Wills continues mission for Europe’s poorest

Wills has been travelling to Romania since the collapse of Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime in 1989 left the nation an economic basket case and its people in the most dire poverty imaginable.

He has witnessed some harrowing sights during that time. Take for instance the orphaned children starved of food and affection packed into poorly sanitised and understaffed homes - sometimes behind chicken wire fencing.

Or the homeless children of Bucharest forced to make their homes in sewers and live off the scraps of urban life.

In 2008 Wills travelled to the Ukraine and Northern Romania to deliver humanitarian aid after the worst floods in over a century wiped out both life and livelihood with more than 20,000 homes flooded and over 7,000 people evacuated by boat or helicopter.

Last summer he travelled to Romania, Moldova and the Ukraine with two fellow Londonderry men David Robinson and Paul Darragh to try and provide whatever help they could.

He told the Sentinel how he intends making the trip once again this summer and described how the support of the people of Londonderry and beyond was making a major difference.

“I always say to people: there are children there who are very young and due to misfortune have found themselves in those circumstances. But we could be there too, lying on the street tonight,” said Wills.

“We buy them ice-cream and maybe a burger or something to help them. We don’t like giving them money because people will take it off them and use it for drink. But we do like to give them clothes.

“I’ve a friend there who has built an extension onto his house and he takes some of them in and trys to bring them up in an ordinary living environment and he’s seen boys married out of it and taken off the streets.

“It’s very sad to see children living with no homes and living down a sewer as you have seen. That’s horrendous,” he said.

Wills, David and Paul travelled out with knitted caps, clothing, jumpers, all hand-made, and provided through charitable donations from the people of the North West.

They also brought out medical supplies such as salbutamol - a drug used to treat asthma - which was specifically requested by medical practitioners in Romania.

“Also your usual, sweets and stuff for the children. Anywhere you go you always like to see the children with sweets, colouring-in books, pencils, rubbers and stuff for the children in orphanages and different places to give them something to do.

“We buy the rice, the pasta, the sugar, oil for cooking and baking and all that out there. Every person we meet in the village we are going through we give them a bag and put all the stuff in it and we give the kids sweets,” said the Drumahoe man.

After helping the street children in Bucharest the Londonderry men travelled northwards to the Iasşi region near the border with Moldova.

It was there Wills encountered the heart-breaking case of a pregnant mother who - paralysed after a train accident - was left with her husband to fend for their three boys in abject poverty.

“As we travelled on up into the North East heading towards the Moldovan border at Iaşsi - out there - we met a lady who lived in a house - 5m by 4m - that was her home - bedroom and everything else in it - with one bed for the three wee boys,” he explained.

“She was hit by a train. She’s paralysed for life and she lies there in that home. Her husband can’t work and he has to cut sticks and that to keep the children warm. One electric bulb. No water. No nothing. We have helped there and we have more help ongoing going out,” he said.

He spoke of the extraordinary spirit of the Romanian people in face of such adversity.

He explained how his humanitarian colleague in Romania Marchal lost his home when the floods returned in 2010 but bounced back to continue helping the less fortunate citizens of his country.

“Tragically, the friend that I have worked with for 19 years out there got his house flooded with the rest and lost his whole house. They had bad flooding again last year,” he said.

“I got a text to say Marchal’s house had been tumbled and wrecked and how he lost his van. But it’s a miracle. These boys work so hard. They got the vehicle back on the road again, took the trailer out of the water and got her back up.”

In Moldova and in the Ukraine Wills came upon amongst the worst poverty he has ever seen.

He said he found villages where the people literally had nothing.

In an isolated orphanage in a remote part of the Ukraine he found 85 children locked up with three or four staff to look after them, starved of love and affection as well as the basic necessities in life.

“At the end of the day as I always say - the story behind these children is different than here,” he told the Sentinel.

“When you come home from work or whatever you’ll give your own children here your best - you’ll give them food, you’ll give them everything.

“But at night they know they are in the comfort of their own home and you are there to look after them if they have a flu or a cold or anything or if they need a hug. But if you are looking after 85 children they’ll not get that attention.

“They are told - go to your bed, maybe four in a room, lock the door and that’s them in. Rise in the morning have the breakfast and out. No motherly care. No warmth or nothing. They don’t know love,” he explained.

Also in the Ukraine they visited a remote and dilapidated former military camp where incredibly 185 elderly people with mental health problems had been literally abandoned with very little care to speak of.

“Out in the wild with no-one near them. An old military camp with windows broken and doors hanging off. An odd bulb working. The place in darkness,” he said. He gave them rice and pasta so that they could be properly fed at least.

“But the conditions were terrible for them. We are to go back to both those places - the orphanage and the mental home,” he said.

So what has driven Wills to dedicate the last two decades of his life to trying to raise these poor people out of the penury in which they find themselves?

“Way back in the early, early days after the communist regime fell I went out to an orphanage and saw the conditions they were in. There was no room. You couldn’t even walk in between them.

“They were using chicken wire to hold some of them in. Maybe one toilet. Sewers open. One or two lights. No toys. Nothing. They never got anything under the communist system. Very, very dark and difficult conditions,” he explained.

He said it was very hard to get access to the orphanages in those days but that he has managed to build up a relationship with the authorities over the years. Ultimately it’s a desire to bring hope to the people that drives him on.

“It’s a love for the children, a love for the people and a love even to give them God’s word. I think it’s good they hear about a God and Christians back home who support the work,” he said.

He said it would be impossible to carry out his mission without the help and support of the people of the North West on both sides of the border.

Last year he was saddened to hear that public workers, teachers and pensioners would suffer a 20-25 per cent cut to their income.

He says the catastrophic collapse in real wages since the collapse of communism was driving some older people to question whether life wasn’t better when Ceausescu’s subsidies meant fuel and food staples could be relatively cheaply obtained at least.

“I was talking to pensioners. They get 100 euros for a month. Now they are going to lose 20 per cent of that in Romania and it’s a similar situation in Moldova,” he said.

He added: “That’s why some elderly people will tell you they would rather have the communist regime back. Because petrol and fuel and that was pretty cheap because they done their own.

“You had your basic foods, which were pretty cheap as well but when they went into the EEC automatically their prices jumped to somewhere nearer our level.

“That’s a big jump. So the value of people’s wages was gone. That’s OK if you are working but if you take someone who was just scraping through with the ordinary food before they are having difficulty buying anything at all other than working their gardens, their fields and land and hopefully doing as best they can to get food for their children.”

The Waterside aid-worker has organised a Gospel Concert to raise funds for aid for the children of Moldova, Ukraine and Romania and is appealing to the wider community to come along and support this worthy cause.

The concert will take place in Glendermott Presbyterian Church Hall, Drumahoe, on Friday, March 25,

Special guests lined up for the concert include Heaven Bound, Lynda Lyndsay, Margaret Johnston and Parker Donnelly.

All proceeds will go to Help for Children Europe, an officially registered charity set up by Wills as part of his Eastern European aid mission.

As Wills says, it’s a worthy cause: “There are places I’ve been and things I’ve done and I can only say: this has been a miracle. God has really blessed this work. It’s unbelievable the people we have reached in different parts and it’s expanded out.”