updated 5:02 p.m. ET Dec. 4, 2006

TUTOVA, Romania - My teenage daughters, Emma and Lilly, are both surrounded by babies.

Lilly, the 15-year-old who will only baby-sit back home in Kansas City, Mo., if she's desperate for cash, has 4-month-old Vlad in one arm, and Mihaela, about nine months, in another. Little Abel is at Lilly's feet making gurgling noises. Everybody's smiling.

Emma, 17, vowed years ago (when she was 12) that she would never have kids and that little girls especially bugged her. Today she's helping supervise the toddler room, tossing Dumitru into the air, while two other young ones howl because now they want a turn on this new carnival ride called Emma.

"Wait a minute," she tells them all. "I only have two arms. I'll get to you, don't worry. Just chill a minute."

Two weeks earlier we were home in Missouri getting ready for Christmas. Now the whole Fisher family — my husband, Hal, Emma, Lilly and I — are in Romania, at Tutova Hospital's Failure to Thrive Clinic with seven other people from Global Volunteers. We're one of the largest Global Volunteer teams to make the trip to the hospital in Tutova, a tiny town in northeast Romania.

Our purpose is to help the staff care for 42 infants and toddlers, ages about four months to 4-years-old. We bring a lot of enthusiasm, but no special expertise, though our team does include one pediatric nurse whose pockets are filled with Twizzlers and Cheerios.

Although my daughters' low-lying nurturing instincts might have pointed us in another direction — say building houses or picking trash off trails — we signed on with Global Volunteers' Romanian program after surfing the Internet looking for family volunteering opportunities. Our criteria were pretty straightforward: It had to be the first week of January — because that was the week the kids had off from school, post-Christmas. It had to be affordable and something we could all do.

I was initially hesitant about the Romania program even though it was the only one that had dates that worked for us. Not only did taking care of a lot of children seem like less than a natural fit for my daughters, but I also remembered the horror stories about Romanian orphanages in the 1990s.

Lilly Fisher / AP file In this photo released by Global Volunteers, Emma Fisher feeds a girl named Ana-Maria while volunteering at Tutova Hospital's Failure to Thrive Clinic.

But Global Volunteers' Web site made it clear that Tutova was not like that. Yes, Tutova hospital was poor, ill-quipped and understaffed. But it also appeared to be a place where children were cared for, and where some children — all of them at risk — did well. It's also one of Global Volunteers' more popular programs.

And then I mentioned the idea to Emma and Lilly.

"Are you kidding? Yes!" was the way Emma, who doesn't really care for kids, put it.

"That would be so amazing," said Lilly, who groans out loud when someone asks her to baby-sit.

IF YOU GO ... GLOBAL VOLUNTEERS St. Paul, Minn.-based Global Volunteers sends 2,000 Americans each year to work in 20 countries; globalvolunteers.org or 800-487-1074. GLOBAL AWARE globeaware.org or 877-588-4562 CROSS-CULTURAL SOLUTIONS crossculturalsolutions.org or 800-380-4777 Source: The Associated Press

My kids are not saints. They get excited about the usual stuff. A new Dane Cook CD, jeans that fit just so and getting a later curfew. But they're adventurous. I saw the Romania volunteer trip as a chance for our family to visit a new part of the world, maybe lend a hand and spend some concentrated time together — which has been getting pretty tough to come by these days.

Sussing out my daughters' nascent maternal instincts would be a side benefit.

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