It is our hope to have this Buhusi building renovated in 2006-8, making it into a museum and education center about the area's archeological sites, ethnic groups, and Jewish population. This project can become a model to help the community focus on nature, community and tolerance. In helping the animals, the people will help themselves. The project will bring back needed enthusiasm about the ability to make change. It will help increase jobs, tourism and business opportunities.

APRIL 24, 2005. I drove out to Buhusi today, a half hour from the city of Bacau, in northern Romania to a Sunday Brunch with the Animals, a new program we share with Ovidiu Rom (our educational partner). I saw a line of children waiting on the road. An hour later there were more than 100 people walking through the zoo, many of them having become regulars. Children all carry plastic bags with bananas, nuts, bread, apples. They had received a list of foods that the animals need for their health.

Volunteers from the University and Ovidiu Rom (including a woman doctor and two Roma mothers) wait for small groups and take them around to tell them about the animals. There are new small signs telling about the animals as well.

Some of the animals are in better shape, although the sadness of their lives is hard to avoid. But the vet has taken care of all the eye infections and stomach illnesses making them all a bit more healthy. And we have a new sponsor who is giving meat once a week to the dingos and lions.

After seeing the bears, who are in a horrible caged area, I felt miserable. I wondered how I could penetrate the community who are the heart of our ability to actually make a difference. Then, a ten year old boy came to me and gave me a letter he had written in English. It read, "Thank you for helping us. This is our zoo." He wrote about his sadness about the animals in dirty cages and their hunger. And he and his classmates, he said, came every Sunday; and they want to help at the zoo. The other kids arrived with their teacher and one university student who has seen them every week.

We discussed the possibilites and inaugurated a new program, The Mihai Eminescu Garden Project. They are going to make a vegetable garden to help feed the baboons and the bears. They are also going to plant flowers along the entrance path to make things more beautiful. I was thrilled.

Then, I read the report based on three hundred interviews carried out by a biology class at the University. It is great. Seventy percent of the people in the community want to help and believe that saving the animals and rebuilding the zoo will improve the economics, the zeal, and the tourism of the area.

Tomorrow is a conference to present the project to the community and businesses, and a newspaper came to photograph and interview us. So we are moving slowly and forward. -- Laura Simms

A Gypsy woman living in Buhusi took Laura Simms to see the zoo in the winter of 2003.  As heartbreaking as it was to see the animals in miserable cages, it was equally painful to watch children look on helplessly. Yet, for both children and adults in Buhusi, concern for the animals is huge. The Buhusi project will become and international model for sustainable community development.  For, regardless of how much aid a community receives to build houses, create jobs, improve medical help and education, these changes cannot endure unless the inner capacities of hope, self-motivation, compassion, resilience and happiness are nurtured.

We believe that restoration of the zoo, its education center and park, will uplift the hearts of the people of Buhusi by engaging them in the joy of involvement beyond their own personal difficulties.