The charity, “Help Us Dry The Tears” Foundation, (H.U.D.T.) is a Christian charity founded in 1999 by Val Conlon who at the time was running a publications group he started in 1985 called ‘Divine Mercy Publications’. He began receiving donations in support of his Christian publications, but he felt these donations could not be used for anything other than charitable works.
Timisoara is a very poor town in the heart of Romania where most of the young have left for greener fields. The result is a high population of elderly people, who have no support from the Government and no extended family. Many of these live alone and have serious debilitating diseases, which living in terrible conditions and malnutrition has caused.
Oituz is an Orphanage that was completely dependent on the villager’s kindness to feed and clothe the children. But the village which is a very poor village can hardly feed and clothe itself. The orphan children come from a wide area around and most are brought in by the police when they are found deeply in distress having been molested or assaulted by an adult.
Since we donated the incubators to the Bucharest Maternity Hospital, many premature babies have been saved. At this maternity Hospital, an average of eighty babies are abandoned on the doorstep each year.
Irish priest Fr. Eddie Veasey spent over thirty years working with the poor in the shanty town on the outskirts of Guayaquil, Ecuador, helping people living on city trash sites and begging in the streets for survival. He became so overwhelmed with demands on both his time and his pocket helping these people that he appealed to HUDT “Help Us Dry the Tears” to come to his aid.
We have always made clear that the mercy of God is for all people and “Divine Mercy in Action” does not ask people any questions about their belief before we help them and when the Romanian Orthodox Church, asked us to help them with the building of a refuge for single mothers and children in need in their community, in Timisoria, we just built it for them.
Father Andrei Ciobanica in the Parish of Saint Anthony in Husi in east Romania close to the border of Moldova appealed to us for assistance for children with high social risks and many other problems. The list was great. Abandoned children, abused children in dysfunctional families, children without shelter.
In autumn 2006, we started a new project in the village of Luizi Calugara with children from very poor families who before we arrived were living in tents beside rubbish dumps. Finding where to start wasn’t very difficult, as the village is very big and there are so many families with children living in appalling poverty.