The drugs are over the counter paint thinner - the sickness behind the all too familiar scenes of stumbling street children inhaling the insides of dirty plastic bags that they clasp inside his fist like gold.
�it makes you feel dizzy inside and until you don�t know what�s going on around you,� she went on explained its lure. �The world becomes a different place. You feel like you are someplace else. We used to like to say that we were dreaming.�
I asked if she had been pressured into using it. �No, absolutely not. I wanted it. I took it to forget.�
�I wanted to show you my scars� she said giggling as she rolled up her sleeve revealing a page of scars up and down her white porcelain arm. These medals were earned fighting in the streets.
Pointing to a wider mark across her wrist she said, �I did this one myself.�
I wanted to ask why but I already knew... It wasn�t but a few silent minutes later that she kind of pulled me aside and in her broken English said something I will always remember.. �There are many things that are very hard for me to talk about. You know that I like to talk about my life, but there are somethings that I prefer not to. They are forbidden even for me to remember.�
We had been on our feet for hours and decided to take a break and have something to eat.
We stopped in at the Paradis Restaurant just across from the station. While pondering our menus I asked Ramona about the difficulties in finding food on the street.
�We had many ways to get food,� she said, �either we begged or sometimes we walked through restaurants and ate the food that people left on the plates.�... she paused while the waitress leaned in and deposited the silverware. She waited till she walked off before continuing. �We always had problems with the waitresses. They could get very violent sometimes. I remember one restaurant where the waitress came after me with a big plate. I was lucky because I saw her coming. I wrestled it away from her and then hit her with it.�
The question made her turn red. Her hard life has deeply humbled her and she still can�t quite understand what all the fuss is about. She looked back up into my eyes and said, �it�s a long story.�
Ramona�s turn around began in 1992 when Catholic Charities offered her a community house to live in.
�I was very very glad, but at first I admit it was very hard for me because I was used to coming and going as I pleased. It felt more like a jail than a home, but once I started going to school then things really began to change for me.�
However all those early years of truancy had taken its toll and she needed to repeat classes right up till the 7th grade when she finally reached her grade level. After that there was just no stopping her.
Though she is now beginning her final year at the university studying psychology she still has not escaped her past. She lives in a thinly walled void caught between her ugly past and hopeful future. She didn�t forget to tell me why she did not want the street kids to know who she was. �It�s because sometimes I get recognized by street children and I can start to have problems. They don�t see me like I am now, but as I was.� Meanwhile she protects herself by keeping the secrets of her past from her classmates. �Not too long ago,� she told me, �I was walking with a friend from school and a street child came up to me and said, �hey, your Ramona. You�re one of us.� Then my friend told everyone at school that I use to live in on the street and after that it wasn�t the same anymore.�
It is an unobtrusive little house tucked away inside a narrow cul-de-sac just a few blocks from the train station and what 11 former street children today call home.
The on duty resident, Cristina Rusu escorted my translator and myself up to Ilie�s room on the second floor which he shares with five of his house brothers. There we found him at his corner workstation where he spends just about all his free time sketching or sculpturing some fine new creation.
We sat down on one of the beds and just as Cristina began talking about when Ilie first came to St. John�s house he got up and walked out.
Cristina has been around since the beginnings. This August will mark her 9th year with Catholic Charity�s street children program which is quite remarkable as most social workers working with street children don�t last more than a couple years
But according to Cristina - she was fated to be a career social worker, or as she puts it, �I was born to be at this place.�
Social working comes natural for her, she says , because she understands what it is like being different, and it is just this lack of understanding that causes so few to hold out. Christina was born with a single arm. Baring a grim smile she told me that as a child she always felt people didn�t understand her and it is the same with the children from the street. They come from abusive homes, alcoholic parents, or they run away from orphanages.