in Romania, a shelter welcomes Ukrainian children deprived of their parents

At the entrance to the Bucium center in Iaşi, Romania, you cannot miss it, there is this painting in the colors of the Ukrainian flag with photos of refugee children. “The youngest at a year and a half, and the oldest at 17says Andreea Corodescu, Romanian director of the center. They arrived on March 18, 2022.” In all, 43 children – and a handful of educators – were urgently evacuated from an institution in Dnipro to flee the war in Ukraine and were welcomed with open arms in Romania.

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Among the approximately 108,000 Ukrainian refugees in Romania since the Russian invasion of February 24, 2022, there is this group of children welcomed in this center supported by local authorities and Unicef. It has become a Romanian refuge for these Ukrainian children, deprived of parents for various reasons.

These children have made this center their new home. The walls are also covered with their drawings. Some go to school to take online courses in their native language. Over the months, they found their bearings. “Now they are betterexplains director Andreea Corodescu, but a psychologist works with them every day. They kept the trauma of the war, but also those related to their families. Most are orphans or their parents are in prison in Ukraine. Some had different types of abuse, alcoholic parents, and the war was added to all that.”

“We were all afraid with the war”

Just in front of the center, there is a ruined building, covered with large colored tarps with animals represented: a giraffe, a lion, etc. One of the representatives of Unicef ​​who accompanies us specifies that children should be spared any image of destruction and anything that could evoke war in their country.

Ivan is 14 years old. Her father is deceased and her mother is an alcoholic. The two days of a rushed trip to Romania with a few things slipped into the backpack are etched in his memory. “With the war, we were all afraidsays the young Ukrainian. We had to take refuge in the basement as soon as there were warning sirens.” And then Ivan took a train, several buses, happy to flee the war and find a sense of security, even if he remembers that he could not sleep on the train “because of the uncomfortable seats”. He would now like his mother to be able to “visit and let the war end”.

If you ask them the question of staying in Romania or returning to Ukraine as soon as possible, all the children of Bucium will tell you: “I like Romania, but I prefer Ukraine!” Children without their parents, and deprived of their country. An extreme and marginal situation, recalls UNICEF, which puts forward the figure of 388 isolated young Ukrainians registered in the Romanian protection system.