Romania Orphans Still In Crisis

Children living in caves, burning garbage to keep warm, huddling together on the underground heating pipes of an apartment complex. This is not what you expect to find in late 1990's Europe. Shockingly, scenes like this are commonplace in Romania today.

When the doors finally swung open after the fall of Romania's secretive dictator Nicholai Ceausescu, the world gasped at the plight of a nation choked with misery. Thousands of mentally retarded, deformed, starving, and sick children, each the result of orders which banned all forms of contraception and forced women to bear at least four children.

Aid agencies and the world's press, poured into Romania to address the problem.

By the time the international attention had shifted to Bosnia and Rwanda, everyone felt that these lost souls had been saved. But they were not.

Aid workers who returned recently have reported that conditions in Romania may now be worse than in 1990.

CBS News Correspondent Allen Pizzey learned of one 8-year-old girl who was found starving on a city garbage dump—her toes and fingers chewed off by rats. The girl also had AIDS, contracted from her mother, who abandoned her. More than half of Romania's orphans are HIV-positive.

The horrors of AIDS babies tugged the heartstrings and opened the purse strings of the Western world. But the outpourings were too short-lived.

Today's gravestones bear the inscription SIDA—the local acronym for AIDS.

Another child, Colin, was only seven-years-old when he was abandoned. Now he's fourteen and knows how to impress with a smile. He lived in an orphanage for a while, but because he was small, food was often stolen from him.

Now Colin and a few friends call a cave their home. Their food and clothing come from the city dump.

Romania has an estimated 350,000 diseased street children, who often make themselves high by sniffing glue.

Aid workers say Romania's efforts to get into NATO and the European economic community divert attention and funds from the more immediate problem of the orphans. They say it's a high price to pay for ambitions to join the West which no longer seems to care about yesterday's headlines.

©1998, CBS Worldwide Inc., All Rights Reserved