Romania 2003

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Newsletter Eleven

Date: Wednesday 1 October 2003.

I arrived back in New Zealand yesterday, finishing a four month stay during their summer. It's cold here! Some highlights (lowlights?) of my last couple of weeks:

One day recently I drove to Jimbolia in the morning with Steve to pay bills and workers for the Boys' Home. On the way we had to wait for a train - something that has been known to take up to half an hour from when the barriers come down. Normally it only takes five or ten minutes. This time it wasn't very long but it gave me the opportunity to take a photo of an interesting Dacia station wagon model. The Dacia is the national car of Romania, and this particular model is, well, hmmm.

I have a friend who has been driving his father's Dacia Break around a lot since he got his license a few months ago. Until recently the stop/tail lights were wired up backwards. We fixed that but it still takes multiple attempts to start it and it doesn't stop when he takes out the key, so he has to deliberately stall it. At 2:20am on my last day in Romania we were trying to push-start it.

But I digress. Steve didn't quite get the electricity bill paid because after filling in huge amounts of paper work the electricity company realised that because the house is owned by a foundation (yeah, OK, it will be when it's finished) a different bunch of paperwork should have been done for it. So they filled that in, then they wanted to know how many lightbulbs there would be (!), what kind of gas-powered water heater it will have, how much electricity the home will be using, etc. No one knows how many lightbulbs we're going to have, we were already late, so we had to move on. Ah well.

One of the nice things about Romanian villages is storks. One day while driving back from Jimbolia I found a stork flying along in front of the van. I pointed out to the others in the van that it was "off to get some more babies" but there was just silence in reply. I looked around and found everyone was asleep. (No wonder they had so much energy in the evenings.)

Corruption continues to be a huge problem in Romania. Consider these examples.

Some friends of a friend have just had their first baby. They had to pay a total of about NZ$1000 in bribes just for her to be seen by doctors when she needed to be, just for him to be able to visit during visiting hours, etc. When people are in pain (like having a baby) it's perhaps not surprising how much money they will pay in order to get medical care.
Another friend has been building a house in a nearby village. He's taken two months and paid NZ$2000 just to get the electricity connected - a HUGE amount for that corner of the world. The closest power pole was only 30m away - just over twice the length of my parents' driveway (or, say, a five second run).

The day before leaving Romania I visited the grave of Cosmin Raducan, a 14 year old streetkid who was murdered last year. It's in the "poor" section of the cemetary and was distressingly sunken-in as well as overgrown. The haystack in the middle of the field was a strange touch. (The grave is in the bottom left quarter of the photo.)

The same day I also accompanied Adi Foto and a couple of foreign helpers to visit the kids on the streets for my last time. In their wisdom the authorities are blocking up many of the subterranean homes the kids live in during winter.

Hot water pipes run through the sewers, so it's quite warm down there while it's below freezing on the streets. Blocking off the entrances is supposed to encourage the kids to move on. In practice the kids are just as likely to unblock their access holes again, since they simply don't have anywhere else to go. We found one location where someone had started unblocking an entrance, with concrete chipped off to expose the reinforcing. When it gets colder they'll probably have another go.

Since the Day Centre had been held earlier that day (targeted at teenage and younger), most of the kids we searched out were older, in their late teens and twenties. One 14 year old boy we found with a group of older boys had a story that's typical for the streetkids. He's been on the streets for four years (ie, since he was 10), his mother is dead, and his father is an alcoholic. He seemed an intelligent boy and knew a fair bit of English, but struck me as being quite lacking in hope.

It's something that Adi and many others in Timisoara are slowly working on.

Ian.
8 )
http://www.boyshome.ro/

Young female American volunteer walks into a corner store and says (in Romanian):

"I want boy milk."

Volunteer realises something is wrong from the shopkeeper's expression and in embarrassment accepts the bag of normal milk offered. She should have said she wanted defeated (or beaten) milk, which sounds slightly similar but comes in a plastic pot.

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