Every time I go abroad and I talk to foreigners about Romania I have the tendency to praise the people and criticize the inefficient laws. My Romania is not as bad as it seems, or at least no one is allowed to say something bad about it except for me...
Thinking about going abroad to do an internship in a social cooperative, I start again having questions about my knowledge of Romania and how much I will miss its fields, mountains and people. I feel sad that I did not have the time and interest to discover those parts of Romania that are different - I have never been in a very very poor village, I do not know how a gypsy community looks like, I do not know how children get an education in the rural areas of my beautiful country... but it's never too late, is it?!
Last week, I got a very tempting invitation from a dear friend to join her in a little trip to a village from Transilvania, Covasna county. The aim of the visit was to learn about the educational level of the gypsy community in Araci. Our findings would have helped a wonderful NGO to improve one of its programmes that encourages families to send their children to kindergarten by offering them some monthly food tickets (12 euro per month).
When I said "yes" to this trip, I must admit I was not sure of what I was going to find there and how important for my life this experience would have been.
I was about to discover that Araci and Heter, another village from Valcele, are two of the poorest villages in Romania. The area is known as a predominantly Hungarian one, but the two villages were populated by 60% gypsy, around 15% Hungarians and 15% Romanians. Araci is the capital of the commune and has the only secondary school, the other villages having only primary schools. There are around 350 students in the school (primary and secondary level), but only around 65% of them come to school daily. As for highschool, if one wants to continue his/her education, they need to commute to Sfintul Gheorghe, the city next to the village, 20 km far. Moreover, many professors seem to have lost their interest in educating the students and they have very poor results, most of them not qualifying for going to highschool. The Hungarian classes are held for all primary and all secondary school students, since their number is very little. For example, all 15 primary school students that attend the Hungarian classes in Araci learn together from one professor that teaches in both Romanian and Hungarian so that she is understood...is that like she is teaching for 8 teachers in the same time??? (4 different classes in 2 different languages in the same timeee???). Moreover, most students from the Hungarian classes are Romanians and their parents decided to send them there because they get paid by the Hungarian Government (30.000 HUF - around 110 euro per year)...
In the center, the community looks fine,they have paved streets and a couple of shops, two churches, a school and a kindergarten, a police office and the City Hall.
Once we go up on a hill, we arrive in the gypsy community ...
Today, after seeing Heter too, I can say Araci is not the poorest one, since Heter looks a lot worse.The poverty is extreme.
The communities are not traditional ones keeping alive their customs or wearing traditional costumes. They are rather a mix of cultures adapting to a continuous capitalistic change that offers no job, very weak education and no chance to become someone else, since there is no possibility to go study in the city or see that there is something else except for your little community. Most of the people do not have the perception of another kind of real life, since they have never been out and what they see on television looks like utopia...
We started to talk to people and soon most of the community was out, watching us and asking what we were doing. Their clothes were dirty, there was no water on the hill, so they needed to bring it from down. Their houses looked small and unfinished. The children were hanging on us, taking our breath and energy. They needed attention. The panorama was scary, but there was no danger...there was only a complete lack of opportunities.
Talking to the people from the community, we found out that they get married around 15-16, the youngest I met marrying at 13 and having the first baby at 14. The time seemed like passing differently in that place and I felt a kid in comparison to the women my age who had at least 4 children...According to my standards, everyone looked a lot older.
I have not met anyone who entered highschool and it was a real success if someone finished the 8th grade, most of the population having around 4-5 grades. The most usual reason for quitting school was getting married and having kids. While everyone declared school is very important, no one knew anyone who had finished highschool and / or had a sort of career or achievement...It looked like studying serves only for learning how to read, write and count, which, in the end, they will never use, since they almost never get a job....
A very interesting aspect was the fact there there were no two families living in the same house/room. Every new family (husband) was building a new house (sometimes with help from the family and friends) and they were living there until the end. The number of children varied from 2 to 14, but most of them had around 5-6 children. Most of their income was comprised by state social aid and children allowance. While the women were never hired and took care of the children, the men were sometimes working on the fields in agriculture, or in industry and constructions. Furthermore, they were often going in the city (Sfintul Gheorghe or Brasov) to collect old iron and sell it...or to beg. In short, their income per capita was around 20 euro per month.
What stroke me was that only one family from Heter (who was known as a sort of leader of the village) was planting some vegetables in a little garden and had some chickens, one horse and one cow. All the rest did not plant vegetables and had at most a horse. I kept on wondering whyyyyyyy? don't they do anything to improve their situation and whyyyy?? are they so short-term oriented? Later, I found out that no matter what they do it's useless since they get stolen....how comes that such a community was not able to have one leader who can convince the population of respecting the other's property...Putting them all together, it makes sense, though: their education level is awful and there is no leader who has the ability to make himself/herself listened to. In addition, the land where they were living was probably stolen also, so their entire lives began like this, by stealing. How can you change your mind about something that you learned from the beginning of your life?
There was only one positive side of the story, as far as I have seen - the tolerance for everyone's ethnicity and religion. All Hungarians, Romanians and Gypsy, reformats, unitarians, catholics, Iehova's witnesses and other believers lived in peace with one another as far as these two components are concerned and there was no association between the criminal acts or occupations and ethnicity or religion. So, please, dear specialists from the top floors, before you bring into discussion the ethnic conflicts in Transilvania, please go there and check it yourselves! This is the last problem we have there!
I keep on thinking on our governmental investments and malinvestments and how we spend our money in those beautiful and opulent shopping malls while those hundreds of children have 0 (ZERO) opportunity to get out of that vicious circle...And I imagine the millionaires who keep on doing passive charity and not changing a bit the way they do business... and I go on reflecting on how we encourage the dependency of those people form Araci and Heter on social aid instead of creating efficient instruments for empowering them... isn't it time to woke up and stopped doing development from the top with no care for the hapless?!
