Assignment 13: My Immigration Story

I was born in Horezu, Romania, in the foothills of Transylvania, as the fourth child of my Roma parents, Constantine and Iona Dobre .  My birth parents lived in the tiny village of Copechene in a small hut with a dirt floor, no electricity, and no running water.  My father sometimes worked on a large collective farm about 100 miles to the north, and my mother worked tending cows in a field.  The hut was also home to my grandmother Eurika, who was the matriarch of the family, as well as to several other people who were probably my aunts, uncles and cousins.  I never actually lived in that hut, because I was taken directly from the hospital in Horezu where I was born to an orphanage in Rimnicu-Vilcea, about 20 miles away.  That was the only time I was ever outdoors until my adoption about 8 months later. 

The orphanage was one of dozens established under the rule of Nicolae Ceausescu, communist dictator of Romania from 1961 until his overthrow and execution on Christmas day, 1990, three months before my birth.  Ceausescu was a greedy, ambitious dictator, who, with his wife Elena, lived in relative luxury while the ordinary people of Romania, like my parents, suffered.  Among the many policies he imposed on the people of Romania, perhaps the worst was a policy that each woman was required to have at least 5 children.  Ceausescu’s goal was to grow Romania’s population and to create more workers so that they could produce more manufactured goods and farm products to sell for export.  Under Ceausescu, Romania had incurred a large national debt, and increased production was needed to pay it off.   The people of Romania suffered greatly under this man’s leadership as they were forced to live under strict food and energy rationing and a police state enforced by a large secret police called the Securitate.  While the populace was starving, the Ceausescus were busy building dozens of palaces, buying luxury cars, limousines and boats and living large.  At the time of his overthrow, Ceausescu was overseeing the finishing touches on his newest residence:  The Palace of the People, one of the largest buildings in the world, then second only to the Pentagon.  My parents’ humble hut made for an interesting contrast. 

Forced to have so many children without the means to provide for them, my parents, like many others, had no options except to abandon their babies to state-run orphanages.  Before the fall of Communism in Romania (and the rest of Eastern Europe) in 1989, the Western world knew nothing of these institutions.  After Ceausescu’s death, the rest of the world found out about Romanian orphanages which housed as many as 300,000 children, from birth to age 14, under utterly terrible conditions.  These institutions were crowded with row upon row of white iron cribs, with peeling paint and few workers, where the children were left to themselves most of the time.  Food was scarce, and the babies were fed mostly a grain-based mush.  Medical care was very primitive by western standards.  Heat and electricity were rationed, so the orphanage was cold, and there were flies on the babies from the open windows.  The children under age one were kept in buildings separate from the older children.  Those who were younger than about 9 months were kept in small bassinets and were wrapped tightly in blankets to keep them from moving around very much.  Older babies were taken upstairs to regular size cribs.  When my adoptive parents found me at age 8 months, I had somehow managed to make the move to the larger living space of a regular sized crib, while my peers were still downstairs in the bassinets. (I am a survivor!) 



Here I am in my orphanage crib, peeling paint and all.



Sometime around their first birthday, the babies who survived their first year in the orphanage were taken to a different orphanage for toddlers.  Actually, there was not much toddling going on there, because the children there were also confined to white iron cribs most of the time.  I never was in this toddler facility because my adoptive parents got me when I was eight months old and brought me home to Minneapolis. 

My adoption in Romania took about three weeks from the time my new parents first met me in my orphanage to time they carried me out of there for good.  My adoption was accomplished with the help of Lucie, a Romanian adoption facilitator and translator to whom I owe so much.  Unlike the adoption process in most countries, Romania’s process when I was adopted didn’t involve having an agency assign a baby to adoptive parents in advance of their arrival.  Instead, my parents were asked to walk through the orphanage in pick out the child they wanted.  I truly was chosen!  My parents say, however, that I picked them, because when they came to my crib, I smiled at them. 

I meet my new mom.



I meet my new dad.

When my parents decided to try to adopt me, a complex process began.  The first hurdle was that my adoptive parents had to locate my birth parents to ask them to come to a court hearing and agree to the adoption.  When Romanian parents turned their children over to the orphanages to be cared for, they didn’t have to sign any papers relinquishing their parental rights.  In my case, the information the orphanage had about my birth parents was recorded on a small piece of adhesive tape stuck to the wall above my crib.  It had my parents’ names and the name of the village in which they lived.  With Lucie’s help, my adoptive parents went to the village, where they were able to find my grandmother, Eurika, who came out of the hut, surrounded by several young women who were probably my aunts, and several young children.  My grandmother said that my mother was at her job tending cows in a field and would not be back until the next day.  She said that my father was about 100 miles north helping with the harvest on a large farm.  My grandmother, who had been an orphan herself, said she wanted me to have a proper home and family and parents who could take care of me.  She said she would help my adoptive parents go to the farm to get my father and to bring my mother to Rimnicu-Vilcea for the court hearing.  The next day my adoptive parents met my birth mother, Iona, when they returned to Copechene to get my birth certificate and other documents at the “Mayor House.”  The following day, my parents returned to Copechene to pick up Eurika who would go with Lucie and my new dad to find Constantine and persuade him to go along with the adoption plan.  Since there wouldn’t be room in the car for both of my adoptive parents, Eurika, and Lucie, my mom stayed behind in Rimnicu-Vilcea.  Luckily, my birth father agreed to leave the farm for two days to travel to Rimnicu-Vilcea for the court proceedings necessary for my adoption, but his boss wouldn’t let him leave his work that day.  George drove my dad, Lucie and Eurika 100 miles back to Rimnicu-Vilcea, then drove back to get Constantine early the next morning to bring him to court.  The next day, my parents and Lucie somehow managed to get everyone to the courthouse in Rimnicu-Vilcea where my birth parents signed the documents necessary to relinquish their parental rights to me.  They both signed with an “x” because they could not read or write.  But I had to remain in the orphanage another week until my adoption could be finalized in Romania.  A half-page report from a social services agency was required, but it was then Wednesday, and the woman who typed these reports would only type them on Tuesdays.  So my parents and Lucie had to wait a week until the final adoption hearing could take place the following Wednesday.  They went to Bucharest to try to get a head start on the U.S. immigration paper work that would be required.  They tell me it was a long week.  In Bucharest, they weren’t able to accomplish much without having the adoption hearing completed, so they did some sightseeing.  They stayed in an apartment that belonged to their driver’s aunt.  It was in one of the many large apartment buildings that Ceausescu ordered built to replace the individual houses which he wanted to eliminate throughout Romania.  The apartment had no water during the morning and most of the afternoon hours, to save energy.  Bathing, laundry and dishwashing all had to occur in the evening hours or early in the morning before the water was turned off.  Street lights were also scarce at night also to save energy.  My parents say it was a pretty bleak place to live.

After a long week in Bucharest, my parents and Lucie traveled about 100 miles back to Rimnicu-Vilcea on the following Tuesday.  When they arrived, they went to the orphanage to make sure I was still there and okay.  They were allowed to take me out of the orphanage for an hour to get my passport picture taken.  That was probably the first time I had been outdoors since arriving at the orphanage as a newborn.  The next day, my parents went to the courthouse for the official adoption hearing.  There were three judges, no less!  They asked many questions about life in Minnesota and about what my status would be under Minnesota adoption law.  My mother, an attorney, says that she was so nervous and excited about the day that she couldn’t answer these basic legal questions, so my father, who isn't a lawyer, just jumped in and started talking, saving the day!  After the adoption hearing was complete, Lucie took my parents to the “Mayor House” to sign some more papers.  Then it was finally time for my parents to go to the orphanage to get me.  It was October 31, 1990, Halloween, in the foothills of Transylvania.  At the orphanage, my brand new parents waited in the Director’s office for the nurse to bring me to them.  They were asked to remove my raggedy and dirty orphanage clothes, which my parents were very happy to do.  They dressed me in my new clothes from Minnesota and then walked out of there with me for keeps.  We celebrate October 31 every year as my Adoption Day, which we also call Gotcha Day. 



Mom and Lucie change me out of my orphanage clothes.





My Dad signs my adoption papers at the "Mayor House" in Rimnicu Vilcea while Lucie looks on.



The driver then drove us all back to Bucharest.  The next day was filled with adoption paperwork at the U.S. Embassy.  My parents tell me that when they arrived at the Embassy, they were directed to a large park across the street which was teeming with hundreds of people.  They were told that it was the line for getting into the Embassy.  Lucie came to the rescue, however, by having my parents show their U.S. passports.  When they did, they were immediately escorted across the street to the Embassy and led to the proper office.  My parents were told that the big crowd in the park was comprised of Romanians who wanted to immigrate to the United States and came there every day to try to be among the lucky few who got visas.  Most were unsuccessful.  Although like these people, I was a Romanian citizen too, my new status as the adopted child of American parents got me to the front of this very long line. 

The Embassy official told my parents that a medical examination by a U.S. Embassy-approved clinic in Bucharest was a requirement for issuing my U.S. visa.  My parents tell me that this examination was a joke.  The doctor listened to my heart for two seconds and tested the reflexes in my legs and said I was fine.  That was it.  There was no medical history, no blood work, or anything else.  The doctor didn’t even fill out the form.  She signed and stamped it and left it to my mother and Lucie to try to fill out the eight pages of detailed medical information in Romanian.  After that my parents remember standing in line for hours at the U.S. Embassy to get all of the necessary papers processed for my visa.  Somewhere along the way I also got a Romanian passport.  Then my parents went to the Lufthansa office to try to get plane tickets out of Bucharest for the next day.  The Lufthansa office was the only place in all of Romania that my parents saw a computer.  All of my adoption and immigration papers were typed on old fashioned typewriters with carbon paper. 

My parents say that they thought they had all the paperwork done so that we could leave Romania the next day, but then discovered at the Lufthansa office that the planned flight back to Minnesota would involve stops in Germany and England.  Germany would not present any problems, but England would require a British visa for me, so my dad had to go to the British Embassy and try to get one.  This was very difficult to do on such short notice, but he somehow managed.  The next day, my parents said goodbye to Lucie, and the driver drove the three of us to the Bucharest airport.  We flew to Frankfurt, Germany that night.  My parents say that when I saw the bright lights and signs at the Frankfurt airport, I was transfixed.  My orphanage existence was so dark and dull, and now I was seeing a whole new world.  It has just begun. We spent the night at an airport hotel in Frankfurt, and flew the next morning to London (where no one ever looked at my British visa), and then to Minneapolis.  I’m told that I slept only during the last 20 minutes of the long flight. 

Many family members and friends of my parents, as well as quite a few strangers welcomed me to my new home, but only after some more immigration paper work at the airport.  My parents joke that it took 20 pounds of paper to adopt 11 pounds of baby from Romania.  We arrived at my new home and my new life on November 3, 1990. 

A few months later, after my parents completed yet another adoption process in the Minnesota courts to make my adoption final in Minnesota, I was still not a U.S. citizen.  I had to be “sworn in” as a United States citizen in a small office in a warehouse building in Bloomington near the airport.  I have a picture of me at about 15 months old waving an American flag in this little office having absolutely no idea what I was doing or why. That was the day I became a U.S. citizen.

My parents tell me that while most people were very supportive of their decision to adopt a Romanian baby, a few suggested that they should have adopted an "American" child instead, showing that prejudice against immigrants can extend even to those of us who were adopted by U.S. citizens when we were tiny babies.  But what, exactly, is that "American child" that my parents supposedly should have adopted instead of me?  Except for the Native Americans, everyone who is here has an immigration story in their family somewhere along the line.   I am glad that my parents didn't listen to the "made in America" argument and instead went to Romania to find me.   I don't understand the position of those who oppose immigration to this country.  I suppose it may be, as Newman suggests, fueled by competition over scarce resouces, fear of outsiders, or even racism (Newman, p. 436).   But if people stopped to think about it, they would have to see that the United States is a land of immigrants.  Although the decision to leave Romania and come to the United States wasn't mine, I am proud and happy to join the long line of immigrants to this country.