Hazards

With the exception of Raul and the newborns Delia, Ana-Maria and Gabriella, our children are on the 3rd floor of the Barlad Children's Hospital (which is really the fourth floor, because the ground floor doesn't count).  Each floor of the hospital has a balcony, as you can see in this picture:

The weather has been just beautiful this week/  I am something of a fresh-air fiend, and that, plus the thought of these kids trapped inside this non-airconditioned hospital all summer, gave me what I thought was a brilliant idea:  let's turn the balcony into an outdoor playroom!  It's plenty big, and we could put plastic netting, the kind you see at construction sites, inside the railing so no one could fall out, or throw anything out.  (I am thinking of you, Ion!)

Who could possibly go wrong with this idea?  But to be sure, I brought some of the interlocking rubber mats that we had bought for the playroom out to the balcony, to help me think it through.

I had no sooner laid out the mats than one of the nurses came rushing out, to make it clear to me, though neither of us spoke the other's language, that this was not acceptable.  She brought me into the office of an English-speaking doctor so she could explain it to me.

You see, Romania has been known to have earthquakes, and Barlad is on a fault line.  If there is an earthquake, the first part of the hospital to collapse would be the balconies, and no one would expect the children to be there, so no one would save them.

See, each of the rooms has a large circle on the door so that emergency personnel, in the event of an earthquake, know exactly what to do:  green means the kids in this room are mobile and you just have to send them toward an exit, red means the kids are non-mobile and must be carried, and yellow means there is a mixture of both.  At the exits other teams of emergency personnel will meet the children and calmly walk them to designated safe areas.

Gee, what could possibly go wrong with this plan?  Well, Nadia -- the completely bedridden 15 year old with (apparently) muscular dystrophy, who can't even wiggle a toe -- has a green circle on her door.

And as long as we are talking about safety measures, how about not locking the doors from the inside, with a key, so that they can't be opened from either the inside or the outside unless someone can find the key, which they often can't?  (There are no "panic bars" here.)  Because that happens all the time here.  In fact, my teammates were locked in the other day and had to wait for someone to return with the key before they could get out of the third floor.

So my beautiful balcony play yard idea has to be scuttled, and if we want to get the kids some fresh air, we'll just have to haul them down from the fourth floor -- remember, no elevators! -- along with their strollers, toys, etc.