Claudia Rushton shares an amazing journey she, her sister Ionela and her brother Alex took when they left their abusive home to survive on their own.
Editor’s Note: Claudia Rushton shares an amazing journey she, her sister Ionela and her brother Alex took when they left their abusive home to survive on their own. God led them eventually to an orphanage in Romania and then to the home of Tom and Blair Rushton and their 3 children in America. Ionela, now a freshman in college, was baptized while still living in Romania. Claudia, a high school senior was baptized in the Atlantic Ocean this past summer. Read and be encouraged by a paper Claudia wrote for a senior class report.
“God sets the lonely in families.” — Psalms 68:6
“I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you.” — John 14:18
Sometimes one decision can change the entire course of your life. I made my decision in the spring of the year 1999 in Balotesti, Romania. I was thirteen years old. My mother had finally decided to leave my abusive, alcoholic stepfather. The night before we left, my stepfather had gotten drunk and beaten us worse than ever before, hitting us until we were all covered with bruises. He knocked out my sister’s tooth, split open my brother’s head, and hit me until one of my eyes swelled shut. As we walked away from the house my sister and I decided that we would never go back no matter what happened. After a month my mother returned to him. We kept our promise to each other and we did not go back. When we told our mother that we would not live that way again she said, “If you don’t come with me you won’t see me again.”
We found a place to live, a shack in a friend’s yard. We worked for our neighbors to get food. It was very hard to go to school, work in the fields, and then chop down trees for wood to cook and keep us warm. We lived this way for eight months and we never saw our mother. My brother, my sister and I learned to rely on each other, and we survived.
One day the owner of the shack told us he didn’t want us to live there anymore, and he reported us to Child Protection Services. They wanted to send us to an orphanage, but the head of the department intervened for us. A United States charity called HOPE worldwide was opening a group foster home. We were invited to visit even though they were already full.
The house was more beautiful than we could ever imagine. It had wood floors, rugs, indoor bathrooms. They didn’t have to light a fire to heat the house or use a plastic basin to bathe, and there was always plenty of food. We thought we were in heaven. When we returned to our shack the owner wouldn’t let us go inside, not even to get our things for school. We went back to the HOPE Saftica Center, where we lived for two years with fourteen other children.
Our life completely changed, the staff treated us with love and respect, and no one yelled or was hit. A few weeks after we arrived it was Alex’s twelfth birthday. None of us had ever celebrated a birthday or received a gift before. My sister and I cried when they brought out a birthday cake and gave him a present and sang happy birthday. We had never seen anyone treat our brother as nicely as they did. At the house we learned to trust and love many different kinds of people; it was the first time in our lives that we lived without fear.
Many people visited the house. An American, Tom Rushton, who worked for HOPE worldwide, came to visit. He tried to speak Romanian and practiced the Romanian alphabet, he made us laugh. He ate with us and played games, he taught my brother how to play basketball. We saw him every few months and then his wife came to visit, too. I asked him if he would try to find a family for us; they already had three kids so I knew he could never adopt us. One day Tom brought us into a room and told us he had found a family for us. He showed us a picture of the family, we were shocked to see it was his family. We couldn’t believe that they would adopt us since they already had three children younger than us. But they wanted us! He told us how hard it would be to change countries and to be in a new family, and leave our life and friends in Romania. Knowing all that, he asked, did we want to become a part of the Rushton family? We were so excited we could barely talk, so we hugged him and said yes! When he left I sent two stuffed animals to put in my new room to wait for me to arrive.
It took almost a year for us to get permission and all the right papers from Romania to come to the United States. We were so excited to arrive and meet the other kids, our new brothers and sister, and to see our house. Moving here was the most exciting and scary thing I have ever done. A whole new place, new people, new language, new food, everything was different from the moment I woke up until I went back to sleep. The hardest thing of all was school, but we stuck together and helped each other as we began to build our new life.
One decision, that moment when we decided we would never go back to live with my brutal stepfather, has changed my whole life. It was hard to stick to that decision and live through the hard times, but I am much stronger because of it. I have learned to trust, to love, and to be loved. I have worked hard at school and made friends. I am a different person than that bruised girl who walked away from her house. I lived my childhood filled with pain and fear, but I now have a life filled with joy, with a family that loves me. One decision put me on the path to get here. I can’t wait to see what lies ahead.
From the Greater Hartford Church of Christ Website
