Beyond death towards solicitude in Bulgaria and Romania: A critical hermeneutic inquiry of home among orphaned and abandoned children

This study gains new understandings through examining the context of home in a critical hermeneutic tradition from an analysis of data gathered on-site in Romania and Bulgaria. The document explores and analyzes how communities responsible for housing and caring for orphaned and abandoned children in Bulgaria and Romania may or may not create a family-like or caring home. Two primary ideas are examined in this text. First, the foundation of these homes is analyzed using the theme of legitimacy as a means to understanding the present structure. Secondly, personal relationships between the child and the community (or caregiver) and institutional ethics are explored to gain new understandings on how relationships influence the child's ability to appropriate a new future which fixes the current place, or meaning, of home and community.; Imagination emerges as a major theme for healing, appropriated meaning and change. Imagination embraces both choice and innate spirit and support. The healing process for these children involves moving from a state of liminality to imaging a new and different future without their biological families or traditional homes. This requires both a public space allowing choice in how to recognize their losses, appropriate their future and an environment where the meaning of home can be mediated or recreated. For the caregivers or those institutions working with orphaned or abandoned children, this also requires public discourse to mediate the past baby homes, essentially baby warehouses, into the present lifeworld and appropriate a new meaning for the future of these homes and, more importantly, the care of these children.; Perhaps more important than the work itself is the ethical intention and public discourse undergirding the work. These set the foundation for our being both in the present and the future. We can choose to create baby warehouses and even with the addition of tremendous resources and energy, stay static in this meaning. It is a conscious choice for those practicing in this area. The discovery of choice is itself a gate to a boundless sphere of possibility.