Vasile Adamescu – You cannot live without love
Today, professor Vasile Adamescu would have turned 76 years old. Please read below a few words written with warmth by his friend and interpreter, Viorel Micu.
On September 5th 1944, in the vilage Borcea, Ialomița County, on the left shore of the Danube river, Vasile Adamescu is born, the second child of Zamfir and Voica, a family of poor, but hard working peasants. Vasilică, as he was called by those close to him, was to go through a terrible misfortune: following meningitis, he loses both his hearing and his sight, when he was only 2 years old. He remains like that, silent and sad, spending an unhappy childhood on the dirt roads of his village until the age of 11. Then, he is taken to the School for Visually Impaired in Cluj, where he meets his teacher, Florica Sandu, a kindhearted and skilled special education teacher, who sees his potential and succeeds in bringing him out of darkness and silence.
Gifted with a will of iron and an inexhaustible thirst for knowledge, Adamescu quickly absorbs every information and succeeds the impossible. He acquires speech, manages to learn a communication system easy to use by all those around him (The Block Alphabet, the writing of capital letters on the palm or other parts of the body), goes through 18 years of school and then becomes a university student studying Special Education.
One must take into account though the relentless work of his teachers, who had the advantage of being able to work with him individually, due to the fact that the Ministry of Education approved the establishment of a class where he was the only student.
If in the beginning he only knew a few signs to ask for water or food, over the years, the child who did not seem to have any chance of leading a relatively normal life, becomes a man useful to society, as he always liked to say. After graduating university, he returns to the school where he once studies, making his teachers proud. He teaches children with multisensory impairments for more than 30 years. Many generations went through his hands, and for them, Vasile Adamescu was the calm and loving teacher, that you go to with love.
Throughout his life, he fought for the rights of people with disabilities, particularly people with deafblindness, towards a better life for them, access to education and social life.
Passionate about arts and sculpture, he graduates the School of Arts, where he polishes his native talent. He worked on thousands of clay works, from birds and animals to cars and busts of great personalities.
He wrote his memoirs, publishing a series of volumes called Confronting Life, a book showing that nothing is impossible.
He receives countless awards and decorations, the most important of them – the National Order of Merit with the High Rank of Knight, given by the Romanian President, the title Senior Citizen of the City given by the Cluj Napoca town-hall, Promoter of the Rights of People with Deafblindness given by Sense International Romania.
”Love is a peculiar feeling, hard to express in words… i don’t even know if there is a clear definition. I believe that love is like air. You cannot live without love” says Vasile Adamescu.
At the end of year 2018, Vasile Adamescu passes away, going to a better world. He was not afraid of death, because he trusted God. Still, he had dreams, plans, hopes. It is our duty to never forget Vasile Adamescu the teacher, the mentor, the writer, the artist, the person who always surrounded us with warmth, smiling to us, giving us advice, loving us and using all his skills to educate children with disabilities in our country.