Ten years ago South Africans Jack and Elsabé Louw were asked to help an organization that worked with children in institutions in Bulgaria. During their first visit to an orphanage for children with disabilities, hidden in the mountains in Southern Bulgaria, they met a seven-year old girl named Lora. Their lives would never be the same again.
“Our first visit to the orphanage was just shocking,” remembers Elsabé Louw. Lora was the last child in the last bed we saw that day. When Jack took off her blanket and told me to look at her, I just said, ‘I can’t. It’s all too much.’”
The caretaker told them Lora was severely brain damaged and would die soon.
After seeing so many dying, starving children that day the couple went home and just cried. They were drawn to their knees. How can we go back, they wondered? “God, we have no experience of rehab or children with disabilities. We cannot do anything. Please send the right people to this home.”
They kept praying for the children. “Each time Lora’s name came to my mind,” says Elsabé. “I thought maybe we should ask God to ease her suffering and rather take her.” Then Elsabé had a dream. “Never before in my life did I have a vision or a dream like that,” she remembers. “I dreamt Lora was playing outside a house with other children. In my dream she looks like she does today. On the house was written ‘Lora’s Home.’”
Elsabé shared her dream with her husband, a Bulgarian friend and a South African friend. She thought perhaps it was just an emotional response after seeing the suffering children. Every time they visited the orphanage, however, their attention was drawn to Lora. “We noticed small things,” says Elsabé. “She was the only child in the section for severely disabled kids who was chasing the flies away. We realized that a child who had severe brain damage might not do that.”
With great effort and lots of prayer, they managed to get Lora admitted for tests at a hospital in Sofia.
Just seven kilos
Lora was seven years old and weighed about seven kilograms. While the doctors were astonished that Lora was still alive, they couldn’t find much wrong with her. There was no sign of brain damage. Instead she was diagnosed as extremely neglected and malnourished.
The Louw’s applied for a medical visa for Lora and took her home to South Africa for treatment. With the help of therapists she learned to sit, then crawl and eventually to walk—all within one year.
“According to her documents Lora is 16,” says Elsabé. “According to tests and her bone structure, she can be 14.” Her mother is proud. But, she says, “It is a long, slow road to recovery. It is not only the bodies of the children that are starved, (but) also their brains.”
The first stimulation Lora ever received was in 2000. She reads and writes at the level of a seven-year-old and she is on a home school program. “Every year I go to South Africa for three months where Lora sees her therapists and they help me to work out her school program for the next year,” says Elsabé.
Life beyond the orphanage held many new experiences for Lora. “I do not think Lora was ever outside during her first seven years of life,” Elsabé says. “I remember how amazed she was to see a leaf in a tree, a dog running and people walking in the streets.”
A Greater Cause
When the Louw’s took Lora into their hearts, they also took on the cause of the destitute children of Bulgaria. By starting the Lora Foundation, they live out this mission in the following ways:
The barriers they’ve come across in their work are frustrating. “There are so many obstacles!” says Elsabé. They fight against the general attitude of people towards orphans with disabilities and they have to work within a corrupt system. What she finds particularly hard is seeing how many children are misdiagnosed. Too often children are sent to orphanages for kids with disabilities without a valid medical evaluation, says Elsabé.The Louw’s have had to learn to be patient. They’ve accepted that they can’t change the system; only work within it. “We’ve experienced so much, learned so much about the children. We sang Jesus songs to them. Many who could not even speak, cried. We prayed for them and realized that God loves them more than we do.”
Neither Jack nor Elsabé were trained to work with children. “Our only qualification was that we raised three kids of our own!” says Elsabé. For Lora, and so many other children in Bulgaria, that has proved more than enough.
For more information about the Lora Foundation and how you can get involved, please visit their website at http://lorafoundation.co.za/
