SOUTH DEERFIELD — Most people know 23-year-old Roman Sweeney as the always-cheerful attendant at Cumberland Farms and an employee at Subway, both in the center of town. What they don’t know is that until age 6, he lived in a Russian orphanage.
“We didn’t have much food,” Sweeney remembers about his youth one recent day after a shift at Subway, while sitting on a friend’s porch behind Stylus hair salon in the center of town. “I don’t really care to think about it, because it doesn’t make me successful or happy. It doesn’t define me, and brings me down to think about it.”
The orphanage was small, and crammed with kids. For personal space, they each had a cubical, and slept on mattresses spread out on the bare ground or bunk beds. There was also a small playground outside — which they didn’t get to use often.
“Never really got to go outside, because there wasn’t much staff,” Sweeney said, adding that they ate perogies, coleslaw, cabbage, and bread, one meal per day, “because it was cheap.”
Sweeney’s friend Natasha Pini, who now calls Lititz, Pa., home, lived in the same orphanage. Pini was adopted when she was 5, and remembers that their building had a red brick roof.
“There were two house mothers per 10 children I believe,” she wrote in an email. “The ages ranged from infant to 16. If you weren’t adopted, you were basically thrown on the street to fend for yourself. A lot of the kids ended up going into the army.”
“There was maybe one bathroom on each floor and so many children that we never really had a place to shower or brush our teeth, or actually use the restroom,” she continued, noting that often they had to use a small pink Tupperware bowl instead. “The food was disgusting; it was always warm. For breakfast, we’d have porridge and a glass of warm milk that wasn’t pasteurized. So it still had thick chunky pieces of who knows what. And, if we didn’t eat all of it, we wouldn’t be able to eat the rest of the day.”
Pini said they weren’t allowed outside much, and would instead hang out in the living room or recreational area playing with “Masha, which was our pet turtle.”
In August of 1993, Sweeney was born in a small town about 13 miles west of Moscow. His mother was a drug addict, his father, who he never met, was a military man. As he relates, because of his mothers addiction, he was born with hydrocephalus, a potentially fatal condition that happens when cerebrospinal fluid buids up in the skull, causing the brain to swell. He was also born without legs and half his left arm.
In part because of Sweeney’s condition, his mother was scared and left him in the hospital.
“The doctors thought I would die — they had no faith I would live,” the young man continues, leaning back in the chair. It’s a beautiful fall day and a light breeze is blowing. “I believe that God had a plan for me.”
Miraculously, Sweeney survived: 95-percent of the fluid evaporated within a few weeks. Then, he was sent to the orphanage, at which he lived until 2000.
“My dad first met me when I was 5 years old,” he says about his adoptive father, Timothy Sweeney, on his first visit to the orphanage. A year later, Roman Sweeney, at 6 years old, received his first prosthetic legs “within a few weeks, when I came to America, to Shriners Hospital in Springfield, Mass.”
After a long vaccination and paperwork process, Orange natives Timothy and Pamela Sweeney adopted Roman into their family in 2000.
Almost 20 years later, the once-orphaned Sweeney now lives on Hillside Road in South Deerfield, has a mom, dad, three brothers and one sister: Thadryan, 29; Tyler, 26; Tobias, 24; and Tessa, 23. At the time of his adoption, Sweeney says the story was covered by more than 20 newspapers across the nation, including The Recorder, which ran an article on May 5, 1999.
In that article, a reporter wrote that Timothy Sweeney went to Russia on a Christian outreach mission around Christmas. “Sweeney said he had no intention of setting out to adopt a child, as he was already raising a large family here. He said when he returned home, he felt a lingering sense of loss that wouldn’t leave him until he and Pamela decided to commit to adopting Roman.”
“When I first went to the hospital, they gave me an ultimatum,” he says. “They said I could either be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life, or I could try out prosthetics. I put them on, and they were hard. Let me tell you, I fell like a million times, but from that day on, I never looked back. I plugged along — I kept doing it, repetition, because I knew it would turn out for the best.”
More recently, during his senior year of high school at North Charter Central Essential School, now called The Sizer School, Sweeney played basketball and gained national attention — his story picked up by ESPN. Because of the coverage, the Wounded Warrior Project asked him to join their traveling basketball team.
“They called me, the director of the Wounded Warrior Project,” he says. “I love basketball, just a huge fan. I know everything about basketball.”
During one particular game in Georgia, Sweeney says he played “with former WNBA, NBA, NFL and other sports players.”
Since then, Sweeney has volunteered at local nursing homes and spoken in high schools as a motivational speaker — something he’d like to do more of in the future.
“I see so many kids giving up on themselves,” he says. “I just want to help them overcome. More than half of it is in their head. That’s the key to successs— your attitude. It’s all about trucking along, being a good person and never giving up on yourself. This world is depressed, and we need a lot more positive thinkers and positive doers.”
“There’s a diference between living life, and LIVING. You’ve gotta throw stuff at life. You’ve gotta be the one who perseveres through struggle. When I die I want people to remember me as someone who’s genuine, kind, a good worker, and an honest human being.”
You can reach Andy Castillo
at: acastillo@recorder.com
or: 413-772-0261, ext. 263
On Twitter: @AndyCCastillo