Hope For The Forgotten

A once-desolate tuberculosis hospital is now fit for purpose

- Sally Rodger, Sally Wood-Lamont, Mary’s Meals

When Harrison Watson, the editor of My Weekly at the time, walked into the Tuberculosis Hospital in Cluj-Napoca back in 2005, he was horrified by what he saw.

“Faces beyond pain, beyond sadness,” he wrote at the time. “Blank faces with no interest, no hope. The faces of forgotten people.”

Beds were packed, barely an arm’s length apart, into large wards. The toilets and showers were old and grubby, a syringe lay on a table with blood seeping out of it. There was not a picture on a wall, no TV, no music, no chatter, no laughter.

“This was a hospital for the very poor,” he said. “They have nowhere else to go.” Tuberculosis was rife in Romania then, but low priority. There had been no funding for years. This was a large hospital, about 150 years old, with three main buildings and two floors.

It was hard to know where to start, but we took the plunge and began with the ground floor. The huge wards were split into eight smaller rooms, to help stop infection spreading and allow a higher level of privacy and dignity. There were new connecting corridors, doors and windows; wash basins in every room. There was new tiling, lighting, plumbing and electrics; air conditioning, hygienic toilets and showers.