Andrea Pickup Aid worker
ANDREA PICKUP, who has died at 70, was an aid worker from Doncaster who devoted much of her life to help orphaned victims of the old regime in Romania.
She joined the initial aid convoy to the country in 1991, and unlike many volunteers at the time, stayed with it. Some of her efforts were documented in programmes filmed by Yorkshire TV, which showed her as direct, honest but also formidable when crossed.
Born in Balby, Ms Pickup grew up with three sisters and two brothers, and despite a widelytravelled childhood with a father in the RAF, she always regarded Doncaster as home.
The travelling began again when she volunteered to join an aid convoy heading for an orphanage in the rural village of Tatarai in post- revolutionary Romania. She found a hell- hole into which handicapped and unwanted children had been consigned by the Communist regime of Nicolai Ceaucescu. The children abandoned there were unlikely ever to get out and endured dreadful lives, often being fed from buckets and forcibly restrained.
Ms Pickup, by then the mother of two adult children, was so shocked by what she saw that she committed the next 30 years to Tatarai. With the support of family and friends, she made several trips a year, bringing
practical supplies and hope. She set up and ran charity shops in Doncaster to raise funds, and battled the Romanian authorities with dogged determination, to defend the interests of the young people who by now called her Mama Andrea.
Practicalities mattered, but for children who had no parents to love them or families to care, it was the personal touch that was life- changing. Since 1991 she saw to it that every resident received an individual birthday card and present, often for the first time in their lives. The annual Christmas parties, with gifts for all, were the highlight of the year.
She carried on even after a diagnosis of cancer some 20 years ago. She is survived by her partner, Richard, her children and six grandchildren.