Twists and Turns on the Journey to Launching a Business in Romania
For Ryan Crozier, four passions remain constant: God, his wife, Romania and trafficking prevention. As a natural-born entrepreneur there have been many other passions and interests that have come and gone, but those are the ones that define his life. At age 12, Ryan fell in love with Romania on a short-term mission trip with his Dad that would change their lives forever. At 18 as a college student, the seeds for anti-trafficking work were sown as he listened to a visiting speaker from India recount the plight of children vulnerable to traffickers. His blood boiled as he listened to the woman tell stories of rescuing children from abuse. She compared their work to standing at the edge of a cliff trying to catch kids as they came off and not being able to catch them all. All Ryan could think about was why there wasn’t someone further back stopping children going anywhere near the cliff edge. It is a question that has helped shape the course of his adult life and it is the reason that today he is leading a company, eLiberare Design – a web design and development agency in Bucharest, Romania.
In 1997 when Ryan and his Dad set off on mission trip to Romania, they expected to serve and help, yet it was them who were most changed by the experience. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it was estimated that 50,000 children were in State care in orphanages. Conditions in those orphanages were terrible, and by the time Ryan first visited Romania eight years later, thousands of children had run away and were living rough on the streets. While the kids found some measure of freedom, they also found new kinds of abuse – particularly the abuse of inhalants, many becoming addicted to sniffing glue. Ryan and his Dad volunteered with an organisation that were helping kids get off the street and into homes. Read more