Real drama has to happen, so somebody would be considered to be taken away from their parents e.g: physical and/or emotional and/or sexual abuse. Physical or emotional abandonment is also considered to be abuse. If a child is starving, freezing, left alone, when one has to live among alcohol and/or drug addicts. And also there are serious mistreats of a child’s defencelessness: when there is sexual abuse than their total childhood and innocence is violated.
Unfortunately, it is not rare that one child experiences all of these. Than sooner or later he/she is taken from the family and enters the social care system.
In better situations, some foster parents can welcome him/her but if not, than he/she has no option but to live in an orphanage where he/she continuously waits for somebody who takes him/her home.
The system
The luckier of these children get to be adopted but the majority of them remain on their own. There are many reasons why the biological parents do not let them be adopted. Mainly, because they don’t want to loose their children, they hope they’ll be able to function as a family, or they have deep guilt. Those children can only be “given” to foster parents. It is the goal of the system, to not leave children in orphanages. They understand that a child needs a family, where one can bond, have a home, where
Left alone
The orphanages can’t even be compared to a family. The caretakers are under a lot of pressure. They try to care for as many traumatized, impaired, hurt and aggressive children as they can. Probably all of them do their best, but they can’t give what a family could give to a child.
A previous leader of an orphanage once said ‘Whatever we did, I could not see any improvement among the children. My only goal was that at least once in their life, they would experience: somebody accepts them, as they are.’
With anyone - with no one
When you visit an orphanage, a little group runs to you. They grab your hand and say ‘Please take me home, I’ll be good!’. They are those who immediately bound, they are so hungry for a little love, they would go home basically with anybody without even thinking of it.
The other ones are locked up. They don’t look into your eyes, they don’t go to you, they harden their heart and close it cause they can’t bear any more hurt. But you’ve come for one of them. They experience a crazy hope and deep fear. They barely have anything, but this small “anything”, that the orphanage represents, is taken away from them. Will they be treated well and with warmth or this will be just another step towards continuous suffering?
