Alina is a teacup-sized girl. She's 4 years old & weighs 18 pounds. She probably won't grow too much larger than she is. She has fetal alcohol syndrome & dwarfism. She's a sprite, a scamp, an elf. She's been here her whole life & kind of runs the place, in that her cognitive & language abilities enable her to talk & sing, not fluently, but selectively, bi-lingually. She a mimic & has acute observational powers. She speaks Romanian from the staff & English from the volunteers. She speaks snatches of sentences & songs in a tiny, Thumbelina voice. She likes to say "Ooo la la!"
She can be charming when she wants...winsome & funny & affectionate. She can also be a brat. For a long time, she bit everyone. She's now graduated to pinching. She knows perfectly well it's wrong, but she can't seem to resist. She loves to dress up & has an uninhibited flair for fashion.
The things she does do & the things she could do are quite disparate. She does not feed herself. She still drinks from a bottle. She still wears diapers & is not toilet trained at all. The reason she is still infantile in her habits is due to institutional living. Dan, the Romanian leader of the volunteers, says that, if she were adopted into a family, she would be a completely different child within 2 weeks. She would do most things a normal 4 year old does. She will always have delays of speech & cognition, but not to a non-functional degree.
It's amazing that a change of circumstance & 2 little weeks are what stand between Alina remaining a baby into adulthood & Alina becoming a contributing member of society...albeit a very, very small one.
-- la reverdere
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