by Tina Rowe

The smiles say it all...after a three-year battle with red tape, Sue and Ray Baker have officially adopted their bubbly little Romanian daughter, Roszi.

A county court judge approved the adoption and last week Roszi, aged five, took 92 lollipops with her to her primary school in Yeovil, Somerset, so that all the children in her year could share in the celebrations.

For Roszi the future looks bright.

She is doing well at school, speaks perfect English, but is also keeping up her Romanian. An extrovert little girl, she's currently keen to show off her skills with a skipping rope and has no idea of the sacrifices her adoptive parents have made to give her that secure future.

She has no idea that her life in Romania, as an abandoned baby in a frighteningly institutionalised orphanage, would have been grim indeed. It was chance that led Sue and Ray, parents of grown-up sons, Paul and Jeremy, to hear about Roszi's plight.

Sue runs the Toybox nursery in Yeovil, Ray works for Westland. They were not looking to adopt a child.

But Sue is deeply involved with the charity Christian World Embassy and was helping its work in Romanian orphanages when a friend told her about a little girl who seemed even lonelier and more vulnerable than other orphans.

Roszi had been abandoned by her gipsy parents at the age of three months.

By the time Sue saw her, she should have been talking, but she was so emotionally traumatised by her experiences, that she would not speak. Staff did not try to encourage her and it was thought that she might have learning difficulties.

Sue saw a photograph, and was smitten by the slightly-built toddler with the big dark eyes. She got to know Roszi and, with Ray, was determined to adopt her.

She says: "All she needed was love and stimulation. She responded well as I got to know her in Romania. She is a lovely child."

Sue arranged for Roszi to be taken out of the orphanage and to live with foster parents as she and Ray dealt with complicated adoption procedures in Romania.

Foreigners cannot select children for adoption so Sue had to move to Romania and become a resident to satisfy officials.

Unravelling red tape meant that Sue was in Romania for 11 months. Then with the Romanian adoption approved and Roszi's entry into Britain approved by the Home Office, Sue and Roszi arrived in Yeovil at Easter last year.

Then the British adoption process began. The couple found it phenomenally long-winded and bureaucratic. They had already gone through the normal police investigations to be approved first as child minders and then as nursery owners and as foster parents.

They were surprised that another report was needed for the UK adoption process.

Sue says: "We have had four or five police checks now, and they all take time. We would really have liked the process to be quicker.

"We couldn't really take Roszi on holiday until the adoption was official because she would need a special visa and we would have had to plan everything a long way in advance which, with our lives, we couldn't really do.

"It is also one of the reasons we have not taken her back to Romania with us when we have travelled by car. Some countries would have needed to see the visa."

The Bakers, pictured with Roszi, dealt with all the paperwork themselves and are grateful to their social worker and Somerset County Council for their advice.

The final hitch came when the Home Office wanted Roszi's real mother to sign a declaration of approval, even though she had signed papers declaring she was abandoning the child when she handed her over to the institution.

She could not be traced so, after extra weeks of waiting, the adoption hearing took place in Taunton on Tuesday last week. The whole family attended and the adoption was approved in minutes.

Sue said: "It is a wonderful feeling. We had been told it should be straight forward, but I was more nervous this time than in Romania.

"Now we can get on with our lives. I think it is important for Roszi to know about her past and she will be coming back with me to Romania in August."

They will be visiting the children's home they founded, and Ray will be helping replace condemned kitchens in the older girls' orphanage which would now be Roszi's home if she had not won her way into their hearts.

Used courtesy of the Western Daily Press