VIDRA, Romania Eleven-year-old Petre Costache has written a long list of gifts he wants Santa Claus to bring him, including a remote-controlled car and a scarf.

He also says he wants to be a policeman but it's unlikely that wish will be granted.

Costache, a seemingly healthy boy with big, black eyes and thick, dark hair, lives in one of the saddest places on earth.

He and his friends Petronela, George, Eugen and Givan -- 81 in all -- live in one of Romania's hostels for AIDS-infected children, located in a poor farm village south of Bucharest.

The World Health Organization says AIDS is on the rise in Eastern Europe, especially in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and Kazakhstan. In Romania, it is nothing new.

Just over a decade ago, the world was shocked by the conditions in Romania's orphanages and child-care facilities.

When dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown and executed in 1989, journalists were able to get a look at the appalling squalor in which children, many infected with HIV but most not, were kept, sometimes locked away in rooms.

Today the big institutions that fitted into Ceausescu's plan for state care for orphans as well as children whose families either could not or would not support them, are gone.

There are still 100,000 children in institutional care in Romania, but the institutions are smaller and tens of thousands of healthy children have been adopted.

The health system, too, which created the AIDS epidemic by using unsterilized needles and giving transfusions of untested blood -- at a time when the need to check was known -- has improved.

UNICEF area representative Karin Hulshof said no children are now being infected through blood or contaminated needles.

Different Story

For those children already infected with AIDS, the story is different.

The ones rescued from big institutions have been placed in smaller facilities. There many of them have grown up, some now in their early teens.

And there they are dying -- five or six a year at Vidra, about one a week countrywide.

In its most recent update, UNICEF said Romania has 5,305 children with full-blown AIDS and some 4,000 who test positive for the virus. It said that since 1989, when the epidemic was detected, 2,108 have died.

At its peak Vidra had 120 AIDS orphans -- a term used loosely in Romania to cover children abandoned by their families, as well as those truly orphaned.

Of those who survive, most show the effects of early childhood infection by HIV -- they are mentally and physically far behind their normal peers.

"Most of them are in the last stages of AIDS," said Elisabeta Iancu, 57, the head nurse who has worked at the hospice, formerly a hospital for malnourished children, since 1982 -- well before Romania knew it had an AIDS problem.

George, 14, the oldest and one of the most sociable of the youngsters, can barely write his name. Others are noticeably short or underweight for their age.

That one of them should graduate from the hospital's school, and enter the world outside the fenced compound, "is our great hope", said Iancu, who knows that will not happen soon; if ever.

The Vidra Hospice, and others like it in Romania's capital Bucharest, the port city of Constanta and elsewhere, are institutions that in many ways could exist only in Romania.

Ceausescu's push to create a worker society, modeled on the example of North Korea, left this once mostly agrarian society with a legacy of failure -- industrial, medical and social.

"I've been to one village near Bucharest where out of 700 inhabitants 37 kids were HIV positive," Hulshof said in an interview.

"It looks like an immunization campaign where one person was HIV positive and contaminated all the others. It would not be possible to prove, but we can suggest that might be the cause."

Some of those infected remain with their families, but thousands more live in special institutions like Vidra.

"Constanta is the first place with children with HIV," Rodica Matusa, AIDS coordinator for the Black Sea port city with Romania's largest concentration of AIDS victims, told Reuters.

"I have in total 1,000 children who are alive and 700 who have died," Matusa said. "And I have 10 places with abandoned children, places just like Vidra."

These days the emphasis at the orphanages is to provide the best possible care and a stimulating environment.

"In Constanta I have very good supervision for the children and also for abandoned children," Matusa said. "I have 10 family houses, with very good conditions."

At Vidra, the cost of care per child, in a country where people earn about $100 a month, runs to 35 million lei, roughly $1,300, per month, with almost $1,000 of that for medicines.

It could not be done without help from organizations like the Milan-based AVSI (Voluntary Association for International Services), which provides financial support to Vidra along with several Irish charities and many others. UNICEF say about 2,000 nongovernmental charities are active in Romania.

But special treatment breeds resentment, even of children doomed to die, and ignorance about AIDS remains widespread.

Vidra village officials refuse to let the children from the hospice attend local schools, for fear other children will be infected. And local residents, struggling in one of Europe's most backward economies, think the orphans shouldn't mix.

"They have television and food and things," said Florin Nastase, 16, waiting for a bus across from the Vidra Hospice.

"Why don't they just keep them locked in there?"

Apart from trips three days a week to Bucharest to see a movie, excursions to a Black Sea summer resort or a stroll into the village to sing Christmas carols, that is where the Vidra children spend almost all their time.

It is an unusual community, where Iancu said the children are aware something is wrong with them, but are not told exactly what -- or its consequences.

But they all must know, since every one of the children is surrounded every day by death.

Thirteen-year-old Givan is in a final stage of the disease. He has chronic diarrhea, his skin has shrivelled, his teeth protrude. The other children help and love him.

"All they have they want to share with the very sick child," Iancu said. "They have grown together and they are very close."

(Reuter)

An HIV-positive Romanian child is seen in his bed at the Vidra Hospice, 20 kms south of Bucharest.