In Romania, Ukrainian children with special needs struggle

Bucharest, Romania – Ukrainian children with special needs are in a state of limbo across Europe, struggling to access vital education and therapy services.

Most refugee kids make do with online sessions with the specialists they used to work with back home in Ukraine.

“We cannot continue having kids studying in front of the screen one more year, after two years of COVID. That is part of the education, but it’s not full education. They need to interact,” Pablo Zapata, head of the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) in Romania, told Al Jazeera.

Millions of Ukrainians have transited through Romania, seeking refuge in various European countries.

About 110,000 Ukrainian refugees are living in the Eastern European nation, of whom 47,000 are children.

Romania has been praised for providing humanitarian relief, but specialist services remain out of reach for many.

Faced with the urgency of the situation, the government of Romania, the UNHCR and local NGOs are coordinating to reach those on the margins.

Autism Voice, a Romanian NGO, runs the only therapy class in Bucharest for Ukrainian children with additional needs.

“With funding from UNHCR, we were able to offer for free many hours of individual therapy, and we were also very lucky because we found two very good therapists.

“Ala, one of them, is from the Ukrainian refugee community living here in Bucharest. We tried to find more therapists among the Ukrainian refugees, we had a lady with a lot of experience with special education in Ukraine, but the next day after we met, her home in Ukraine was bombed, so she went back immediately,” said Oliviana Jura, head of the group.

Other challenges in finding Ukrainian or Russian-speaking therapists include language barriers and the incompatibility of Ukrainian and EU certifications for specialist psychology services.

“If therapy is interrupted, there can be tremendous regress. What children managed to achieve with a lot of work through therapy is lost, if not practised continuously,” Jura said.

“Currently we have two therapists and 14 or 15 kids. We have such a small number of kids, as we are aiming to keep therapy at the level that we know is working, because if we offer one hour of therapy per week, for a child it is equivalent to nothing. They need many hours of therapy, they need to come two to three times per week.”

Limited space means most Ukrainian children will miss out. For those who can access therapy, the benefits are visible.

Amaliia Harachava, a four-year-old child with autism, attends sessions at Autism Voice with Tatiana Scripa, a Russian-speaking therapist originally from Moldova.

Back in Mykolaiv, Amaliia had daily therapy with her mother, Julia, a psychologist.

Scripa says the war has affected Amaliia, making her oppositional and anxious about new indoor spaces.

“You can see the improvement since we started therapy, she has developed play and communication abilities, she can manage her behaviour better. Her anxiety of new places has decreased, even though still visible. If you explain to her what the new place is about, she tries to manage the situation and with the help of the parent or therapist, she can cope”, Scripa said proudly.

When Julia, Amaliia’s mother, fled to Bucharest last March, she tried to find therapy for her daughter. At the time, there were no services for Ukrainian children.

She contacted several organisations and was invited to work as a therapist, but refused since she did not have specialised childcare for Amalia.

Later, with the financial support of a private sponsor from the United States, Julia ran pro-bono sensory integration classes for 20 Ukrainian children from her Bucharest apartment.

“More than 40 families contacted me. They said they need it greatly, but I said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t take you all’.”

Her kind of therapy helps children develop skills like coordination, focus and language.

For nine-year-old Elena, who has Down’s syndrome, leaving Kyiv for Bucharest a year ago meant interrupting a well-set path towards starting school.

Fortunately, soon after arriving, her parents found her a place at a pre-school for Ukrainian kids in Bucharest.

“I happen to know the people who work there, we had a common project, my colleagues linked us,” said Marina Kornilova , Elena’s mother, a public health specialist who works with an NGO in Ukraine.

Elena was the first of three children with special needs at the preschool.

“They have classes to learn Romanian and English, she is attending the English class. I am just happy that she has some other kids to communicate with. Everyone there speaks the language she knows, she speaks Russian and Ukrainian, she is mixing them but she can communicate,” Marina said.

Elena also started therapy with Julia in September 2022.

“When Lena came in, she said only a few words, no sentences,” said Julia, using an affectionate nickname for the nine-year-old. “It was only with the sensory integration that she started to talk, speech is just the result of how her brain started working, because speech is not possible if the brain is not working properly. Her left and right halves of the brain started working, synchronised. She makes some physical exercises here with the fit ball – before she was not able even to sit on it because she would fall down, there was no coordination between the body and brain. Now, she jumps on it.”

Elena’s mother Marina added: “Her speech developed, she can elaborate on something. She will tell me stories about kindergarten or what she did during the day. Sometimes I hear when she plays on her own, she does a dialogue between the toys. This is really great progress.”

After a couple of months, the sponsor stopped sending money and Julia had to turn some children away, in order to continue.

“I kept the kids who came from the most bombed places, such as Mariupol, Kharkiv, as they have no money to pay for therapy and no houses to go back to,” Julia explained.

She now provides therapy for 10 children.

“With some kids, I have one session per week. With Lena, we try to have three sessions per week. People don’t pay me, so it’s just up to me how much time I spend on them. If I see some results, if I see that parents are really interested and they will do what I ask them to do at home, then it’s more interesting for me to work with such kids.”

Julia’s sensory integration classes require time, a large number of toys, games, and fitness equipment.

Her small living room resembles a little gym while the shelves on her bookcase are filled to the edge.

It’s still less than what she needs, Julia said.

“I need to give them different toys to train logic, memory, attention. Usually, for these kids we need about 500 toys, because the kids are all of different age. We need to have toys to learn animals, food, to learn what to do in the kitchen, to learn letters, or some what-if logical chains.

“I need to have games for their fingers – different type of puzzles, I need to have toys for relaxation, it’s a large amount of things. Because if you play with only one toy, you test only memory for example, or you test only attention.”

Now, with even fewer funds, Julia is considering downsizing the group again.

“I will continue to work with only five kids if I don’t find any sponsorship. I am extremely tired,” she said.

Seventy-nine percent of Ukrainian refugees living in Europe face difficulties in making ends meet, according to a study published in January by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights.

In June, Romania announced a national plan designed to support Ukrainians and facilitate their access to public services, education and employment.

Currently under revision, the scheme will remove barriers, according to the UNHCR’s Zapata, but there is room for improvement.

“[Specialist services] would need to strengthen the language part, medical [services] particularly needs to be specialised in terms of language,” he said. “It’s also something that is in the hands of refugees. We see in other situations of refugees around the world that there is an unresolved tension, between the will to return soon and the realisation that this may not happen quickly. So there is another step to take, in terms of making them feel included in the society.”