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.