Countywide : Her Cause Is ‘Forgotten Children’

Photographs of Romanian orphans lay scattered across a table in Alice Johnson’s office. Pictures of ruddy-cheeked children contrast with those of children whose skin is sallow and whose bodies are shrunken and deformed.

All of them are among “the forgotten children” of Romania, says Johnson, director of the Orange County branch of the Free Romania Foundation. And she wants them to be remembered.

Johnson was angered by television images of orphaned and abandoned children in Romania, and she decided to take action. Johnson, the manager of California Rubber Products, an aircraft parts distributor in Orange, opened space in the business’ offices for the foundation last November and now spends 30 hours a week fielding calls and soliciting donations to help Romanian children. This fall, she hopes to take a group of medical professionals and other volunteers to Romania to work directly with the orphans and help determine their physical and emotional needs.

As a special project, the Orange County Free Romania office has adopted Sasca, an orphanage about 200 miles north of Bucharest that is considered among the worst such institutions in the country. About 250 children and adults live there.

There will be a baby shower for the children of Sasca today at 2 p.m. at St. Luke’s Orthodox Church, 13261 Dunklee Ave., Garden Grove. Johnson hopes to receive cloth diapers, wooden toys, baby bottles, bedding for cribs and twin beds and other supplies to deliver for the trip to Sasca in the fall.

The government of Nicolae Ceausescu, which was overthrown in 1989, outlawed abortion and penalized people who had too few children. About 125,000 Romanian children were either orphaned or abandoned and were turned over to be cared for in understaffed institutions. Some parents who were unable to afford more children would deposit them there. Some of the children in these institutions have never received proper care and have never learned to walk or talk.

In addition, as many as 30,000 others who were born disabled or with other abnormalities such as crossed eyes, birthmarks or cleft palates, were labeled “irrecoverable” and left to the care of the state.

Johnson visited three Romanian orphanages through a Free Romania Foundation program in January. There, she discovered that without modern medical care, some children could spend the rest of their lives in institutions.

“I know of one child that has cerebral palsy and seizures they hadn’t been able to control,” she said. “The mother was told by a neurologist in Bucharest to ‘forget the child. You can have other children.’ ”

The national Free Romania Foundation, which is based in Massachusetts, helped make the children’s plight known last year when ABC broadcast footage shot by the group’s founder in Romania. The video images of the children’s squalid living conditions prompted a movement to help the children.

Free Romania now has 10 branches nationwide that include offices in Orange and Los Angeles counties. The group organizes teams of American medical and lay volunteers to work in the orphanages, offers adoption counseling and assistance, arranges surgery for Romanian children, and has started a program to teach Romanians how to help disabled children. It also sends supplies and money to the orphanages.

Eventually, Johnson said, she herself may adopt one of the Romanian children she has tried to help, but not yet.

“Maybe next year, but now I don’t have the time,” she said. “I see so much need for organization here.”

For more information on the Free Romania Foundation, call (714) 633-6404.