Last of June in Rasnov

Blogsite entry June 30, 2005


This past weekend I and ten other volunteer trainees traveled to Comenesti, a small city on the border of the Transylvania and Moldavia regions. It was about a four hour maxi-taxi ride through some very interesting terrain. Northeast of Brasov the land is flat and fertile with mountains in the distance surrounding the plain. After traveling about an hour and half past corn and potato fields we began to gain elevation and soon were climbing a mountain pass.

It occurred to me as I traveled that Romania is at once one of the most beautiful countries in the world and one of the ugliest. The beauty is in the countryside, in the hills and mountains and the pastoral nature of the country, the churches tucked into the curves of the hills and the uncluttered views of the geography. The ugly comes when the cities appear. Concrete apartment buildings line the pot holed streets. Drab buildings, usually five or six stories high, the blocks, as they are called, have no appeal. Each apartment usually has a balcony, many as drab as the common areas of the structures, but others alive with blooming flowers and decorations. The architecture of the structures built before World War II is must more interesting then those build afterwards.

Romanians generally have a great love of beauty. Nearly every courtyard and cemetery plot has planted annuals and perennials, and there is a lively market for cut flowers. But beauty seems to be a private thing and does not extend to the communal areas. This is a generalization and there are some attractive public gardens in Brasov and such, but little attempt is made at sprucing up the common areas.

Comenesti is famous (in Romania) as the birthplace of gymnast Nadia Comaneci. We went there to help with a habitat for humanity project building four houses. I’m not sure how much help we really were – when I’m the expert on construction it shows the body of corporate knowledge is rather feeble – but we did manage to put up siding and insulation, paint window framing and haul lumber. Mostly though, our presence seemed to encourage the soon to be homeowners. They seemed to appreciate our help.

This old man worked as hard as any of the volunteers on Saturday, even staying for an extra 90 minutes after most of the others had knocked off work, but I must admit that the young people then went out to dinner and party, while I stayed back at the bunkhouse and went to bed. Unfortunately, I could have put in a few good hours of work on Sunday morning, but H for H refuses to do work on Sundays so our efforts were limited to one day.

It seemed a little strange that in this world of Peace Corps, where we are paid (at least enough to cover basic expenses) to be volunteers, we had to pay our travel and food expenses to volunteer for the habitat project. I think those of us that went, though, thought that our million lei cost was worth it.

Yesterday (June 29th) Nancy and I got our first clue as to what we will be doing the next two years. According to the plan I’ll be working with an agricultural organization that promotes and does research into organic methods of farming. Nancy will be assigned to an environmental organization with her talents directed to a money generating aspect of that group. She’ll not work directly with the environmental side, but will be assisting with setting up and co-coordinating the income producing portion.

Peace Corps continues to be secretive about where exactly we’ll be going. They are planning a ceremony and site naming next week when we travel to the mountain resort of Sinaia. From what hints that we’ve been given though, it looks as if we’ll be in a suburb of either Cluj or Timisoara. Nancy will work in the main city while my position is in the outlying town. Either city would be fine with us as they have the reputation along with Brasov as being the nicest cities in Romania.

Next week we go to Sinaia for a few days. Along with the naming of our sites, we will meet our ‘counterparts’ – the people that will be our main contacts at our organizations. We hope that our counterparts have much patience and speak English. After we spend the weekend in the resort we head out on our site visit. We’ll travel with our counterparts to site and examine first hand our work situation. We’ll also meet our next Gazda family. We’re required to stay with a host family when we first get to site. It’ll be another 8 weeks once we get permanently to site before we move into a place of our own.

We are currently in week 5 of the ten week training session. Counterpart conference and site visit will take up most of week 6 and 7. We’ve been working hard at our language skills but they remain weak. We have a ‘test’ next Tuesday and I’m afraid that it will show us deficient, but we’ve been assured that PC will not send us home if we fail. At least not yet.