St. Mary’s Children’s Home- Déva

Our institution opened its doors on September 15, 1993 at the Franciscan cloister in Déva during its renovation. We accept disadvantaged children from all over Transylvania into our large family and guarantee them total free care including education and upbringing while relying on God’s loving providence.

As a result of the worsening social conditions, more and more children without families or from troubled families have made our institution their home over the years. Since children have been coming to us continually, we outgrew the cloister building and started buying the twenty units in an adjacent apartment building. Today, thanks to our gracious benefactors, nineteen apartments and four family homes belong to our foundation. Our children live here in “social families” with one or two foster parents.

Because of the official authorities, our institution was merely tolerated as a child-saving program, but since January of 1998 it has been working with official acceptance: the Hunyad County’s Department of Child Protection accepted us as a private center for child protection and qualifying children get monthly funding from the state, which accounts for only one-third of their expenses. This also means that our children come here with the knowledge and approval of the county’s Department of Child Protection. We have the authority to accept orphaned and half-orphaned children as well as all those young children whose physical, mental, spiritual, and moral integration isn’t guaranteed where they live.

Our institution is always open and lovingly accepts the desperate children who have fallen from their homes. Our phone number and address can be found in every parish, and we lovingly try to help every troubled Hungarian child. We are most happy to accept 3-7 year-old children, but the 14-15 year-olds may knock on our doors in as much as they would like to continue studying and because of financial or other reasons, lack the opportunities in their own families.

St. Mary’s Dormitory- Déva

In addition to the children’s home, the dormitory is functioning for those youth who have finished eighth grade and lack the opportunity to study in their Hungarian mother tongue at home. For a nominal fee, they receive room and board at our home and study in the Hungarian section of the city schools. Depending on the success of their studies, they can receive full or partial scholarships. Currently, altogether 85 youth live and study under our guidance. The dormitory’s students only come from Hunyad County. From other counties, we only accept children from socially injured families, and those children join the children’s home.

St. Mary’s School- Déva

With the opportunities guaranteed by the educational laws of 1995, our foundation founded a private Hungarian school for grades 1-4 with qualified teachers. In 1998, we started adding grades, beginning with the 5th grade. Now we have an 8 grade school inside our walls. Even though it requires many sacrifices, the private Hungarian school is extremely important for preserving their Hungarian language and culture in the “szorvány,” a land sparsely populated with Hungarians. Unfortunately, presently the Romanian state doesn’t support the school with any money or textbooks, and the foundation has to support it on its own.

The older children continue their studies in the Hungarian section of Déva’s public schools where they have been successful fitting in without any significant difficulties.

Nursery School and Kindergarten

Most of our children never attended nursery school or kindergarten, and their families weren’t able to provide adequate care. As a result, they arrived in first grade with many deficiencies. Many didn’t even know their mother tongue. Consequently, we deemed it necessary to start a nursery school and kindergarten so that we could adequately provide a foundation for the children’s education.

Children from Déva and its vicinity also attend our nursery school, kindergarten, and school. We accept them with great love, and we recognize that they are very important to us since they make it much easier for our children to fit in with our city’s Hungarian community. We believe that these commuters find it advantageous to study here because in addition to the intellectual instruction that they can receive in other schools, they can partake in our intensive Christian spiritual instruction.