You know that thing, where you're just sitting around in quarantine and your mind wanders to Dracula and abandoned babies in Romania? Yea, same. And like me, you're probably wondering “how could climbing a lot of stairs benefit children in the vampire region of eastern Europe?” Don't worry, my sister Elona and I will tell you.

In 2018 I traveled to Romania and my experience comprised four themes: abandoned children, Dracula, a LOT of stairs, and even more diapers. Let me explain... 

You may remember in 1989 the iron curtain fell, revealing over 170,000 Romanian orphans living in inhuman conditions; victims of intense abuse, severe neglect, and developmental delapidation. Today, 9,000 children are still abandoned every year in Romania, but now they sit in hospitals. Emphasis on ‘sit.’ All day, in uncomfortable rags, all by themselves. 

Two women heard their cry and formed Firm Foundations Romania (FFR) whose task is to love and nurture these children at Brasov Children's Hospital. FFR gives simple acts of affection and play, which teach the children to walk and talk and develop human connection. FFR is also the provider of a basic baby need: diapers. 4,000 MONTHLY, to be exact. 

I got to love these babies as a volunteer in Brasov, the heart of Romania’s famous vampire region of Transylvania. Apart from the heart-string tugging, the hardest part was... climbing the hospital stairs for daily diaper delivery (pathetic, I know). In fact, the whole country is absolutely overrun with stairs. Okay, fair, it sits in the Carpathian mountains and has roughly a billion castles on clifftops. Vlad the Impaler's—or by his stage name, Dracula—is no different. He has a 1400-step stairwell leading to his front door. He truly is a monster. 

As of March, 2020, our babies are back in their cribs, isolated and alone. COVID-19 has disrupted all our lives, but theirs in a heartbreaking way. Physical distancing has been hard, but these children have been victims of it their whole lives and right now we can't provide the affection they need. BUT this is where we all come in. We can help FFR get them crucial baby PPE: diapers.

For the month of May, Elona and I will climb the distance to Dracula's castle... 1400 stairs, every thigh-busting day, to raise $1400 for the abandoned children of Transylvania. $1400 is about a month's worth of diapers. (It would be wonderful to exceed that goal and keep our babies diapered up for a long time to come.) We all hope and pray for this pandemic to come to a close, but until then there are things we can do. We will climb the 1400 steps to Dracula's castle every day for the entire month of May, and in return we ask that after you hug the children in your life, you buy diapers for the babies in ours.