At last, I've found a home for my orphan - in the house F1 built: How Grand Prix TV presenter Natalie Pinkham reconciled her world with that of the desperate Romanian girl who captured her heart

Natalie Pinkham first met Mirela in 1999 as a volunteer at an orphanage



She found her again, ten years later, a severely disturbed teen

She vowed to find a home for the Romanian girl, and eventually suceeded



I first met Mirela when she was three years old. She had big brown eyes, a mop of brown hair, skinny arms and legs and a bloated belly.



Home – if you could call it that – was a decaying orphanage for 300 children in the Romanian city of Slatina, three hours west of Bucharest. She had nothing. No toys, no possessions. Even her clothes were rotated with the other orphans.

Yet, despite the deprivation, Mirela was a cheeky little thing who made a beeline for me every playtime. And when I left – after spending the summer of 1999 as a 20-year-old volunteer at the orphanage – I’d often think of her.



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Brighter future: Orphaned Romanian teenager Mirela in her new bedroom with racing presenter Natalie Pinkham, who raised the money to find a home for Mirela and her siblings

Over the years, it was easier to imagine she’d been adopted and was safe and happy, so that’s what I did. But deep down I knew that was unlikely.

For a while, the West did everything it could to help the orphans of Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship. Inevitably, though, the world moves on. People’s attention shifted elsewhere, but what of Mirela?

Three years ago I decided to go back to Romania to find out. All I had was a photo. I didn’t even know her surname. It took me weeks to find her. I searched the sewers of Bucharest where many homeless orphans seek shelter and spoke to prostitutes who had been in state care.

I discovered her in Slatina in a cramped two-bedroom flat with ten other children. She was no longer a toddler but a severely disturbed 13-year-old. Years of neglect and being tied to a radiator – that’s how we found her – had done their worst. According to the child psychiatrist Professor Michael Rutter, the brain shrinks when a person goes without love. So it was with Mirela. She couldn’t talk or interact and hit herself constantly.

It was so sad to look into her eyes. They were dead. What had she seen and experienced over the past decade? She was also painfully thin and couldn’t walk very well.



Orphaned: Mirela aged three, seen in a picture taken by Natalie while she was a volunteer at the orphanage, was a happy toddler with a bleak future

I couldn’t abandon her again. This time I vowed I would find Mirela a home, somewhere she would be safe. In truth, I had absolutely no idea how I was going to do this, but shortly afterwards I was hosting a charity event when I met someone from Hope and Homes, an incredible organisation that is working to close all children’s institutions worldwide.

I told them I wanted to build a house for Mirela. They set up a sub fund for her and helped me find a plot of land and get planning permission. They also gave me the credibility of working with experts who are leaders in their field.



Then there was the small matter of finding £200,000. So began more than two years of constant fundraising. I held an event at the House of Commons with the MP Caroline Nokes and another at the Mayfair nightclub Mahiki.



I climbed ten peaks in ten hours, launched a Twitter campaign and held online auctions. When I married my husband, Owain Walbyoff, a TV executive, in 2012, we sold the wedding pictures to Hello! and put the fee towards Mirela’s fund.

At one time I found it hard to reconcile my job as Sky’s Formula 1 pit lane reporter with Mirela. Seeing all the wealth was so far removed from what I was seeing in the children’s projects I was by then beginning to visit.

Yet, in a way, it’s been the home that F1 built.

Racing forward: Natalie took help from her friends in the F1 world to raise money

A female racing driver called Alice Powell organised a karting day and my fellow Sky Formula 1 presenters pitched up.



McLaren and Red Bull sent their pit crews down and Jenson Button gave me memorabilia for an auction. Everyone says that F1’s an elitist sport but these people didn’t owe me anything, they just wanted to help.

There were also bureaucratic hurdles to overcome. The authorities said they would facilitate my ‘adoption’ of Mirela but on the condition that I took her siblings – which I’d always wanted to do – plus eight other children I didn’t know. A couple of them were like feral animals and so institutionalised it scared me being in the same room with them.

It wasn’t how I’d envisaged it. I have made a documentary for Channel 5, A Home For Mirela, and in all honesty some scenes are quite disturbing.



This isn’t the nice happy ending of opening this cosy little home and having kids running around laughing. I admit I found it quite hard to take and there were a few reflective nights until I pulled myself together.



As Hope and Homes has taught me, these are exactly the sort of children we should be helping. The ones who aren’t pretty to look at, the last ten per cent that nobody wants.

Last December, we moved in.

Mirela supposedly understands little of her surroundings, but the first moment we walked in her face changed.

She pulled off her coat and started running around touching things, smelling things.

I had wanted Mirela to be socialised around ‘normal’ kids so she could mimic behaviour, raise her game and start communicating. But experts believe the environment she is in – with space, a garden, her own possessions – will help build a sense of identity she’s never had.

She has her own room, her own wardrobe covered in stickers and toys and clothes donated by friends in England. At the end of the trip, when I said goodbye to Mirela, she reached out, hugged me and began stroking my face, something she has never done before.

I have no doubt she understands a lot more than we think.

It was an end and a beginning. The Romanian authorities have agreed to fund the home and I will continue to raise money to safeguard its future. This is where we start to try to reverse some of her symptoms and also gain a better understanding of the impact of institutionalisation.

If Mirela has taught me one thing it’s that we have a moral duty to look after these children, to not presume that they can cope without love.

Mirela wasn’t born this way. And while I’m happy we’ve been able to build this home and I’m so thankful for all the support, there is also a profound sense of sadness.

I genuinely feel that had I intervened sooner, Mirela wouldn’t be in this situation. And nor would many more like her.