You Are Brave

You Are Brave
by Jacob Juntunen

(A WOMAN addresses a group.)

WOMAN
You are brave.

Coming all the way to Romania. Sitting in this church. And so many of you. Ready to jump over the hurdles President Clinton set in your way. When the Berlin wall fell a few years ago, hardly anyone could point to Romania on a map.

But here you all are. So many of you willing to make this sacrifice to help a child escape poverty.

Have you been to a Romanian orphanage? They won’t let me take pictures, but if I had some here to show, you’d think you were looking at a concentration camp. And you are. A communist concentration camp for babies, open sores on their faces, screaming and rocking in their cells, their cribs, while attendants lounge in the hallways smoking and drinking coffee.

I’ve seen grown men fall to their knees weeping when they saw the thousands of little blonde-haired babies shrieking.

But you are brave enough to help these most innocent victims of communism.

And Clinton is making it harder, setting up insane background checks. Right now it can take years to get one of these babies out of the country, and then it’s too late. The attendants touch the infants five minutes a day. That causes permanent damage.

And Doctors Without Borders is against us! They say every one of you in this room cannot be a good parent. That you don’t understand the culture. That removing them from Romania will harm them permanently.

The last Romanian woman I met who dropped off a baby already had two children at home, no husband, and lived on twenty-five dollars a day from a government pension. She buys two loaves of bread, potatoes, and sometimes some beans. Instead of milk, her two children get tea with sugar. So it’s not like you’re robbing these children of some glorious Romanian culture. If you adopt a baby, you’ll give them milk, won’t you?

And they’re white. I know, I know: no one wants to say that out-loud, but when you’re pushing your Romanian baby around in the grocery store no one’s going to know it’s adopted just by looking at it. You know that matters, and an African or Asian baby isn’t going to fit into your family the same way.

You are brave. All of you are willing to come here, to a foreign country, and meet with me, even though our government says what we’re doing is illegal. They say people like me are profiteering. They say pedophiles want white little girls more than black ones. But you’re not a pedophile, are you? We’re all just in this room for the same reason: to help these children. And if Clinton and Doctors Without Borders would get out of our way, we could help thousands of children get out of this horrible country where these children have no hope and no future.

So if you have the cash with you, and, yes, I’m afraid the payment needs to be in cash, we have the children in the next room.

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