Romania: May 9-10, 2006

Flying into the “future” always takes a little adjusting. The body and mind begin to lag a bit with no sleep. But as we crossed several time zones on our way to visit Habitat’s Europe/Central Asia office in Budapest, I felt such an adjustment was little price to pay for the experience ahead. This trip concludes my “learning tour” of Habitat’s wide world, in which I have traveled with colleagues across the globe to gain a better understanding of both the need for and the impact of Habitat’s work. The collective experience has brought to me a new appreciation for the needs of poor families in our world, as well as for the deep compassion that resides in the hearts of people everywhere, no matter the language, politics, religion or geography. My European trip has proven no different.

If you’ve read my travel blogs or heard me speak about Habitat for more than five minutes, you know that building transformational communities is a vital goal that drives me personally and inspires the work of this organization. Our first field visit on this trip was to a community outside Bucharest, Romania, where I was once more profoundly struck by the importance of community—both its presence when it thrives and its void when it is absent.

Habitat’s area office Vice President Don Haszczyn met us in Bucharest, along with some of his staff from the ECA office and several national staff members from HFH Romania, including national director Adrian Ciorna.

From the airport we drove south straight to a community called Pitesti-Golesti, which was heavily impacted by flooding in 2005. We took a rather scenic route to get there, apart from the more heavily traveled freeway. It curved through rural communities where residents were carrying on with their normal days at the market or tending to whatever they had planted in the lush-green fields that stretched out as flat as the runway that delivered us to this historic and scenic country.

I always enjoy the chance to get out into the countryside and get a picture of everyday life in towns and villages.

We stopped in Golesti, where Habitat Romania has helped about 100 families recover from flooding. And what we quickly saw was that the homes where some of these families lived previously were wholly inadequate—wet or dry.

The roofs were crumbling, along with the foundations themselves, almost as if the entire structures were crouching lower and lower, feeble and hunched over. The houses sagged. They were old and weathered, and it was almost as if the only things propping them up had been the spirit and hope of those living within.

One such person was a warm, inviting woman named Victoria Pietrosanu, who said she had endured a difficult life, including a sustained grief for the 27-year-old son she had lost. She had lived in her former home for more than four decades, and she graciously showed us the place. The walls were cracked and filled with evidence of her repair work. Wiring was exposed, the ceiling very low, and the small wood stove was hardly a match for the extreme winters of Romania. “I kept a fire all day,” she said, “but I was still cold.” The house had been condemned by local authorities and was in danger of collapse any day.

Mere steps away, however, was her new home, at once a tangible mark of stability and a solid symbol of hope and renewal. It was clean. (And I don’t mean that the clothes and dishes were simply put away.) I mean it was free of dankness and mold on the walls and ceiling. It was free from the constant chill that seemed to permeate her former home.

There were wooden studs more assuredly holding the new place together, drywall and sufficient insulation to help enfold the heat comfortably around her in winter.

Victoria told me, “My new house is my new love.” Her smile was quick, her handshake firm and full of gratitude. Habitat in Romania had worked with Victoria and other families like her to help them claim and reclaim security in decent housing they can afford.

The size of Habitat houses in Romania varies between 21 square meters for studio apartments and 90 square meters for homes with large families. The average size is 65 square meters. The homes are typically wood-frame and cost around US$15,800 with an average monthly payment of about US$40 per month. Habitat for Humanity began in Romania in 1996 and has served more than 400 families through six affiliates across the country.

Like the lives of the Habitat families there, that country itself has gone through profound change.

Years of oppressive Ceausescu rule and a Soviet-style economy left Romania with an obsolete and inadequate industrial base. Creating and stabilizing a market economy has been difficult, and wages for working Romanian families have dropped by 40 percent. Coupled with the economic toll are the thousands of children orphaned under the previous communist regime.

Soviet-style apartment blocks are abundant throughout the country. A manifestation of the socialist notion that each family deserved the same (limited) housing space, they were constructed hurriedly and cheaply and stand now as forlorn relics of a bygone era. They’re crumbling, and while many are inhabited, having been sold cheaply to residents following the collapse of communism, many are abandoned as well. They’re grey and gloomy, the structural equivalent of a cloudy, motionless sky.

We visited one largely Roma community where families were living in such apartments, surviving daily in utterly desperate conditions. No water. No electricity. Garbage spread out thickly across the courtyards, its stench hovering on the breeze.

One family was gracious enough to welcome us into their home. We made our way up a dark, windowless, musty-smelling stairwell, entering the apartment block through a metal door, which opened into a hallway that housed about four apartments.

This family, including two small children, was destitute. Simple as that. They had no running water or place to bathe, little to eat and probably less hope that things would ever improve. The children didn’t stand a chance, I thought, of breaking out of the cycle of despair. As I dismally absorbed the sounds, smells and visuals around me, I thought that there must be a point at which housing and living conditions become so entirely wretched that it’s futile to discuss them in degrees of misery. Bob Pierce said, “Let our hearts be broken by the things that break the heart of God.” This must break God’s heart.

No one on earth, not a single one of God’s children anywhere, should ever have to live in arrangements anywhere close to what I found in this urban slum of Bucharest. And yet so many do. Every day. Every night. Every hour, minute and second.

What binds Habitat partners all over this planet, however, is the determination that conditions such as these are wholly and completely unacceptable. We simply will not tolerate the fact that our neighbors, our brothers, our sisters, are enduring such indescribable hardship. Yes, the challenge is overwhelming.

But with a shared resolve to make a difference, an abiding trust in God and a reliance on the commitment of partners everywhere, we can change—and are transforming—lives.

During my brief time in Romania, I encountered evidence of this as well. While there, we traveled to the community of Oarja, within sight of the smoke stacks, metal and concrete of a nearby industrial city. We visited some apartment flats, which during communist rule were built for farm workers but which had long since fallen into disrepair. Because the buildings are relatively close to the city, poor families had “squatted” in them so as to have some degree of access to jobs. But the buildings were unsafe and not suitable for habitation.

In the neighborhood that we visited, Habitat Romania is in the process of transforming the structures and the community into vibrant places to live. I was lucky enough to help break ground on a new renovation project here, laying a few bricks that would join many others to build stability and promise in this community—and in the families who reside here.

As the sun fell, along with the temperature and a slight drizzle, we celebrated with food and fellowship, joining Habitat for Humanity staff, local volunteers and the families themselves. I played basketball with the local children, and it was nice to envision the community that was emerging around me.

I was told that when Habitat first began work on these buildings, residents were somewhat skeptical about what was going on, but then as they learned more, they became more engaged in the process.

I was privileged to meet one Habitat family in particular and to visit their new home, which they had moved into less than two months ago. They were a young family—Nicolae Angelescu, his wife Ioana-Mariana and their two-year-old daughter Alexandra-Gabriela. Prior to moving into their new home, they had lived in a small 2x3 square meter apartment that was cold, damp and entirely inadequate. “It was terrible,” Nicolae told me quite simply. Young Alexandra-Gabriela had contracted pneumonia twice in their previous home.

Today, they live modestly in a clean apartment, paying one-quarter of what they used to pay in rent and occupying a space five times as large. “We just want to have our own roof on top of our heads,” Nicolae told me. “We just wanted our own shelter.”

Well, they have that now, and the joy in their hearts and on their faces clearly transcended any language barrier that existed between us.

It’s this kind of transformation that Habitat can and does bring to families in Romania, as true partnerships emerge, as decent, affordable shelter rises from the framework of long-forgotten block flats.

As I encounter destitute living conditions anywhere around the world, my heart is burdened with the notion of families enduring such hardships. Yet as I experience the work these families are undertaking in partnership with so many compassionate people, those burdens are tempered by a new hope, by renewed possibility that comes with a solid foundation, safe, secure, dry, warm, structurally sound.

I am uplifted by the work HFH Romania is doing, by the change that work is bringing to people. I know that the challenge is great, but I also have no doubt of the resolve Habitat puts forth to meet it.

I’m grateful for the contributions so many people make every day to further the important work of this organization. And I thank you for reading.