A car pulls up to the orphanage in Romania as a three-year-old Tia Cummins looks out the window. Standing on the orphanage steps, a tiny little girl holds the hand of an older woman. The car barely comes to a stop before Tia opens the door, dashes to the little girl, and throws her arms around her to give her a big hug. “That’s my baby sister!” she cries.

Fourteen years later, sisters Tia and Gabi Cummins reside in Corte Madera. Both are adopted from Romania. Tia, a senior at San Andreas who plans to return to Redwood this spring, was adopted two years before Gabi, who is now a sophomore at Redwood. Gabi and Tia, named in Romania as Monica and Maria, are biological sisters.

Parents Sherwood and Jan Cummins said they had always wanted to adopt children. Sherwood said that Adopt International, the agency that connected him with Tia,  was the first adoption agency he had visited that he felt had heart.

“I went to their meeting. There were 20 families represented there and the adoption agency had been selected by the Romanian umbrella adoption committee as recipients of 19 children who were available in Romania for adoption.” Sherwood said. “They had a picture of each of these children in a stack and they passed them around during the during the presentation.”

Sherwood said he fell in love with Tia the moment he saw her picture.

“I was sorting through them, and in the middle of the stack was this beautiful little fair-haired girl,” he said. “It looked just like Jan’s baby picture. And I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God. There’s our daughter.’”

Sherwood said his wife Jan was just as in love with Tia as he was.

“People would say to us, ‘Aren’t you afraid that she might have AIDS because so many of these children in the Romanian orphanages have AIDS?’ And I said, ‘It doesn’t matter. That’s our daughter and she’ll be a lot better off with us here than she would be in an orphanage in Romania,” Sherwood said.

Sherwood said that when he adopted Tia at 15 months, Romania had a 13 percent employment rate, which is why her birth family, who lived in a small village called Vișina Nouă, couldn’t keep her. Both parents were unemployed.

Jan said that Ceaușescu, Romania’s dictator, restricted birth control and gave bonuses to families who had five or more children as an incentive to grow the population. Tia’s family of nine received their bonus, but still could not take care of her, so they gave her up for adoption.

After seven months of paperwork, the Cummins flew to Romania to adopt their first daughter.

Tia was in an orphanage with 27 children under the age of three and only two caregivers.

“She got no attention,” Jan said. “We didn’t really see any evidence that she had ever been out of her crib in the orphanage. We saw children banging their heads against the ends of their cribs for self-stimulation.”

According to Sherwood, Tia could not speak or walk.

“She was 15 months old. Most children can walk by the time they’re 12 months old, but she hadn’t been out of the crib so she couldn’t,” he said.

Sherwood and Jan said that when they brought Tia home to Corte Madera, everything was new to her.

“At home she would fall and not cry because in the orphanage, nobody would come if you cried, so they learned not to cry,” Jan said. “We had to give her permission and teach her to cry.”

Jan and Sherwood also had to hire a speech therapist for Tia, since she hadn’t learned any language in the orphanage and was already 15 months old. Sherwood said it was not long before Tia was speaking fluently.

“Low and behold, a year and a half later, [Tia] said to me ‘Daddy, me want baby sister,’” Sherwood said. “At that point I was 62 or 63. We had a meeting with the adoption agency and we told them she’s asking for a baby sister, and we asked if there was another child in the [biological] family. They said no.”

Two weeks later, Sherwood received a “chilling” telephone call from the adoption agency. Tia’s birth mother had given birth to another daughter four months after Tia had been adopted, and was giving her up for adoption, too. The agency asked if the Cummins wanted to adopt this baby as well.

Seven months later, Sherwood and Jan flew to Romania and adopted Gabi at 19 months.

Sherwood said that when Tia greeted Gabi with a hug on the steps of the orphanage, Gabi was frightened.

“Gabi bursted into tears, she’s screaming, she’s terrified,” he said. “She’d never seen Tia before, she didn’t know who she was. Jan is standing next to the caregiver, and Jan’s in tears crying for Gabi, Tia is sitting on the stairs of the orphanage, sobbing because her baby sister doesn’t love her, I’m standing there with three women who were PMSing, and only one of them is age eligible!”

The Cummins took Gabi home and raised her with Tia. The girls both have learning issues, which Jan said are most likely due to the lack of early brain development caused by malnutrition in the orphanage.

“I have learning issues, and Gabi does, too,” Tia said, “because we didn’t learn anything until we were a year and a half old.”

Sherwood said Tia and Gabi both had trouble reading at a young age.

“There are certain stages in your brain’s development, where if it isn’t stimulated in a certain time frame, then it never gets stimulated,” Sherwood said. “Those first few months are so important.”

A few years later, Sherwood made contact with Tia and Gabi’s birth mother through a young Romanian woman he had met through a friend.

The young woman returned to Romania and stopped by Vișina Nouă to meet Gabi and Tia’s birth parents. She brought pictures of the girls, some money, and a letter that Jan had written describing the girls.

“Their older sister ran throughout the village to gather the other children to see the pictures of their sisters,” Sherwood said. “At this point, they didn’t know that Gabi and Tia were together.”

The birth family wrote a letter to the Cummins, saying that their greatest joy in life would be if Gabi and Tia visited them in Romania.

“And so, when Tia was eight and Gabi was six, we went to visit them,” Sherwood said.

Sherwood said that the trip to Vișina Nouă was eye-opening for the girls.

“They lived in a house with no running water, no toilet, no shower,” he said. “If you wanted to bathe, they had a big galvanized tub that they would heat water in. There was an outhouse out behind the pig sty. They lived on about an acre and a half of land, and they grew their own vegetables — they had this huge garden of vegetables with chickens and pigs and rabbits that they grow for food.”

After the first trip, Gabi and Tia raised $700 to buy their birth family a cow, which Gabi and Tia named Daisy. The family was happy because the cow would provide milk to drink and a calf to they can sell.

According to Jan, Tia and Gabi were treated like princesses in the village.

“It was such a big deal. No one had ever seen Americans before,” Jan said.

Tia said she often thinks about what her life would be like if her birth mom had never given her up for adoption.

“My older sister got pregnant at 18 and already has a baby,” she said. “I’d probably be headed down that road at this point in my life if I was there.”

Today, Gabi is a member of Junior Statesmen of America and plays lacrosse on a club team and for Redwood. Tia is an accomplished competitive swimmer, placing fourth in the county, and is a part of San Andreas leadership and a youth government program at the YMCA.

Tia said when she grows up, she wants to help the Romanian orphans who weren’t as lucky as her. She said she has read up on the issue, and recently wrote a research paper on what happens to the unadopted orphans when they get older.

“When they turn 7 or 8 they have to start caring for the younger ones if they can walk, but most of them can’t. So they either get shipped off to some mental institution or get kicked out on the street,” Tia said. “A lot of them either go into human trafficking or stealing. They’re not given any skills.”

Tia said she wants to open up a shelter for the rejected orphans and educate them.

“That’s what I want to do in my life. I want to go over there and make a shelter for them because they don’t have a place to go, they don’t learn any job skills at all in the orphanage, so when they’re kicked out, what are they supposed to do?” she said.

The Cummins have since been back to Romania four times, and plan to return again in two summers. The last visit was for Gabi and Tia’s biological brother’s wedding. Tia said she wants to spend a summer there with the birth family to learn the language.

“Visiting [Romania] makes me feel so much more lucky than probably a lot of other kids do,” she said, “because a lot of other kids haven’t seen the other side of the world.”