Lancaster Sunday News
To Romania, with love
Parents, six grown daughters will leave country to join
seventh sister working at mission school.
By Stephen Kopfinger - Sunday News Staff Writer August 15, 2004
It’s not something most people would think of as a souvenir from a trip abroad: a package of children’s clothing, encrusted with dirt, and more akin to rags than wardrobe.
But for the Berchtold family, it’s a symbol of a journey that changed their lives and one that’s about to take a new direction.
The large clan Phil, his wife Clareann, and six of Clareann’s seven grown daughters are putting careers and lives on hold and moving to Romania Sept. 13. There, they hope to establish what Clareann calls a “home/clinic” for impoverished Gypsy children, as well as orphans, many of whom in Romania are afflicted with AIDS.
It’s a world away from the Berchtolds’ West Hempfield Township suburban lifestyle. Their overseas plans are in flux; the family originally planned to stay nine weeks in the Eastern European country but might stay up to a year.
“We desire to start a first aid medical clinic in or next to a home we would purchase for the orphans,” wrote daughter Kim in an e-mail clarifying their goals. “This clinic would provide services for those in the home and any needy children in the Gypsie village we have been ministering to.
My sisters and I would staff the clinic once we are able to stay in Romania
on a more permanent basis,” which would be determined by the amount
of funds raised.
And when they return from Romania, they might not even be coming home to the same house, which the family, whose members live under one roof, has put up for sale as part of a plan to raise funds for their cause. It doesn’t matter, said Clareann, in an interview at the Berchtold home. “We believe God has another place for us ... Romania needs us, and Sarah needs us,’’ she said.
Sarah, 26, is Clareann’s seventh daughter, who teaches at a missionary school in Brasov, Romania’s second-largest city, and who hopes to adopt a Romanian baby girl. “She’s alone over there,” Clareann said of her daughter. But she won’t be for long.
Family ties
Travel isn’t alien to the other Berchtold daughters in addition to Kim, 38, a registered nurse with Lancaster General’s non-invasive cardiology department, there’s Lisa, 29, a musician/recording artist; Katie, 33, who works in support staff in the operating room at Ephrata Community Hospital; Amy, 34, a medical assistant in diabetes and endocrinology at Lancaster General Hospital; Paula, 37, who works at Avalone Orthopedics; and Tina, 39, a registered nurse in Ephrata Community Hospital’s short-stay unit.
Along with Clareann, 57, and Phil, 53, the Berchtolds have traveled the United States and the world as the inspirational singing group Seventh Heaven. Phil, who married Clareann in 1982 after her first husband left the family, adopted all seven sisters in 1995. Today, he manages and engineers their music.
The family is not affiliated with any church.
“We are a completely independent mission,” Clareann said. “We meet in our own home.”
The Berchtolds, originally from Massachusetts, moved to California in 1989 where their music was profiled on a Sacramento-area newscast and to Lancaster County in 2001. They have sung in churches, nursing homes and hospitals and have recorded a dozen albums. They are selling one effort, “Angel’s Smile,” as a fund-raising album for their Romanian work and hope to find a distributor to market their other records.
“Our long-term goal is to offer more than first aid once we are established,” Kim explained in her e-mail. “When we expand we would be able to welcome the many medical people of Pennsylvania who have expressed a desire to visit Romania and donate their services. We would like to provide lodging and do whatever is needed to make their stay more comfortable.”
‘Our miracle’
The Berchtold family’s connection with Romania began through Sarah, who has been there since 2002. Sarah befriended a young orphan woman, Dani, who was diagnosed with probable cancer.
“Sarah called us up crying, saying ‘This girl is going to die,’ ’’ Clareann recalled. “When she told me, my heart went out to her. We decided to fly (Dani) here for medical treatment.
“That was two years ago,’’ said Clareann, who, with the family, funded Dani’s trip here. At the time, Clareann remembered thinking, “If she gets a visa, it’s a miracle.”
Dani got her visa and a good diagnosis as well. Pronounced cancer-free by doctors at Lancaster Regional Medical Center, she was sent home healthy. Today, Dani is married and living in Italy.
“We got our miracle,” Clareann said.
“And that’s when God told us we should be in Romania.”
Through Dani, Phil and Clareann came to know Aurora, Sarah’s roommate at the time, who grew up in the same orphanage as Dani. Sarah introduced her parents to Aurora, a kindergarten teacher, when they visited Romania for the first time in December, 2002.
Aurora, in turn, introduced Phil and Clareann to her kindergarten charges, Gypsy children from the tiny village of Hetea.
That was the beginning. After six months of maintaining communication ties with Aurora, the entire Berchtold family paid a second visit to Romania, in June 2003. There, they experienced firsthand the contrasts of a country still emerging from decades of isolation.
Though nearby Brasov is replete with European ambiance, Hetea proved a backward and, at one point, hostile place for the family. A group of Gypsies, angry that they did not receive gifts from the Berchtolds, threatened them with whips and stones, Clareann said, forcing them to hide in a farmhouse. Corruption is evident even among some authority figures, she added, recalling how she was told to give “a gift” to police when her stolen purse was recovered.
Troubled history
The sorry plight of Romania’s children has long been in the making.
International adoptions boomed in the country after the 1989 downfall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who banned birth control and abortion; televised images of orphans and abandoned children living in squalor inspired thousands of foreigners to adopt. Since then, about 30,000 children have been adopted abroad, the Associated Press reported earlier this year.
That came to a halt in June when Romania began to severely restrict adoptions by foreigners. The law was adopted under pressure from the European Union, which Romania is hoping to join. Officially, the EU has expressed concern about trafficking and corruption within the adoption system, according to press accounts. And within Romania itself, there was an unsubstantiated but disturbing reason: a rumor that said “Americans and other countries are using these kids for their organs,” Phil said.
It is through this double wall of government restrictions and popular misconception that the Berchtolds hope to make a small opening. They have already made progress. Through donations from such local institutions as HMA, the parent company of Lancaster Regional Medical Center (Paula’s former employer, which donated medical supplies and baseball caps for the children) and Solanco High School (where the school’s Interact Club donated 200 pairs of shoes), the Berchtolds have seen changes for the better both on subsequent visits to Romania this year and in photographs they’ve received of children they first saw in rags.
Displaying the bundle of dirty clothing, Clareann pointed to a picture of Lenuta, whom they met in 2002. In one photo, the little girl stands with an uncertain expression, her hands marked by infections, her mouth down-turned. In another picture, taken eight months later, she glances up from a book, one hand resting on a school desk, the other holding a crayon and both free of disease.
“She’s doing her nails now,” Clareann said.
Seventh Heaven’s album “Angel’s Smile” is available for a donation of $15 or more.
Call the Berchtolds at (717) 684-3308 for more information or E-Mail them at