15 years ago Pat was found tied to his cot and left to rot in a Romanian orphanage..he was rescued by a British family but now he's returned. By Bob Graham In Bacau And Clare Raymond
THE stench of stale urine and human excrement was horribly familiar to British teenager Patreascu Peberdy.
Looking around the dormitory of what was once a Romanian orphanage triggered long-buried memories of his own desperate childhood. It was in this room that the 19-year-old from Milton Keynes, Bucks, had been left to die as a baby. He and another child were found in a stinking cot in the fetid Ungerini Orphanage, east of the city of Bacau. Their legs and hands had been bound and their soiled clothes were in rags.
Sixteen years after being rescued from his terrible plight by the British family who later adopted him, Pat returned to the place where he spent the hellish first three years of his life. He wanted to learn about his past and prepare for his speech to MEPs in Brussels last week, urging them to overturn Romania's ban on foreign adoptions.
"Being there again brought back memories of the awful smells and the suffering of all the kids - and I was just one of them," says Pat, who was given up shortly after birth by his impoverished parents.
"I looked at their faces and kept thinking how lucky I was to escape from the orphanage. If fate had played things differently I could still be there as one of them - or more likely dead."
On his trip he managed to track down his biological father - a farmer called Gheorge - and 68-year-old grandmother, Elena. Sadly his birth mother is dead.
Pat, who describes his escape from Ungerini as "the luckiest day of my life", was also anxious to trace Iulien Boanta, the boy who shared his cot.
Although Ungerini is now a home for 120 handicapped adults who have grown up there, he heard that Iulien had been moved to another institution. Then he learned that his friend had died in 2003, of liver failure caused by the years of neglect and all the drugs he was given for his mental problems.
Pat wept as he, Gheorge and Elena went to visit Iulien's graveside.
"This could have been me," he says. "Poor Iulien. His life would have been spent in misery. Maybe now he's free of the pain and suffering of all those years of being abandoned in the orphanage."
Of the 100,000 children dumped in orphanages because of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's insane population-building policy, Pat is one of the fortunate ones.
AFTER Ceausescu's fall in 1989, foreign aid workers and TV cameras were allowed into Romania for the first time. The world was shocked by what they saw.
A year later, the horrors of Ungerini Orphanage came to light - the children inside had been abandoned by parents who were simply too poor to care for them. In 1991, Beverly Peberdy, a building society worker from Milton Keynes, volunteered to work in the orphanage.
"The conditions were shocking," recalls Beverly, 49. "There was one room, the 'dying room', where children were left to die. That's where I came across Patreascu. He was pitiful and close to death."
Pat was tied up, his arms and legs curled under his skeletal body. He had malnutrition, polio, pneumonia and bronchitis. His body was covered in raw sores.
Beverly took him to the Mother Teresa's Sisters Of Mercy home in Bacau where he began to recover.
The following year she brought him back to England where, in a hospital in Birmingham, he had the first of 13 operations to correct the deformities in his limbs caused by being tied to his cot - one of his legs was six inches shorter than the other and the muscles had withered.
In October 1995, Beverly and her husband John adopted Pat who, despite his traumatic early years, soon settled in to his new life.
He thrived at primary school - never letting his leg brace get in the way of games. And he was a promising student who later won a scholarship to attend the £6,000-a-year Bury Lawn private school in Milton Keynes.
Pat set his heart on going to RADA and becoming an actor but then changed his mind, telling his headteacher: "I have never seen a limping James Bond... and I do not wish to be Richard III for the rest of my life!"
Instead, he has started an apprenticeship as a television cameraman in Cyprus, where the Peberdys have a holiday home.
He knows that his life could have been very different. That is why, for the last three years, he has returned to Romania to help those still suffering. But last week was the first time he had returned to Ungerini.
"It was a journey into my past back to an experience I'd been able to leave behind," he says. "During it I had flashbacks to the terrible conditions. I had to make this journey to try to understand what happened when I was a child and how I escaped the misery of an orphanage. It was part of my determination to try to help the kids I left behind."
The building remains much as it was in Communist times.
DOUBLE glazing, heating and fresh paint give the appearance of better care, but many of the inmates wear clothes soiled by food or soaked in urine.
The staff at Ungerini are far less welcoming to foreign visitors now. "You need permission to come in here," says the director. "You must not take pictures, it is forbidden." In 2001, Romania imposed a moratorium on all inter-country adoption. The ban became law last year. But Pat is determined to do all he can to overturn this and give hope to the 70,000 children who remain trapped in such desolate institutions.
His story moved MEPs to tears and was central to last week's heated debate in Brussels between the pro and anti foreign adoption lobbies.
Those in favour say Romanian children in care would have the chance of a better life. But critics claim it is ripe for corruption, with unscrupulous agents willing to sell orphans into child-sex rings.
Beverly Peberdy, who accompanied Pat to the EU, says: "I'd like the European politicians and both sides of the inter-country adoption debate to close their laptops, put away their reports, and come with me to see the reality of the orphanages and the conditions as they are now. They should come out of Brussels and away from Romania's capital Bucharest into remote areas - away from showpiece institutes to places like Ungerini, where Patreascu comes from, and where very little has changed in the past 16 years. Cosmetically they look better, but beneath the surface neglect and suffering continues. I have visited projects which are wonderful but they are only catering for a minority of the young people stuck in institutions. The majority are still living in archaic and terrible conditions. Patreascu's story shows that it's possible to be adopted by a family living outside Romania and to still retain the cultural and ethnic values of his country of birth. We are most proud of the fact that he has, of his own free will, returned to Romania each year to voluntarily work in an institution similar to where he was abandoned, to try and make a difference for those who were left behind."
In fact, this could well turn into his life's work.
Pat concludes: "My ambition is to make films that matter to people. To that end I hope to make one of street kids in Romania and one about the people who live in the sewers of Bucharest."
