“The twins I saw will spend their lives staring at ceilings”: Bulgaria’s abandoned children

It was something about the twins that got to me; after seeing so many baby institutions and children’s homes, I had almost grown used to abandoned children in ranks of cots, staring at the ceiling. The twins — a boy and a girl of six — were set apart; pale, twisted, both with cerebral palsy. Their mother left them in the institution on the day their father had kicked her out for ‘only being able to have crippled children’. I reached into the girl’s cot to hold her hand, and her steady gaze held mine. I bent over to hold her brother’s foot, and felt like a lightning rod between them. But the missing link is their mother.

Bulgaria has the highest rate of institutionalised children in Europe, more than 8,000 in 32 buildings, many in the most inaccessible parts of the country. I have been going there for five years, with the Bulgarian Abandoned Children’s Trust, which, along with other NGOs, is trying to change things.

Late last year, the new health minister, Desislava Atanasova, made an unscheduled visit to Pleven, which has the largest baby institute in the country. She then gave a press conference, where she told of the conditions in which the children lived, and in which, over the course of the past 18 months, the same number had died. She told of babies being fed with bottles long after they should be on solid food. She described three-year-olds unable to walk or talk, and 16-year-olds (this is an institution for children up to three) being kept there to justify the employment of 170 staff.

I have been several times to Pleven, and carry memories that haunt me. I think particularly about the disabled children, locked away on a separate floor, many growing into the shape of their cots, and dying of starvation and neglect.