am scared to death if I die and go to hell that I will come back as an orphan in Romania,” says Ryan Meyer.

Team members spend hours debating how such conditions can exist.

“I personally can’t understand how an adult with children of their own can allow these conditions,” Norris says. “But the system is so broken it seems to have ripped even basic compassion from them. I find it more difficult to blame them than what the Communist system and the dictatorship did to them. These people aren’t Hitlers … they were normal people until they got stomped on hard enough.”

The volunteers, charmed by Romanian hospitality and the decency of individuals, want to respect the rich culture around them. They refuse to place blame.

But Ryan Meyer wants answers. Married to attorney David Meyer, a partner at Paine Hamblen, she’s a born prosecutor who briefly considered law school herself - not to be a lawyer, but to be a judge - to hold people accountable.

She grills everyone, from Northwest’s Romanian staff to Carmen Anghel, the doctor for the school and the kindergarten. How can this happen?

The answer is always money.

Neither staff, the schools nor the Romanian people have enough. Employees earn $30 to $60 a month and with inflation, many families spend 90 percent of their income on food. The doctor, a young mother herself, earns $80 a month and hitchhikes to work.

As for the community, most Romanians probably don’t know the orphanage at Suta Dragodana exists. Until the 1989 revolution, orphanages were like prisons, deliberately located 10 miles from town, secret and secure. Byzantine secrecy persists.

The Romanian foundation that - through Northwest Medical Teams - provides relief in 20 orphanages, still does not know how many orphanages exist or where they are because they fall under different ministries.

After the revolution, the kindergarten and school received beds and carpet. The food and staff budget doubled. But there is still no money for diapers, shoes or toilet paper. Half the doctor’s $150 monthly budget goes to buy tampons for the older girls.

“It is very difficult for two working parents to raise one child here. Imagine each staff member trying to provide for 10,” says Dr. Anghel.

So why do two orphanages nearby, just as poor and far larger, have children who are clean, fed and thriving?

In the kindergarten at Suta Dragodana, as in so much of Romania, the old regime is gone but the same deputies are still in charge.

Director Daniela Petrescu has been at the kindergarten 18 years, since she was assigned here while at the university. Now, she says, she is used to it.

“The director makes all the difference,” says Pryde, who grew up in a child welfare system. So does oversight and, of course, attitudes toward the disabled.

“It’s easier to pay attention to a child who can love than a child who cannot. Even animals respond to love but some kids cannot. And to care for them with love is hard to do,” the doctor explains.

These orphans, abandoned because of poverty, divorce or illegitimacy, also face the stigma of being mentally retarded. By age 3, all Romanian orphans are evaluated by a committee of doctors and social workers. Those deemed retarded are shipped to special schools.

In the kindergarten, having a lazy eye, a speech impediment or chronic illness seems to qualify children as mentally retarded - slotted for life.

Both the kindergarten director and doctor readily admit that if children don’t have mental problems when they arrive, they soon develop them.

“In your opinion, which came first, the children acting like animals or being treated like animals?” Ryan Meyer asks.

“Both, in the same amount,” the doctor says.

Emil Coman, a young journalist translating for Northwest Medical Teams, believes it may take a generation for attitudes to truly change.

Yes, Ryan Meyer says, but wouldn’t it be easier if they used the toilet?

The director says they try to train them, but the children cannot learn to go every two hours and there is not enough money for diapers. Then, echoing what other orphanage staff say when they reveal 60 percent of their charges are chronic bed-wetters, she says: “It’s a kidney problem they are born with.”

Of course, the toilets at the kindergarten are broken anyway.

IT’S LATE. THE BUS IS WAITING. The team crowds into the storeroom putting tools away when a 5-year-old girl slips in, a little bird.

“Guma, guma,” Sabina sings. Gum.

Her shoulder bones point out of her torn shirt. Nylon pants, on backward, drag behind her. She is half the size of the team members’ children the same age. All eyes and bones.

Marv Frey kneels, offering a Tootsie Roll. She grabs and eats it - wrapped. He unwraps another, then a granola bar, then raisins. She crowds them into her mouth, chewing in a jerking frenzy.

He points to the pocket in her sagging pants. But Sabina eats like she’ll never get this chance again, and one by one, the nine Spokane adults in the room realize she’s right.

The orphan schoolyard is the worst kind of prison yard, all of the cruelty with none of the guards. Supervisors take gifts from their underlings, who take things from orphans. The biggest orphans take from the smallest and the smallest take from the weak. In other words, from Sabina.

Frey shepherds her to a stairwell. It is dark there, grimy and dingy, but safe from bigger kids. Ryan Meyer sits alongside the child talking softly. Eight other adults, in perfect solidarity, stand watch.

Sabina eats and eats, her ribs sharp as a discarded chicken breast.

“The bus is waiting,” someone yells.

It can wait.

NEVERS HAS HAD IT. CLEANING TOILETS, holding scabby, slimy hands doesn’t shake her. It’s what she can’t do - fix this.

“I just want to finish the windows and blow this place up,” Nevers says.

Images of her own six children, starting their first days of school from kindergarten to Gonzaga Prep, press in at night. She’s able to call home once and reaches her husband at 3 a.m., who just happens to be awake with a vomiting child. “Please come back to this orphanage,” he says.

Frey jogs to ease his frustration. Knutson whittles a piece of linden wood. Everyone on the team races to a neighborhood cantina at night for the simple joy of sitting in the warm summer air.

Targoviste is a picturesque village and a modern steel town with black snakes of smoke across its sky. Horse-drawn wagons clatter past diesel-spewing buses. Charming hosts and starving orphans. Like the Romanian 500 lei bill: a beautiful European face on one side, an alien on the other.

In a country that seems not to care about the children at Suta Dragodana, each morning the translator Coman collects breakfast leftovers for the children. Lunch scraps go to the orphanage cat. He won’t ask the doctor which child has AIDS because he fears he will treat that child differently. It is better, he says, not to know.

Vicentiu Mocanu, the team liaison, cheerfully works 18-hour days. pitching in on windows and plumbing. Evangelical Bible teachers who also work for Northwest, Florian and Cati Ion channel direct aid into a dozen other orphanages almost weekly.

And of course, the Five Amigos.

Four boys and Sonia, they are older, sturdier survivors.

Cartwheeling barefoot through the yard, they land upright even at Suta Dragodana. They share one tricycle with no handlebars, an adopted kitten and the run of the place.

When tantrums erupt, even the director turns to the Amigos to settle it. While the other children are kept in beds all afternoon, the Amigos roam free.

They steal grapes from the arbor, strip work buckets of all food, and shadow the foreigners, eager to help.

Constantin steals a water bottle one day amid irritated shouts before horrified team members realize they’ve been feeding him crackers all afternoon and he had no other way to get a drink.

Not even Amigos have a cup of their own.

One night, Knutson presents Ryan Meyer with his linden wood whittling: a chain of five links, elaborate and intertwined.

“I thought this was like the five Amigos,” he says. “From Romanian soil, slightly twisted, and very fragile. Please be careful with them.”

IT IS NOT A RELIGIOUS MISSION. But faith brings these Lutherans, Presbyterians, Catholics and non-denominational Christians here and it carries them.

They pray alone and at meals, for the children and the adults who fail them.

The team gives mops to cleaning women who don’t know how to use them. They scrub toilets and floors with bleach only to have the women throw buckets of filthy water on top.

“I just think they need a lot of help,” Knutson says. “Somebody has got to teach the workers how to do it, tell them when to do it and give them the supplies to do it.”

Last winter, Suta Dragodana had no electricity for a week. The children wore layers of clothes and huddled around huge wood fires in the snow.

Throughout the 1980s, such hardships were common as Romanians endured terrible shortages of food and heat. The schools for social work were closed by the Communists in the 1960s. Until 1990, it was illegal for Romanians to speak to foreigners.

“We look at how far they need to go,” says Frey. “And they look at how far they’ve come.”

“There is joy here,” King says. “I see the horror, the inequities. I walk on the floor and think, ‘Please God don’t let me fall.’ But I’m much more accepting of the realism. If you can matter for a moment it’s worth it. Every person should do what they can.”

With three days left and the project money already spent, the team decides to do what it can in the kindergarten. Over lunch, members contribute their spending money, Christmas money and the “$4 from Tyler” - $2,118.

The team replaces 22 toilets, 27 sinks, 17 showers, buys and installs two hot water heaters. And fixes windows.

Three times a day, Gregg Pryde injects insulin into the bruised skin of his stomach. Crow watches him at the glass table closely, forcing him to snack on granola bars. But irregular mealtimes and his emotional seismograph are disastrous. He slips into insulin shock twice, growing woozy at dinner and at bedtime, his blood sugar dangerously low.

He recovers, and manages to cut glass for 330 windows that the crew seals. They also seal another 185 windows.

“They’ll have windows to keep in the heat, hot water, and toilets that flush,” says Barb Pryde. “I realize it’s transitory. But if one winter of your life is warm, that might be the winter you remember.”

“Each one of you,” Ryan Meyer tells the team, “is one degree on a thermostat.”

The group gives every child it meets a stuffed animal. All the older girls, visited at summer camp, get hair toys and gift bags of toiletries. Frey creates nearly 500 balloon hearts, puppies and flowers.

The team decorates and delivers hundreds of gifts to employees. With the leftovers, Crow holds a lottery.

Team members also buy two new steam irons for laundresses too speechless to respond. They leave money for a new potato peeler.

And then, on the last day, they take off their Levis, windbreakers, baseball caps, work boots, tools and crucifixes and leave those behind for the Romanians, too.

AT HOME, KRISTIE SMITH breathes the sweet smell of her 5-year-old’s hair, then takes three bags of toys from her child’s bedroom for charity.

Tom Norris can’t develop his film. “I’m afraid it will all be there and at the same time, I’m afraid it will just be pictures and won’t convey what it is really like.”

At a party Frey grabs food out of a friend’s mouth.

“That’s what it was like,” he says as the conversation dies around him. “They were so hungry they would eat the banana peels. They were so hungry, they would take food out of each other’s mouths.”

Frey will go back. Foster plans to move to Romania permanently within the year. Norris is leading a team in early summer and Ryan Meyer, a team after that.

But there is something more she must do now.

On Thursday, she’ll leave Spokane again for Suta Dragodana, bringing warm clothes for the hungry child, Sabina.

Ryan Meyer and Celeste Shaw, a nurse at Deaconess Medical Center who has made three medical missions to Romania, will take winter clothes, antibiotics, Tylenol and skin medicine to the children.

Then Ryan Meyer will get out her map.

“I am going to get a giant map of Romania and find all of the orphanages and the names of each director and mark them with push pins. Then one by one, pull them off, until Romania is free.”

THREE DAYS BEFORE THE Spokane group leaves Romania, Ryan Meyer rides 15 miles to the summer camp where the kindergartners were moved two days earlier. Because no one wanted to bunk with AIDS children, they draw the last slot of the summer, two short weeks in September.

It is beautiful there, the air clean. Fed, clothed and stimulated, the kindergartners laugh and play the only way they know how: by hitting one another.

Alone in a clearing Ryan Meyer pulls out clothing she took from her daughter’s dresser weeks earlier and begins to dress Sabina.

Last year, she tried to adopt an abandoned Romanian baby boy and waited her entire last day for the mother to come and sign the papers. The mother never showed.

Ryan Meyer couldn’t save the boy. She can’t save Sabina. But she can bring her warm clothes.

Humming gently, she pulls a shirt over Sabina’s skeletal shoulders, slides her arms into a pink bunny sweater, pulls blue corduroy trousers over scabbed legs. And then, the red Italian shoes.

The child stands, a strange smile transforming her pixie face, and begins to walk. She stops to run hands down the soft sweater, touch the pants. She bends to see the shoes, which she picks up and puts down like a princess.

Awash in sunlight and Downy fabric softener, she walks away standing so straight. Then she winces with cramps. Chronic diarrhea. She relieves herself on the ground, her bottom emaciated and covered with sores, and walks on. Stops again. And again.

Ryan Meyer’s shoulders shake with sobs as the child pulls up her stained pants a third time and walks away.

A tiny bird, dropped from the nest without a mother to notice, alone forever in these Romanian woods.

Yes, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 26 Color Photos; Map of Targoviste, Romania area

MEMO: These 2 sidebars appeared with the story: 1. WHO’S WHO IN THIS STORY Members of the Northwest Medical Teams Spokane group who went to Romania Aug. 23 - Sept. 7: Anni Ryan Meyer, 42, Spokane, owner, Ryan House Studio of Stained Glass. Marge Bland, 54, Elk, housecleaner. Marlene Crow, 45, Colbert, office manager, Spokane Plastic Surgeons. Robert Cummings, 65, Silverdale, Wash., retired civil service. Kris Foster, 24, Spokane, medical assistant for gastroenterologists at the Physicians Clinic of Spokane. Marvin Frey, 44, Millwood, head shipping clerk, Inland Empire Paper Mill. Melody King, 37, Spokane, pediatric intensive care nurse, Sacred Heart Medical Center. Ken Knutson, 42, Spokane firefighter, Station 11. Suzanne Ryan Nevers, 45, Spokane, homemaker, mother of six. Tom Norris, 32, Spokane, pastor, Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church. Barb Pryde, 45, Spokane, commercial note manager, Eastern Washington, U.S. Bank. Gregg Pryde, 46, Spokane, ATM teller, U.S. Bank. Kristie Smith, 27, Hayden, Idaho, nursery director, New Life Community Church.

2. WOULD YOU LIKE TO HELP? Here is a partial list of agencies or churches working with Romanian orphans: The Spokane chapter of Northwest Medical Teams International, contact any U.S. Bank branch or call 534-3775 or 327-4591. Northwest Medical Teams International Inc., P.O. Box 10, Portland, OR, 97207-0010 or 503-624-1000. For information on adoption or to support adoption services in Romania: Holt International Children Services, 541-687-2202; or Adoption Services of WACAP, 206-575-4550. Children of the World, which supports art and other projects for Romanian orphans, 503-460-3411. Your local church or charity which may already be supporting a Romanian mission, such as Catholic Charities of Spokane, 358-4250, P.O. Box 1453, Spokane, 99210.