How We Brought a Subject Into the Open

by Richard Thomas

Richard Thomas was British Ambassador to Bulgaria from 1989 to 1994. 

“We were not sanctimonious, and we did our best to build on the goodwill and good practices that already existed. I have the happiest memories of days out at Vidrare […] seeing the children’s faces light up and sharing in the staffs’ pride in their revived and much improved institution.” – Richard Thomas

One day in 1991 Dimi Panitza burst into the Residence and tipped a bunch of photographs onto the piano in the Drawing Room.“Have a look at those”, he said, addressing my wife Catherine. “Please help us to do something about this horrible business.”

The photographs were horrific. Dimi said that they were the inhabitants of one of the mysterious detski domove, which we knew were dotted about the country, but which we, as foreigners – western foreigners – had never been allowed to enter. By this time the outside world was well aware of the state of the so-called orphanages in Romania, but we had no idea that the same sort of horrors existed in Bulgaria.

Catherine said that of course we would try to help, and a few days later she and two or three embassy colleagues set off for Vidin. As far as I remember they were Toni Granchareva, Marta Nikolova and Sarah Lampert – together with Stanka Zheleva, President Zhelev’s daughter and a good friend of Sarah’s. Stanka had pulled the right strings, and the ladies were admitted. The condition of the children was just as alarming as Dimi’s photographs, but the visitors were careful not to criticise. Instead, Catherine and her colleagues sympathised with the Director’s moans about a lack of resources, and said they would see what they could do to help.

Over the next few weeks the ladies visited three other homes, in Mezdra, Stara Zagora and Vidrare. Conditions were pretty frightful there too, but the attitude of the directing staff and carers varied, from genuine concern to indifference, bred, we suspected from ignorance. We knew that Bulgarians were by nature no crueller than Brits, but realised that forty-five years of dictatorship had led to an attitude of “the less seen the better”.

We had already built up a small amount of experience in helping residential institutions for disabled children through a small Friends of Bulgaria programme in aid of the two schools for the blind, in Varna and Sofia. Our son Alexander had just finished university and did a sponsored bicycle ride, with an LSE friend, from the Bulgarian Embassy in London to the British Embassy in Sofia, and between them they managed to raise over £15,000 with which the Friends purchased much needed Braille printers for use in the two schools. So we had something of a track record with the various responsible ministries in Sofia, who were happy for us to put together a small aid programme targeted at the four homes.

We too were very short of resources as, while the Know How Fund (KHF) had already been set up, it had not at that stage yet been extended to Bulgaria. All we had were two standard instruments available to all embassies in developing or newly emerging countries, the Heads of Mission Gifts Fund (HMGF) and the Small Projects Fund. Somehow we managed to eke enough out of these relatively modest sources to help improve the lot of the children and, almost as a by-product, increase the staffs’ self respect and consequent humanity. For, if a foreign embassy regarded their institutions as worthy of attention, then surely they themselves had jobs that were worthwhile and worth developing in professional and caring terms. In this respect we were much inspired and helped by the example of the Stara Zagora Director, an amazing person and complete exception from the norm. She needed no moral encouragement from us, but welcomed us as allies in her crusade to improve standards, and joined in enthusiastically, accepting whatever material assistance we could provide to help her turn her establishment into a national template of good practice – a sort of public sector equivalent of Johnny Stancioff’s marvellous voluntary sector Karin Dom at Varna. All four Directors worked hard to improve the standards of care in their respective homes. Vidrare was the most dilapidated, and it was heartening to see the enthusiasm of its Director and the transformation for the better, in moral and material terms, that she was able to bring about.

In this way we were able to provide for example a new central heating system for the Mezdra home and new kitchens and dining facilities for Vidrare. We were also able to provide all four homes with cars. The Residence came into its own as the site of a seminar on the care of disabled children, to which we invited a number of Directors of Homes, including of course “our” four, officials from the sponsoring ministries, experts and counterparts from the UK, and above all the Bulgarian media, especially TV. We deliberately made the occasion as glitzy as possible, in an attempt to show the Bulgarian government and public opinion that child care – especially disabled child care – was not a Cinderella affair, that above all it did not need to be carried out in secretive residential establishments, that it mattered, and that there were all sorts of ways in which it could be provided, most of them non-residential and in the community. We were trying to give the people who worked in the sector a chance to develop their own feeling of self worth and to demonstrate to the Bulgarian world at large that they were vital and important members of society.

I don’t know how much success we had. At least we had done something to bring the subject into the open, and in due course the KHF arrived in Bulgaria, and with it increased resources, including expert assistance. Our little amateur programme developed into a sector of our wider KHF programme, and in turn was incorporated into something far bigger under the EU’s PHARE umbrella. We were not sanctimonious, and we did our best to build on the goodwill and good practices that already existed. A number of embassy staff and families got involved, locally engaged and UK based, and in general it was fun. I have the happiest memories of days out at Vidrare, the nearest of our client homes and in many ways the one in most need of help, seeing the children’s faces light up (especially when Simeon gave them rides in the Jaguar), and sharing in the staffs’ pride in their revived and much improved institution. Catherine and her friends even managed to explain and help set up a Vidrare version of an English village fund-raising fete, with stalls selling produce and games for the children. We waited with bated breath to see if anyone would turn up, but they did, in relative droves, and quite a respectable amount of money was raised – by the Home itself and from a voluntary sector that only a few years earlier would have been derided as a western frippery.

I hope that perhaps the four Directors will read this blog, especially Maria and Nellie, together with the members of the 1990s embassy locally engaged staff, who so cheerfully worked beyond the call of official duty with Catherine and the rest of us to encourage new and more humane ways of helping Bulgaria’s disabled children.