Another problem with the children's homes and institutions in Bulgaria is the severe lack of Government funding. I volunteer for a charitable organisation called Bulgarian Child, which is among the many such organisations trying to help meet the needs of these children, but the needs are vast.

The best-funded homes, those for handicapped children, receive just over four leva a day per child. The Helping Schools receive less than half this amount; other homes average somewhere in between — the director of a home in Roman told us that the Government gives her 11 000 leva a month to care for 130 children. That money has to cover every expense except the salaries of the workers.

verything: food, clothing, shoes, electricity, water, heating, medicine and school supplies, to name but a few. Our organisation makes regular donations of food, clothing and shoes, and we have been petitioned countless times for emergency food deliveries.

dditionally, since many of the homes are outside city limits, they are not hooked up to the city heating systems — as a consequence, between rising energy costs and antiquated, inefficient furnaces, many homes spend over half their annual budget on heating fuel, and each year several directors ask our organisation for help keeping the children warm. Even for the ones that are hooked up to a city system, heating is still a major burden, as are the other utilities. One director in Berkovitsa recently told us that he owed over 3000 leva to the (state-owned!) water company, which was threatening to cut off the water to the 90 disabled children in his home.

With immediate needs so pressing, long-term needs such as infrastructure are entirely neglected. Most of the homes were built decades ago, and have received little or no funds for maintenance, such as the case at a home in Borovtsi. There, the Government condemned the kitchen/cafeteria outbuilding as a architectural and sanitation hazard — the decades-old structure was literally falling down. The Government offered no money whatsoever to either repair the building or build a new one, nor did it increase the home's budget to account for the vastly greater expense of subcontracting meal preparation to an outside firm. A new building was finally built by Bulgarian Child, which also included the home's first indoor toilets.

Sadly, this was not the only home lacking such a basic necessity. At a home for school-aged children in Georgi Damyanovo, the children were still forced to use an outhouse until it closed last spring; in another home in Lom, they have indoor toilets, but the children are not allowed to use them during the day, and before a remodeling project Bulgarian Child sponsored, a home in Berkovitsa had only one working shower for more than 100 children. Such stories are all too common. However, as many homes are closing, NGOs are understandably leery about making large investments in infrastructure: it's not a wise use of resources to remodel a home that might be closed soon after.

This description, of course, barely scratches the surface. There are hundreds of needs, from remodeling to food, but in talking about physical conditions, one should never forget the greatest need these children have — love.