Dateline Romania A Winter Term Spent Helping Children

Author: Caroline Stauffer

Over Winter Term, 13 students participated in a unique service-learning project in Romania. Biology 270, "Early Experience and Brain Development," was the result of a year of organizational work by Assistant Professor of Biology David Parfitt.
According to Parfitt, who is a neuroscientist, the course was developed around laboratory research involving mice. Parfitt's lab received a large grant to study the effects of early experience on brain and behavioral development from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur and James McDonnell Foundation. The foundation is particularly interested in researching the effects of adverse experiences on brain development, and in exploring what can be done to combat those effects. Through the research foundation, Parfitt made a contact with a developmental psychology lab that was studying the effects of institutionalization on children. The lab, located in Bucharest, Romania, sought ways to reverse those effects through foster care.
After receiving the grant and contacting the lab in Romania, Parfitt began to seriously ponder offering a Winter Term course. He traveled to Romania last summer to meet with the researchers in Bucharest, but thought logistical constraints would prevent him from sponsoring a course. While still in Romania, Parfitt came across a magazine article about an organization called Global Volunteers. This organization runs service projects at orphanages year-round, including the one in Tutova where Parfitt's class traveled last month. During his preliminary travels, Parfitt also worked in a hospital in the town of Tutova and ironed out details for the course with Global Volunteers.
The course began with a week of background and orientation at Middlebury followed by two weeks of service in Romania and a final concluding week on campus. It was based on the scientific theory that the first two to three years of life are critical to the development of the brain and to human behavior.
During the initial week, the class studied primary scientific literature on how the experiences of early life are incorporated into the structures of the developing brain. They also considered how brain development impacts behavior.
Following the first week, the class traveled to Tutova, Romania. Tutova is located 20 minutes outside of the major city of Barlav, north of Bucharest.
Parfitt believes that the class was a great success.
"My thought while the class was going on was that this is what I envisioned a J-term class to be," he said.
The bulk of the classtime in Romania was spent at an orphanage that was an offshoot of the hospital Parfitt had worked at during the previous summer. The children range in age from infants to toddlers. Once the children near the age of three, they are either moved to a foster center or sent to a placement center.
All of the children that the students worked with had serious developmental delays. The class dealt with a one-year-old child who could not even sit up alone. They also saw children who were almost three years old, but could neither speak nor eat solid food. Some of the children were so inhibited that they were terrified when taken outside the hospital.
Other sights the class saw while in Romania relating to children included 200 abandoned children living in St. Catherine's, one of the oldest orphanages in Bucharest, the "failure to thrive ward" at Tutova Hospital and a modern placement center in Barlad that had just opened last year.
The students' jobs were to nurture and take care of the children. Because they were so young, language was not generally a barrier to the project.
According to Parfitt, the quality of the orphanages and the care the children received was hugely variable by locations.
All participants kept a daily journal while in Romania. To continue their studies of the brain and early development, the class would meet and have discussions over lunch. They studied the issue of abandoned children from neuroscientific, psychological, economic, political and cultural angles. Students researched and helped the children from 7:30 a.m. until at least 8:00 p.m. every day.
"We went into issues and concepts that we simply would not have been exposed to if we had stayed at Middlebury," Parfitt said. "And seeing the problem up close really energized the students to try to do something to make a difference."
The students also had a few opportunities to see the rest of Romania. A few students went with Parfitt to the University of Lasi to meet with some Romanian college students and their professor.
Parfitt described Lasi as "a beautiful city with old European and Parisian style buildings and streets." While there, the students and Parfitt stayed in a hotel designed by Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel. The whole class took a weekend trip to Transylvania to see the medieval city of Brasov and the castles at Bran and Sinaia. Parfitt describes the Peles Castle of King Carol I as "one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen."
The bulk of the trip, however, was spent at the orphanage and hospital, and Parfitt acknowledges that this experience was not representative of the country as a whole.
"It would be easy to come away thinking that Romania is a country totally made up of people that abandon their children and is defined by this problem," he said. "However, that would be narrow and limited. There are some beautiful parts of Romania."
Parfitt also praises the Romanian people.
"I was constantly taken aback by how welcoming everyone is, and how giving everyone is -- especially for people who (by our standards) have much less than we do," he said.
"All of us experienced some measure of culture shock upon arriving and seeing one of the more negative aspects of Romanian society," Edith Honan '03 agreed. "After a couple of days with the children, however, the experience became more positive."
"The uplifting side of things was that you could see the children improve over the short period that we were there," Parfitt said.
He went on to describe the improvements of the young boy he worked with for the entire two weeks. In the beginning, the child would not eat any solid food. But on the last day of the trip, he took bites of banana.
"The uplifting side of things was tempered by the fact that we know that the children are going to regress until the next team of volunteers comes," Parfitt concluded.
Upon returning to campus for the final week of Winter Term, each student had a final exam and final 10-page paper to complete. The papers were on different topics, such as nutrition or speech, but all addressed a problem or need of the hospital in Tutova. Honan's project was on peer interaction. She made recommendations to the hospital on how to facilitate play between children to make it a place more open to interaction.
Parfitt is currently compiling the papers into a booklet to send to the hospital to improve the orphanage's work. So far it is 145 pages.
"I believe the student's work and effort on these papers was at a much higher level because they wanted to help the hospital and the children they were working with," Parfitt said. "Again, I don't think the papers would have been as compelling if the students had stayed at Middlebury."