Zoro Found-part 2

The video jogged Zoro's memory. He started to cry. I hugged him, and he rubbed his hand up and down on my back. He said in Hungarian that he wanted to go back to the school. His mother said that he couldn't go back; if he went, she'd never get him back again. Zoro's father agreed; if he let Zoro go, they'd never get him back. She began to watch me warily, not letting Zoro out of her sight. Eventually, I asked if we could come back the next day so that we could talk more about the whole situation. I needed to regroup. What had I done?

When I sat with Zoro and his mom the next day at the bilingual neighbor's house, she explained to me that she had to take the youngest of her five children, Zoro and one of his brothers, to the orphanage in Satu Mare when Zoro was two years old, because his father left her for another woman. Since she was homeless, she had no choice. She had no money or transportation, so she rarely visited the orphanage. One day she went to visit and found out that Zoro had been transferred to Beclean a month earlier, which was impossibly far away for her. She didn't know how to get there, and she didn't have the money anyway. While she was recounting this, she started to cry, and this got Zoro crying. She said he had never heard all this before, because she hadn't wanted to tell him how hard things were for her.

Her parental rights were eventually terminated, because during the years Zoro spent in Beclean, she never visited. So when social workers from Satu Mare contacted the aunt, the aunt legally adopted him so that his mother could get him back. Things are better now for the family; they have a house, though ten people share two rooms and two small beds.



The floor is bare dirt. It has a strong smell because they have no plumbing, water, or electricity, and the goose and pig wander in and out of the house when the door is open. The 4-inch black and white television is connected to a car battery. Every social worker is required to evaluate the family's living conditions before reintegrating a child into the home. Zoro's social worker evidently decided that these were acceptable living conditions.

Zoro doesn't go to school anymore because-according to Zoro and his mother--he is alays getting into fights. His mother says that he suffered a breakdown soon after arriving in the village, and that he is supposed to take medication--but she can't afford it. She gets $44 dollars a month for Zoro from the child welfare department--$14 of which is for medication that costs over $40 a month. If Zoro had been placed in a foster family, that family would have received $273 per month plus a clothing allowance. They would have been required to have a certain standard of living, including electricity, flooring, and running water. The $44 a month is a significant amount for Zoro's family; they have been able to make a few additions to the home. His mother makes a living by canning vegetables, which she then sells in the village. This is summertime work only; in the winter, things are very hard.

The situation is so complicated, and by making myself the only link between Zoro's present and past, I now feel an obligation to follow through. But how? The living conditions are so difficult; I can't imagine how the family made it through the winter. The neighbors' homes are even less solid, some roofless, or with plastic for doors and windows. But what is the alternative for him? The system will not take a child back unless abuse is reported, and even if that were going on (which I could not determine from such a short visit), where would he go? He has been legally adopted by his aunt. While Zoro liked living at the school in Beclean, he couldn't stay there forever. Given his emotional sensitivity and his intellectual limitations, I don't know how he would have fared at the age of 18 when he would be on his own. The children in Beclean raise this question a lot--what happens when we turn 18 and we're out the door? It's a scary prospect, when you have no family to help you.

The filmmaking aspect blurs ethical lines even further; I want to include Zoro's story, because I feel it's important to hear about his experience, as well as his mother's. Ninety percent of Romanian gypsies live in dire poverty, which is why about 70% of the abandoned children (approximately 5,000 per year) are of Gypsy ethnicity. These children have virtually no chance of being adopted by a Romanian family, so they are generally raised in the state system until they're old enough to be returned to their biological families, whom they've often never seen. Zoro's mother doesn't want him to leave, though I can't tell which reasons are most important to her. Is it that he helps around the house and in the fields? That he brings the family a little money each month? That she loves him as she says?

Quite telling was Zoro's comment to me, when his mother was out of range. I said, "Zoro, you told me three years ago that you wanted a family. Is this a family for you?" He said something in Hungarian that I have to have translated, but I think he said "I wanted a family, but..." Then he gestured at his mother and said, "Tiganca" ("Gypsy") and kind of shook his head and shrugged. Like many children of Roma (Gypsy) ethnicity, he grew up associating the Roma, or Tsigani, with crime and disrepute. They were shady characters to be avoided, not emulated or lived with. The word "Tsigan" has a pejorative connotation in Romanian that the English word "Gypsy" doesn't have--it is somewhat like "nigger" depending on the context, and is used as an insult by Romanians and Roma alike. However, many Gypsies refer to themselves as "Tsigani," and some have never even heard the more politically correct word "Roma." Roma children raised in an institution do not identify as Roma or "Tsigani," and the look on Zoro's face as he said this was so subtle...I can only interpret from my own limited perspective. It was half bemused, half resigned. Surprised, like he wondered how the hell he got here. When I showed him some video I'd shot of him that day, he said, "Who is that?" and his mother said, "Zoro--that's YOU!"

Zoro Found-part 1

I found Zoro.



In this picture, we both look happy. The golden sunlight is highlighting our hair; Zoro's sweater looks clean and bright. In reality, we were both pretty traumatized. Oh, the hazards of filmmaking.

I sent a very long and detailed account of my production trip to Satu Mare to my family and Kim and Sorin and some others who know Zoro from our time at the camp with him. It's much too long to publish here, but here is a shorter version.

The working title of my film (though unlikely to be the final one) is "Finding Zoro: Journeys in Romania." I knew before I came back to Romania that a number of children from the summer camp (www.copiiproject.org) had either been placed in foster families or "reunited" with their biological families. My film is about the recent (2002-2006) push in Romania to deinstitutionalize children who grew up in large facilities by placing them in family settings. I have spent most of my time here at the Scoala Speciala in Beclean, where we originally met all the children. Four of the five children in my film still attend school there; three are in foster families, and one is still living in the school most of the time. In November, I was able to obtain the address of Zoro's aunt, whom I was told had agreed to take him. According to teachers and students in Beclean, Zoro had wanted very much to stay at the school, crying for two weeks when told he had to go. The school's social worker said that Zoro had been stealing and misbehaving at school which made it difficult to place him in foster care. Also, a new law required that children in state care be returned to the counties of their birth, so Zoro, along with several other children, was transferred to neighboring Satu Mare County in 2003. Sorin and I tried to go find him around Thanksgiving, but the weather was bad and we had a minor accident on the road, and decided that navigating the unknown rural countryside in our poorly insured and extremely expensive Budget rent-a-car was just too risky during snow season. So I have been impatiently waiting for the snow to melt, and when Nikki got back from her monthly jaunt in Eastern Europe, we decided it was time to go find him.

We rounded up a Romanian translator and set off for Cluj, where we rented another poorly insured rental car from a sketchy company and drove to Satu Mare, billed by Lonely Planet as the ugliest city in Romania (not true--it's Bucharest, hands down.) The scenery was really nice; I miss my car and it felt great to drive, even given the nerve-wracking driving conditions. Once we actually got to Satu Mare, which is about 3 and 1/2 hours from Beclean, it was not hard to find Zoro's village, although it was a long and bumpy ride over unpaved roads full of potholes that would indeed have been unnavigable in the snow without a four wheel drive. We were stopped by the border police near the village; they later came to Zoro's house to see what we were up to. Zoro's village is only about 5Km from the Hungarian border, which is why, as we soon found out, no one there spoke Romanian--including Zoro.

I expected that Zoro might be living in poor conditions. I expected that his aunt might speak Hungarian, that the Roma (Gypsy) community he lived in might be hostile to outsiders. But I was totally unprepared for the fact that Zoro not only did not recognize me, but no longer spoke Romanian. As it turned out, we received a warm and curious welcome from most of the neighborhood, who stood by as I attempted to communicate with this boy I had spent so much time with, who two and a half years ago spoke only Romanian, and who now registered nothing when I told him, through the only fluently bilingual neighbor, who I was. Did he remember Beclean? No. Did he remember the camp? No. Kim? No...The kids? No. He was totally bewildered. The 30 or so onlookers were fascinated. Who were these foreigners in a blue Daewoo, waving cameras around and speaking through a chain of translators? I was simultaneously trying to direct Nikki-who had never shot video in her life--to capture this strange scene on tape so I could talk to Zoro, and trying to figure out what was going on. Turns out Zoro's aunt turned him over to his biological mother and father, who had both appeared on the scene. Figuring it was too late to turn back now, I decided to use my camera to show him the video we had made in the first summer camp, called "The King Who Wanted a Boy." It's a fairytale written by Adelina, another child from the camp. In it, Zoro plays a prince living in a faraway land who is called to resolve a family dispute. Here is a picture Nikki took of him watching it. His mother is watching over his shoulder.