Why “us” and why “now?”
First, let us congratulate you for caring enough to explore who we are and what our work is about. We know that you and those you care about have been through a lot since the start of the 2020 pandemic. We also know that the resulting impacts, tragedies, and losses have been felt disproportionately across all people from every place on Earth. That is why our mission is not to just help people around us at home in the United States but also those across the globe starting with Romania.
Perhaps, you have seen the stock photos of six or more babies and toddlers squeezed together in a crib made for one? Or maybe you have seen the photos of visibly impoverished children staring blankly into the void of their despair? While I know those images are difficult and visceral in getting your attention, they are also passé and overused to elicit compassion and support from you. Instead, the fact is that 30 years ago the children of Romania were collectively neglected and eventually abandoned to a life of deprivation and poverty that most of us cannot fathom. An entire generation grew up lacking the security and comfort that most of us take for granted. They grew up in an environment so inhospitable to human development that science recently¹ has been able to measure the damage decades afterward in adults that were deprived of human contact and nurturing as children.
Today, according to many current EU indicators², Romania has sunk below its peers in caring for its people and once again its children. Romanian parents and average aged working adults³ are the very children that 30 years ago suffered harm that will forever negatively impact their life trajectory. Therefore, as members of a global community, we need to support not only today’s Romanian children but the working-age adults that are trying to provide for them amidst a world turned upside down by pandemic. We cannot change the past but we can influence the future by helping each child and supporting families
Please, join us in helping others now, not in response to the horrors experienced by Romania’s children in decades past or because the damage persists in today’s adult Romanian population. Romania is a second world nation that recently according to a World Bank chief economist “has the largest poor population in the European Union, over a quarter of its inhabitants living with less than EUR 5 per day”. ⁴ Do it because you and I are global citizens that know how hard post-pandemic recovery is within the borders of our first world nation “The United States of America”.
Romania needs our help now and we at “Together to Help” need your help to make that possible. Please, join us because today is the first chapter in the rest of not only their story but ours as well.
Michelle Waldenmaier
