Carminul Felix

Romania was the last country to break away from the defunct Soviet controlled Eastern European communist bloc in the late 1980s. During the last gasps of the Nicolae Ceauşescu regime, the state had decreed that each married couple must produce seven children by the age of forty, or else they would be taxed heavily. The scheme was to have increased Romanian's population with sufficient manpower to work at the state-run factories. Any couple who have bored the children but couldn't support them, the state would raise them. That was the plan.

Yet, the harmful communistic ideology in general with Ceauşescu population mandates in particular, have literally spawned generations of orphans and abandoned children. One of the tragic results of the failed communist utopian dream. Today, it is estimated there are 400,000 of these homeless children in a country of 20 million people. Romania provides the equivalent of $10 USD per month per institued orphan.

Founded in 1990, the non-sectarian Christian organization, Carminul Felix (The Happy Home) was setup to ameliorate the spiritual and physical depravities of these unclaimed and unwanted young souls. In the latter part of June 2006, one of our church groups and two-chapter representatives of the California and Nevada Rotary went to the Carminul Felix Village at Oradea, Romania.

For nine days, this team of twenty-one people, including some young people and three physicians, helped finished and furnished two apartment houses for orphans-now-turned adults (18-years and older). These are transitional housing for the young adults who would eventually leave the Village and find their ways about the world. The two buildings finished just in time to receive at least twenty-five young adults, as they are preparing to leave the children-side of the orphanage in September.


'For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.' -- Matthew 25:35. New American Standard Bible (NASB)