Guardian angel
Twenty-five years on, the founder of charity Fara tells Peter Stanford why she had to help
The Norfolk nurse who saved Romania’s orphans
In 1990, like so many others, Jane Nicholson was shocked by the pictures coming out of Romania: thousands of orphaned children, starving and in rags, some chained to beds, living in brutal, loveless state institutions. The horror unveiled by the collapse of communism there inspired many in Britain to want to help, but the scale of the challenge overwhelmed their best intentions.
But not this 71-year-old former Great Ormond Street nurse and mother-of-three from north Norfolk. The charity she founded, Fara (which means “without” in Romanian), is this year celebrating its 25th anniversary. Its projects, funded by a chain of 50 posh charity shops in and around west London, now extend all across Romania. “It was actually my youngest daughter, Amelia, who started watching the TV reports,” remembers Nicholson, an unassuming, quietly spoken, outwardly reticent woman. “She was only 15 at the time, but she said, ‘I need to go there and help’.”
Nicholson had given up her career to raise her own children, but subsequently got heavily involved with the Sue Ryder Foundation. Once they spotted her formidable abilities, she rose from local volunteer to become chairman of the whole organisation. (It was their fund-raising model, based on shops, that she adapted for Fara.) At the start of 1991, inspired by her daughter’s determination to do something for Romanian orphans, she put everything else aside to join an aid convoy. “Though I am not an aid deliverer of any sort, I’d agreed to accompany it with a group of other nurses, go into the state institutions, and see what needed done.” The answer? Everything. “I’d never seen anything like it in my life. It was like a concentration camp: 150 to 200 children and young adults, some older, who had no sanitation, hardly any clothing, only bread and soup to eat. Some hadn’t been out of bed for years. Many had lost their minds completely.”
She knew at once, she says, that she couldn’t walk away. It was a moment of epiphany. Fara was born out of a conviction that is strengthened and sustained by her strong Catholic faith.
The commitment it has required of her has been gruelling, not least the long absences in Romania away from her rambling farmhouse home near the Wash. But then, Fara has become something of a Nicholson family affair.
“As [my daughters] have grown up, they have become involved. Amelia and Lucinda have both spent time in Romania. It was being there that convinced Lucinda to change course from being an artist to train as a children’s nurse. And my husband, Michael, often travels to Romania with me. I couldn’t have done it without him.”
Today Fara runs residential homes and therapy units, drop-in centres and programmes to get unemployed teenagers into jobs, plus an organic farm and school meals projects.
Nicholson felt strongly that the staff employed at the projects should all be Romanian. Ines Bulai, the charity’s operations director, joined Fara as a young nun in 1999, trained as a social worker and worked her way up.
Among the thousands of youngsters whose lives have been transformed is 22-year-old Virma Barcsa. She came to Fara’s St Nicholas children’s home in the city of Suceava after being abandoned when she was just four years old in a local hospital.
“I still remember my first day,” she tells me, during a break from the 25th anniversary party in Bucharest. “I was with two other girls. We had all been in a state-run institution in Falticeni, where the staff were always angry. The one I remember most used to put soap in our eyes when we had a shower.”
On arrival at Fara, she says, it was all very different. “We were given soup and then the cook gave us mints. All the other children were staring through the window at us. For me, Fara has been a protective angel. It has given me wings. I’ve learnt how to cope, how to have courage, how to take control of my life.”
Virma’s mother died in a road accident, shortly after leaving her daughter in the hospital. Her father passed away much more recently. She did make efforts to keep in touch with her siblings and her extended birth family – something that Fara always encourages – but has now stopped.
“Each child will think about their family and will wonder how it would be if your parents were there for you,” she says calmly but openly. “No one can replace your parents. The staff at Fara have their own families. So it’s not the same. There are the wounds that can’t be healed, but Fara has healed them as much as they can ever be healed. If I had stayed with my birth family, I’d have probably ended up starving or in prison.”
Instead, this self-assured young woman is now studying psychology at Romania’s oldest and most prestigious university at Iasi. Her ambition is to qualify as a child psychologist.
Ionut Stegar is 17 and has been with Fara for his entire childhood. “All I remember from when I first came to Fara is a lot of people and me being the centre of attention. I felt very spoilt. I’d found a family,” he says.
Ionut gives a very good impression of being a carefree teenager, but that isn’t the whole story. He recently got back in touch with his birth family. He has older and younger siblings still living with his parents.
“They do not have a lot of money and live in poor conditions,” he explains. “My father wanted me to continue at school. I couldn’t have done that if I was at home.”
Cosmin Covrig, also 17, is torn, he tells me, between going on to university to study IT or joining the army, like his father and grandfather. His parents’ death when he was 11 left him and his sister with only an elderly grandfather to look after them. When he couldn’t manage, Cosmin was sent to St Nicholas in Suceava, but his sister, Andrea, a year younger, went to foster parents.
Staff remember how hard Cosmin pressed them for Andrea to join him at Fara. Two years ago, she did.
“When I first arrived,” Cosmin says, “an aunt brought me. I was very introverted back then – my parents had just died – but Fara helped me to gain confidence.”
Like all the others, he is keen to talk about what an impact Jane Nicholson in particular has made on his life, and the lives of those he has grown up with. “Jane has a good heart and great courage,” says this serious, thoughtful young man. “She’d do anything for us. Even put her life in danger.”
Nicholson smiles when, later, I tell her what Cosmin said.
“No one has ever threatened my life,” she reassures me, “but in the early years the Securitate [the hated secret police] would make phone calls and visits to warn me, ‘We know you are here.’ They were very suspicious of what I was up to and were trying to intimidate me, but I’m not easily put off.” I catch a glimpse of the steel in her, behind the unthreatening exterior.
“I could see them thinking, ‘She looks like a soft touch’,” Nicholson remembers, “but I hope after 25 years they have learnt I’m not. I am not going away when there are children who need our support.”
‘I had never seen anything like it in my life’