Nathan Fox, Charles Nelson, and Charles Zeanah are the American researches that went to Bucharest and started the Bucharest Early Intervention Project or BEIP, which is one of the first successful interventions to help the Romanian orphans. Fox and Nelson brought expertise on how early development molds the developing brain and Zeanah on emotional attachment. This program showed that early intervention with foster families could considerably decrease the children’s developmental delays. They used a control, children raised in a home with their birth parents, children placed in foster care and the children in the orphanages. Their finding was that, as Nelson said, the children in the orphanages severely lacked stimulation so their brains cannot fully develop. The foster children showed immense improvement if they were taken before the age of 2 and are functioning at an average level for children their age, “BEIP's initial findings suggest that consistent, high-quality foster care, begun early enough, may reverse many of these losses and salvage young lives” (Beckelmen). Their progress was shown by the many trips back to Bucharest that these researchers took to reevaluate the children in the experiment.
There are also many organizations such as the Relief Fund for Romania, where people can donate their time and money to these helpless children. The Relief Fund raises money and spends it in Romania to help the orphans, whose objective is “The relief of poverty, sickness and distress through projects helping the children, sick and elderly of Romania's institutions and most disadvantaged communities,” (Romanian Orphans). It is programs like BEIP and RFR that are making the most headway in the problems Romanian orphans face.
