Catching up with Transylvania

This morning I got e-mail, the first in a very long time, from a friend who lives in Kolozsvar (Cluj Napoca) Romania.

I first met Rozsa five years ago, in Torockószentgyörgy, a tiny Transylvanian village where her family has lived for longer than any of them can remember, or even guess. She was one of our "scholarship girls," a handful of bright, ambitious students who studied English diligently enough to be our interpreters during week-long stays in the village.


(Why Transylvania? Why a week-long stay in a village that isn't even on most maps? Long story, most easily summed up like this: The Unitarian Church was established in Transylvania in the 1560's, and has hung on, through war, famine, pestilence, and countless changes of government and borders. Today, most Transylvanian Unitarians are Hungarian by ethnicity and inclination, Romanian by citizenship, a double minority. Before WW2, a few American, Canadian and English Unitarian churches had connections to some Transylvanian churches. After the fall of the Ceasescu regime, in 1990, American Unitarians re-established partnership with Transylvania. Because of the strong interest of our former minister, my church became one of the earliest partners. More about the UUPCC here. Since 1999, our Partner Church group has sponsored a trip to the village approximately every two years. )

So - Rozsa. Torockószentgyörgy. In contrast to our other scholarship girls, whose goals ranged from "work in tourism" to "communications" and "computers," Rozsa had a specific vocation in mind - to be a pharmacist. "My family had to sell a cow to pay for my first year," she said. "I have to be able to find a job."

She finished her training and found work in a pharmacy in Kolozsvar. The work is hard, and even with credentials, life is not easy in Romania. This morning she wrote, "I'm still working in the same pharmacy,but I have so much work to do,and learn a lot of new things. At the begining of December the program it changed a lot. . . now at the begining of this month the prescriptions for the patients changed,and now I have an extra thing to do, cause they are mking huge mistakes,and we are talking about a human life. Like everything in our country is going backwards."

Last year Romania entered the EU. For the villages, this is good news and bad news. Good, in that EU funds have been available for several years now to make needed improvements to infrastructure. Bad, because EU agricultural rules create huge difficulties for the subsistence farming culture of small Transylvanian villages. This article says it better than I can.

Transylvania is a beautiful place. Ignore the Dracula babble - the attraction, for me at least, is this "pre-industrial" (to quote the article) landscape. There is little sprawl, there are woods and green fields and hills and twisty mountain roads that snake through villages where people have mined for gold since the Romans. And incredibly hard-working, resilient, hospitable people.

Here's one of the local landmarks. "14th century," someone said - but who knows? It commands a splendid view of the village and its valley.