This is the story of a little girl who stayed with us in the 1990s, before she was supposed to leave for the US. Her adoption never happened, but we carried the memories of our months with Georgi for the rest of our lives.
She came from an orphanage, she did. At first she was wild, feral in a hard-to-define way. Over time, we grew close to each other, and I can still remember the joy we lived with her…
“From her own world, Georgiana speaks, she speaks to us. Often, her disjointed syllables absorb us. We do not understand her, we can’t imagine what she is trying to say, but we also don’t ask… as if we were afraid. We hide behind already-known words from our common social vocabulary. We repeat them to her over and over, trying to convince her to inhabit our language, more familiar, more easily bearable. Ma-ma, pa-pa, pa-per, chick-en, child-ren. Georgiana has a language she alone knows and she inhabits that one. A world all her own, small, there, on the carpet, in the livingroom.”
“To society, she does not exist, she is no one. There is nothing to guide us in our relationship with her. Georgiana forces us to live with her in this blind state of uncertainty, of absence, of pain. Each day, we descend into hell. We go down with her, we follow her spasms.” — fragment from Maria Balabaș’s book Ciclam [Cyclamen].
And a message from the author: “I truly hope this story can reach those who need it.”
Testimony donated to the Museum of Abandonment by Maria Balabaș, for the Abandonment Baggage campaign. This project is financed by CARE through the Sera Foundation, Care France, and FONPC.
