Mormon family reaches out to Romania's forsaken children

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Westerners know little about Romania, save for the nightmarish tale about a night-stalking, blood-sucking villain.

In fact, searching for Count Dracula, the fictional figure built from legends about the real-life 15th-century Vlad the Impaler, has become one of the Eastern European nation's most frequent tourist activities.

But what drew Utahns Scott and Laurie Lundberg to the supposedly vampire-soaked country was quite a different dark past: the legacy of abandoned children.

In the spring of 1999, Laurie Lundberg began getting "spiritual promptings," she says, that she was supposed to "do something for abandoned children."

But what? the Mormon mother of six in Taylorsville wondered.

The answer came just before Thanksgiving that year, when Lundberg learned from a relative that 32 children housed in a building behind a hospital outside of Barlad, Romania, were being cared for by just three staffers. There would be no volunteers until February to hold, feed and give the tots personal attention.

Lundberg suggested to her husband, Scott, that they take their children and new son-in-law there for Christmas and spend the holidays rocking and loving those orphans.

It was an expensive and impulsive proposition, but the husband went along with it — and the decision changed their lives forever.

The trip prompted them to launch a nonprofit organization, Bridge of Love, on behalf of Romania's abandoned children. It pressed them to partner with other altruistic organizations. It spawned frequent returns to cities and villages steeped in folklore and religious traditions. It paved the way for Romania to become their home for three years. It even wound up adding yet another child to their family.

A son also rises

Until the popular uprisings of 1989 deposed him, communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu ruled Romania with an iron fist and draconian dictates. He rationed food and raised taxes exponentially, saddling families with huge burdens. On top of that, he outlawed birth control, leaving parents with more children than they could feasibly afford or manage.

By the end of his 25-year reign, about 65,000 children, Lundberg says, were warehoused in underfunded state-run orphanages in a country the size of Oregon.

Westerners were outraged at the sight of babies in row after row of cribs, looking like caged animals with little nurturing and few normal comforts.

Thanks to foreign attention and aid, the orphan plight improved. Americans adopted some, foster families took in others and many orphanages were closed. Birth control became more available, at least in the cities, and family life grew better.

When the Lundbergs arrived that Christmas of 1999, however, they still found little people facing stark deprivations.

And so the family began an experiment in caretaking. Toddlers who could walk were moved to one room; infants and those who couldn't were put in the second.

"I went in the room with infants, where we spread some blankets on the floor. The babies were learning to crawl, but ended up in a pile in the middle, where one tried to crawl over the other," Laurie Lundberg recalls. "It was like a little litter of puppies, but they were human beings. It was wintertime and cold and they had no one."

The Lundbergs' then-18-year-old son held up one 8-month-old boy to show his mother and the baby grinned. In that instant, the Utah mom felt the youngster was meant to be her son, she says. "I knew we had been sent there to find our son and bring him home."

After 10 days, the Lundbergs bid a teary farewell and promised to return for the boy, then named Marian.

Thus began a three-year-journey to adopt the boy, whom they renamed Joshua, and a decadelong effort to better the lives for all those children.

Neither was easy.

Good intentions

American adoptions eventually ceased after charges of corruption and child trafficking were levied against some Romanian officials and social workers. In the early 2000s, other nations pressured Romania to close all of its orphanages as a requirement for entry into the European Union. In 2005, the country prohibited placing children 2 years old and under in an institution unless they were "severely disabled."

In 2006, Mental Disability Rights International reported that more than 30,000 children remained in Romania's institutions, and many others were "outside the child-protection system" and thus "off the public record."

In addition, "some 9,000 babies are abandoned each year — a rate of abandonment that has not changed over 30 years," the report says. "At least 700 abandoned children have never left the maternity wards of hospitals."

On top of that, the definition of "severely disabled" was used, the report says, "whenever it is administratively convenient, and it is often applied to children with little or no disability."

That's how the country had labeled all the children the Lundbergs initially encountered, which they found ludicrous.

Three weeks after she came back to Utah in 1999, Laurie Lundberg and a friend returned to Romania for another two weeks.

Lundberg told the hospital director of her plans to adopt.

"How many do you want out of here?" Lundberg recalls the director asking.

"All of them," was the Utah mom's reply.

"We are not ready for that," the director said.

In the years since, the Lundbergs and Bridge of Love — with help from Romanian social workers and nonprofit groups — have done just that.

Many of the first children they saw, plus some from other hospitals and orphanages, eventually were placed with foster families. Bridge of Love then tackled other needs. It created educational programs, summer camps and parenting classes for the new parents. It donated clothes and Christmas gifts, toiletries and medicine.

Then it was time for the Lundbergs to take another assignment.

Beyond the orphans

After endless trips to Romania as well as rearing their adopted son, Joshua, marrying off children and spoiling grandchildren, the Lundbergs should have been ready for a rest.

Instead, at Christmastime 2007, the Utah couple accepted a three-year assignment to oversee the LDS mission in Romania, taking Joshua back to his home country.

The first humanitarian Mormon missionaries arrived in Romania in September 1990 and immediately began working in the orphanages, then later created a Special Olympics for disabled children. By December 1990, the country saw its first young proselytizing Mormon missionaries. Three years later, the Utah-based church created the Romania Bucharest Mission, which included neighboring Moldova. Since then, the nation has seen membership increase by about 100 a year to nearly 3,000.

From July 2008 to July of this year, the Lundbergs presided over about 110 missionaries, including a few senior couples, with 17 LDS branches in the bigger cities.

Most Romanians belong to the Romanian Orthodox Church and are fairly suspicious of minority faiths, according to an essay at cumorah.com, a website that follows and describes LDS Church growth.

"Non-Orthodox Christians report little to no increases in membership and many of the larger denominations are in decline," the essay says. "Evangelicals, Jehovah's Witnesses and Latter-day Saints appear among the few Christian groups which report regular increases in membership, although these groups report large unreached areas of the country."

The Lundbergs relished their time in Bucharest, not far from the famed Dracula Castle and within hours of the hospital whose children had such a dramatic impact on them.

They are now back to work on Bridge of Love. Last week, the group sponsored Dracula's Dash for Hope, a 5K run to raise funds for clothing, supplies, education, summer camps and training for orphans and their caretakers.

Hope is crucial for these young people whose lives have been overshadowed by darkness and despair.

This is important work, Laurie Lundberg says. "You can see God's hand through the whole thing."

pstack@sltrib.com —