Sărbători Fericite – Or the Christmas Holidays Come to Bihor

Romania is said to be a poor country, at least in financial terms, and Romanians are, by their own admission, somewhat disorganized.  But neither trait was much in evidence during December as my fellow Bihorians got ready for Craiciun, the Romanian word for Christmas. This American visitor in their midst is delighted to observe variations on familiar customs – and the generosity of friends and neighbors here. As with Halloween, it is particularly intriguing to see how songs and symbols from “home” are given a Romanian accent. 

            At the end of November, Christmas decorations, cakes, and candies were abundant in the local stores – not much different than we would see in Target. In early December, lights began to adorn homes and town centers; the newer of the two Orthodox biserica in town held a colinda – the singing of Romanian carols. Groups of children and adults from neighboring villages performed, all dressed in traditional costumes -- women and young girls wear glorious black velvet vests and aprons over white eyelet skirts and blouses, all embroidered with flowers and sequins – a visual delight. The men wear white shirts and pants with decorative belts and sashes, black boots and black lambskin hats.

The next weekend, we had our first snow – only a few inches, but enough to suggest the season.  At school, one of my classes was reading a selection from Charles Dickens, which inspired me rather spontaneously to decide that my 10^th and 11^th graders should know something about “A Christmas Carol.” Vocabulary lessons for them; other sorts of instruction for me. No “Bah, Humbug!” here.

A group of high school girls were interested in teaching carols in English to younger children, as the start of a possible volunteer program. This, too, became a learning experience as much as whatever else it might turn into. The older girls were eager to do the tutoring, but by the time our lesson was to occur, the 7^th and 8^th graders had organized their own Christmas production, with some guidance from their truly gifted English teacher. One boy had written his own Christmas song, another delivered “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” with the innocent charm of an adolescent chess player, and two girls did “Twelve Days of Christmas” without missing one lord a’leeping.

A chorus dressed in Santa hats sang Romanian and American songs. Most popular are “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” “Feliz Navidad” – they prefer the Celine Dion version to that of Jose Feliciano – and of course “Jingle Bells.” As for our contributions, “Go Tell It on the Mountain” worked well because it is easy to learn; not so for “Away in a Manger.” Most of the younger children were able to follow along on “T’was the Night before Christmas” even if a lot of the vocabulary was over their rooftops.

After this celebration, I went to another at the middle school where a fellow volunteer teaches. Though the show got underway a half-hour late, the production was a delight – and at my friend’s suggestion, it even included a printed program. Though Romanians are fond of certificates for all sorts of things, programs are not part of the culture. The mix of songs – and students in Santa caps singing them – was similar to those at my school. But this one included a college-age dance group and a display of homemade baskets brimming with holiday foods.

When I listen to Romanian carols, I’m intrigued that so few tunes are familiar, but later that evening I had an opportunity to hear several hundred people join Romanian singing sensation Fuego in a few of their favorites. “Colindim, colindim iarna” – we sing, we sing, of winter -- has become one of mine, too. Before the concert – the first I’ve attended in Romania – some women were selling holiday items made by participants in program for disabled adults; this attractive and inexpensive collection was something else I’ve seldom seen in Romania.

On the actual first day of winter, the lovely snow we’d enjoyed all weekend was rained away –- but a Christmas celebration at my school kept holiday spirits high. One of our really well-organized colleagues had guided her 10^th graders to present a Power Point show of Christmas traditions from various European countries, complimented by actual performances from the cultures represented by our students: Hungarian, Slovak, and Romanian. Among the joys -- seeing many of my students dressed in sheepskin hats and jackets, or the sparkling embroidered vests and aprons, looking more like Romanians than, well, Americans, as they do at school.

That evening, the mayor’s office put on another celebration that included 20-odd eight-year olds learning to master traditional dances, all dressed in embroidery and lambskin. Their big brothers and sisters offered a highly-gymnastic (and slightly risqué) dance to “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” As usual, I was impressed by the talents displayed – without all the expensive facilities and instruction of American suburbanites, students here can perform on par with them. And, it’s usually American music they choose to sing, play, or dance to.   

Social customs and holiday entertaining, however, are strictly Romanian. In the week before Christmas, when I asked my students to say – English sentence, please! – what is special about Christmas, they all mentioned being at home with family. Whereas in the U.S., the holiday season involves various parties at work and among friends, the custom here is to observe the holiday with close family only. Though my school did have a Christmas meal (snitel and potato salad with hot mulled wine) for faculty on the last day of school, inviting friends to one’s home to share the holiday is not a Romanian custom. Part of this might be that homes are small and there are few “living rooms” as we know them – most of the living goes on in the kitchen – but the reasons are more rooted in the culture than in the architecture.

Many of my fellow volunteers attribute differences in such practices to communism --one needs to be careful what one says after too much polinka – but I’d argue that it goes back much further. Or, perhaps, that Americans are the exception here. We value interaction and cross-fertilization, the stimulation of new ideas and new people – one of the reasons we are fond of cocktail parties. While I have enjoyed many Romanian meals – some for 20 or 30 people – none have involved much milling about; instead, one sits at a table and talks with those one knows. Romanians value the familiar more than the novel, the comfort of family rather than the distraction of something new. It’s both a virtue and a liability.

My Christmas involved both American and Romanian practices. First, an invitation to a friend’s home to make sarmale – stuffed cabbage, labor intensive and de riguer for a holiday meal -- plus salata de boeuf (no beef, but peas and carrots and homemade mayonnaise), and one of the layer cakes Romanians are masters of (thin layers of cake, filled with cheese, cream, and jam). Then a Christmas Eve with my Romanian friends who lived in the U.S. for several years – and they were delighted to include in the invitation my fellow volunteer, along with her visiting husband and son. We ate, we talked, we walked – the polinka and a tour of a neighborhood biserica that’s being decorated by its talented priest were the chief elements that differentiated it from a holiday we might observe at home.

On Christmas Day itself, sans children to tend to, I slept late, until joining my Romanian friends for more talking and eating and walking. On the way home, we stopped at a relative’s home, where we were of course offered more polinka and wine, but then found ourselves involved in yet another bit of Americana. “Monopoly” has come to Romania (Piata Unirii, Boulevardul Regele Carol, etc.) and 10-year-old Mihai persuaded my friend and me to join him and his six-year-old cousin in a game.

Given the snail’s pace at which I can read Romanian and my friend’s reading glasses left at home, it was obvious the two boys would best us – a delight to watch them play. Though our adult conversations had involved whether Romanians could become competitive and organized enough to haul the nation out of its economic problems, the talent with which these boys went at acquiring property, collecting rents, and calculating how much they could afford gave me hope for Romania’s future prosperity.

Sărbători fericite şi la mulţi ani to all!

 

Community versus Productivity: Some Differences between Schools in Romania and the United States

In order to know what kind of schools you want to have,

you have to know what kind of government you want to have.

Attributed to Plato in The Republic

A truism among education historians is that the kind of schools a society has will determine the kind of government it will have, an insight usually credited to Plato. Extending that insight a bit to cover a nation’s economy, I rather wonder whether some sources of Romania’s economic difficulties are, in part, found in its schools.

            But before addressing that question, I must first say emphatically that the schools here also foster many of the country’s virtues. In addition to providing access to a sturdy academic education, Romanian schools encourage people to live together harmoniously.  I’ve also been impressed by what I’ll call a predominance of healthy personalities among students and teachers, or the absence of its inverse – self-destructive or belligerent behavior. In the United States, alas, we seem to have much more of the latter.

However, after year and a half of observing differences between the two systems, I’ve come to propose a dichotomy of sorts as a way to understand them. This I’ve termed community vs. productivity, with Romania is stronger on the former and the U.S. on the latter.

The U.S. has had the world’s most productive economy for a century or so, and that happened because our schools have encouraged the technical skills, innovative attitudes, and individual accomplishments that have made our productivity possible. On the other hand, we also have a higher proportion of our citizens in prison than any other industrialized nation.   

Unlike in U.S. schools, which remix students into different classroom groupings each year, Romanian children remain with the same group of students – and the same teacher – for grades one to four.  In grades five to eight, they also take classes with the same group of students, but they have a variety of teachers. In high schools, students select a “profile” – technology or literature, for example – and this determines their classmates, courses, and teachers for the next four years.

While this arrangement leads to an admirable sense of community among Romanian students – they not only know each other well, but assume a certain protectiveness toward each other -- it also has a downside. Students might find it difficult to “reinvent” themselves over a summer, and they do not have the stimulation of attending classes with a new group of students each year.  There is less cross-fertilization and less impetus for change.

Productivity – defined here as how much profit can (eventually) be made from each worker – may be a rather foreign concept in Romania. For one, the communist system spread the work around so that everyone had a job. But available equipment and school schedules also discourage productivity.

For example, Romanian schools – at least compared to those in the United States -- have limited equipment and technology. There are no science laboratories or workshops or art rooms; or at best they are inadequate to developing incipient scientists or mechanical engineers. The libraries have limited collections and students little time to visit them. A student with an idea – for a musical composition, a new software application, or some environmental improvement – would have little idea of where or how to start developing it.

Further, Romanian students, especially in high schools, take many more courses each year than do American students. A typical schedule might include an hour per week of biology, chemistry, and physics taken over three or more years, rather than one full year of each. Thus, it is more difficult for Romanian students to focus on one subject or carry a project through, both of which discourage the concentration needed for developing innovative ideas.

Social harmony rather than an entrepreneurial spirit is encouraged by other aspects of Romanian schools. For one, good students are motivated to provide the “right” answer rather than to pursue a distinctive line of thought. And they have little guilt about providing those answers to students who take their studies more casually. Though good “marks” are highly prized by many Romanian students, their U.S. counterparts are probably evaluated more on the basis of individual effort.

Further, neither written research reports nor vigorous classroom debate are part of high school courses.  Thoroughly studying a topic or engaging with the insights such a study might produce has surely germinated ideas that have led to inventions and scientific discoveries – every U.S. entrepreneur can usually tell a good story about some high school experience in which the “light went on.” But in Romania, those opportunities seem not to exist. And direct downloads from Wikipedia, etc., seems practiced more rampantly than in the United States; this provides another way to avoid the mental effort upon which invention and discovery depend.  

Despite this, Romanian students have extraordinary talents – a dance competition I saw last summer would rival any similar regional performance in the U.S. They also have a great sense of personal style – distinctive self-expression sans chains or purple hair, likely a by-product of the emotional security fostered in their classrooms.

Students in my school sing, play guitars, violins, and pianos; this despite there being no organized music program. The artwork hanging on the walls also displays great talent, yet there is little art instruction.  Students here are intellectually and culturally sophisticated – so much so that I frequently have to remind myself that I’m in a small town in northwestern Romania, not on Chicago’s North Shore.

They are also sufficiently computer savvy that they all know how to download a new movie – for free. But their visions of their future are more limited than their U.S. counterparts.  Aside from being forensic detectives (a career idea they’ve picked up from CSI, etc.), their aspirations don’t extend much beyond what they see their elders doing.

And I’ve yet to see signs that school leaders, elected officials, or the omnipresent media are giving much thought to this disjunction between talent and the means to put it to productive use.  Some of the wrenching self-analysis that so often dominates talk about schooling in the United States might be useful here. If Romania’s schools here are not encouraging the sort of society – government and economy – Romanians want to have, what changes can be made in them with available resources? 

10 idei care au influentat dezvoltarea sistemului de educatie american

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The Public Library as Capitalist Tool?

If you give people tools [and they use] their natural ability and curiosity, they will develop things in ways . . . very much beyond what you might have expected.

n  Bill Gates

One of the goals of the Gates Foundation-funded Biblionet project in Romania is that libraries rethink their role – from being simply repositories for books to being information centers for their communities.  But not until I had visited a few libraries did I realize the challenge that entails. However, if Gates is right – the comment above came from a web site offering quotes from famous people – his foundation’s library program could make the same contribution here that the Carnegie program did in the United States (see previous blog on this topic).

            Often, the local contribution towns are required to make in order to be eligible for a Biblionet grant involves construction – the library building must be spacious and secure enough to house the computer equipment it will receive. For some towns, this is a challenge. Last winter, I visited the library in a nearby community and found little more than two dreary rooms and nowhere to sit. Its shelves were filled with dusty volumes, most acquired over two decades ago when the government used libraries to encourage nationalism and disseminate propaganda. The librarian – actually a young woman whose chief credential was an interest in reading – had an office across the street in the town hall. People who want a book have to stop by her office first so she can unlock the library’s doors.

            But it has few patrons. As the librarian noted, if a neighborhood woman comes to check out a book, her neighbors might ask whether she felt she was too good to talk to them.

            Earlier, I had visited another, larger library in another nearby town. It had been a recipient of Biblionet grant, and had rebuilt its library to accommodate its new computers. I was there for the formal opening – a delightful event with many local officials and lots of good food -- and noted an inviting display of colorful new children’s books.     

            Over in the corner, though, was a relic of another time – a wooden card catalog. I soon learned that the library had neither an electronic catalog nor a computerized circulation system. And later I realized that the books themselves lacked call numbers. Hmm, I thought, perhaps brand new computers were butter for bread that hadn’t yet been baked.

            I’d not yet visited the library in my own town, a close-knit and welcoming community of 10,000 people, as it was in the process of renovation. But one afternoon last winter I had wandered over to the chilly room behind the primarie – town hall – where the librarians were then stationed with a hundred-odd books and little else. Except I was soon offered a warming mug of homegrown herbal tea, and we introduced ourselves using their halting English and my primitive Romanian.

            The Peace Corps encourages us to have secondary projects – teaching is my primary one – and having spent most of my career in the publishing business, offering my services to the library seemed a natural.  I had a grand scheme in mind -- one in-tune with Biblionet’s goal of helping libraries become community information centers.  I’d mentioned this to my Romanian friend attending library school in Illinois – and she’d replied with a marvelous You Tube video of a librarian in Ukraine exclaiming over how the local tomato crop had been improved through information she’d found on the web. Now that’s the idea, I thought.

            The backyard gardens in my area are marvelously productive – from strawberries in the spring to tomatoes and potatoes all summer long to luscious grapes for eating and wines in the fall. But the horticulture industry that, during communism, had flourished in the surrounding hills and valleys died quickly after the 1989 revolution.  Could some product development ideas discovered by a librarian here work the same magic as the one the librarian in Ukraine had found?

            But, ah, the complexities of getting such an idea off the ground. However, inspired by a conversation with the mayor in a nearby town – made possible by a bilingual friend – I thought of how local talent could be harnessed to create a web-based economic development center housed in a library.  Students comfortable with technology could assist their entrepreneurially minded elders in finding information about reenergizing horticulture and sheep-production – two industries apparently well suited to the climate and soil here. How do you find capital? How do you find new markets?

            During the long, dark Romanian winter, my imagination began to far outpace Romanian realities. Conversations with other friends here soon noted impediments to my ideas – the surrounding fields are divided into parcels too small for large-scale agriculture, there’s a disinclination for communal effort, the regulations are daunting, and there’s suspicion -- not wholly unfounded -- that someone else might profit from one’s efforts.

            As spring came, I downsized my dream. Then the library in my town reopened, and I began to appreciate its strengths and challenges: a delightful staff, space that’s a visual delight, shelves of recent books on contemporary topics, and an ample-sized room that houses computers from Biblionet. But there is no shelf of reference books – no business directories, compilations of associations, atlases, etc.  Of course, this information is available on the web – and no doubt the designers of the Biblionet project had this in mind when they decided to concentrate on technology and training.

            But as of now, no potential entrepreneurs are taking advantage of what the library might be able to do for them; the patrons I see there are mainly students – and mainly female, too. But I’ve been impressed by the librarians’ initiative – they were, for example, the first group of people in town to volunteer for the national cleanup day held this fall, they responded enthusiastically when a college student and I proposed that they might sponsor a career fair sometime this spring, and one of the librarians herself is showing an entrepreneurial spirit. Last fall, she found a package of ornamental squash seeds, regarded them with curiosity and planted them this spring, then discovered what a delightful product she has. This fall, their intriguing shapes decorated the library – and my classroom (one of my clever students called them mutant pumpkins). But I’d bet my librarian friend could charge a premium price for them in local markets.  

            Her curiosity and natural ability as a gardener, plus all the technology she is learning to use, might give her some entrepreneurial ideas. She can also concoct a delicious herbal tea from plants growing wild in neighboring fields. And if she wants to stick to the library, she has an equally talented – and entrepreneurial – neighbor.  She and her husband produce – for sale -- some of the best polinka – potent fruit brandy – I’ve had here. They also sell the wine they make from their abundant crop of grapes.

Both these women, in their 40s, are diligently teaching themselves English, as well as having jobs, raising teenagers, and doing energetic gardening. Who knows, given some of the tools the Gates Foundation has provided, what they might be able to develop? Bihor could become a brand name!