| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In July 2011, Laurentiu Ierusalim left his Romanian orphanage, the only home he had ever known. He had less than $150 in his pocket and nothing more than the clothes he was wearing. He had no job, no housing, and no clue how to survive. "I didn't know what to do," Ierusalim says, "so I slept in a playground across the street." It was the beginning of two years of homelessness, of knocking on doors to ask for food and shelter. An Orthodox priest helped him find families to take him in for several weeks at a time. Last summer, after finally surmounting the formidable bureaucratic and financial obstacles required to secure a government ID, he landed his first job as a grocery store clerk. With slight variations, Ierusalim's story is told over and over again in the experiences of the tens of thousands of children shunted away in Romanian orphanages during the reign of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The execution of Ceausescu and his wife on Christmas Day 1989 led to the discovery of the country's most disturbing secret-enough abandoned children to make up a city had been living in squalor for years, packed into unsanitary orphanages without appropriate resources, care, or stimulation.
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