How Things Like This Begin
In March of 2001, I was in Bucharest, Romania, as the staff photographer for Women's Campaign International. WCI helps women in emerging democracies run for political office by offering training & networking opportunities. It also afforded me the opportunity to spend time in and around a unique and fascinating city.
Arrival
The flight is largely unremarkable, Philadelphia to Frankfurt, then Frankfurt to Bucharest. No sleep on the plane to Frankfurt, seats are too small, I'm too tall, that sort of thing. It's a miserable sleepless nine hours. The plane to Bucharest is more interesting as I'm sitting between a U.S. embassy staffer and the son of a Canadian diplomat. They warn me not to eat any meat or drink any milk while I'm here. "Your American bacteria and the Romanian bacteria -- when they meet, there will be a tussle," one of them tells me. None of the embassy staffers I meet seem to have a terribly high opinion of Jim Rosapepe, the American ambassador. "He drove around in a white van with Romania, America is listening painted on the side of it," the son of the Canadian diplomat tells me, "I'm sure he meant well, but the Romanians thought it meant he had the place bugged. They're still paranoid that way." At the very least, Rosapepe looks like a friendly goofball. The most interesting thing on the embassy Web page is a photograph of him looking somewhat silly hurling a fish like a lobbed bowling ball into a Romanian river which now has less cyanide in it than it once did. (Photo filched from the embassy web page at www.usembassy.ro). The American staffer I'm sitting next to laments that Rosapepe was not a diplomat, rather he was a F.O.B. ("Friend of Bill" he explains to me with a wink.) "I hope Colin Powell gets around to appointing someone new fairly quickly or the Romanians are going to get pissed."
Upon arriving in the hotel the bell hop practices his English on me while showing me my room (an entirely unnecessary event, since the floors and rooms are clearly labeled, but no amount of "I can find it myself" or "I can pour that water into that glass without any outside intervention, please thank you." seems to have any effect here.)
"You know," he says, "Dracula was from Romania.""He was from Transylvania," I say.
"Most Americans are very surprised when I tell them that Dracula was from here."
"What kind of Americans do you meet?" I want to know.
"Americans are usually known, ah, for their great ignorance of Europe."
Obviously, my peers have set a very low bar for me.
I call Ady, a techno DJ I'd met on MP3.com and tell him I'm in town -- he lives an hour from the hotel and I'm not sure how long I'll be able to stay awake. We make tentative plans for later in the week -- he'll take us out after work one night. I also call Yannis Katris, a Greek businessman who lives and works in Bucharest. I don't really know him at all, other than that we belong to the same international camera club and he'd e-mailed me saying "Drop me a line when you're in Bucharest."
"You're at the hotel now?" he says, "Fine, I am very nearby. I will pick you up in ten minutes. We will see what there is to see in Bucharest. Have you eaten?" I tell him that I haven't. My hit ratio for actually getting vegetarian meals on airline flights is pretty minimal. I've already begun to dig into my stash of left-wing granola bars."Very good," he says, "I will pick you up, we will pick up my wife at home, and we will take you out to eat. Some good Romanian food."
True to his word, Yannis shows up in ten minutes. I can tell who he is all the way across the parking lot by the silver Leica camera hanging around his neck.
"I am Yannis," he says, extending his hand, "you said you have a meeting in an hour and a half? Let us see what we can see then in that time!"We pile into his silver Volkswagen and drive through the streets of Bucharest, picking up his wife, Laura, at their posh condo directly across from the People's House (now renamed "Parlament House"). Many Romanians I talk to refer to it as "that big ugly building." Big it definitely is, but it certainly isn't ugly. I also heard people call it "Casa Nebunului" (which translates something like "fools house".)
Being a vegetarian in Romania is sort of like -- well, there's nothing to describe it. There are no vegetarian dishes perse, there are only dishes that by accident do not contain meat. One of these is baked spinach and cauliflower covered with cheese. I will spend a lot of time eating this in local restaurants. It's not bad, in fact, although it's quite heavy, it's very good. But basically, Romanian food is pork fried in hog fat garnished with bacon strips.
"One very good Romanian food is pig ears," Yannis tells me, "they just cut them off and eat them. You don't eat ears even?"I assure him that I don't.
I'm bouncing my head around the car looking at things, everything is so distinctly un-American. Even in Iceland I was able to look around and say "This looks like New England" or "This looks like Texas" -- I was able to find some bit of familiarity in everything, but not so here. This place is definitely different. Very different.
"It's good to have you here," says Yannis, "all this is new to you, it's like a picture, it's fresh. We've been here so long -- we don't see it anymore. Where shall we go?" I say I'd just like to photograph people. Anywhere. All these people are fascinatingly unique to me. Magical and distinctly un-American. Their clothes and manners, everything is new and different. "Just plop me down on any street corner and I'll be fine." I say."I know where we should go!" says Laura suddenly, "we should go to Calugareni, it's a town about 30 kilometers south of here, it's a peasant village, they buy and sell livestock, it's like a market. Nobody goes there from Bucharest. It's in the middle of nowhere, but it's very different from what you would see in the city."
"Ah, a very good idea!" chimes in Yannis, "we could even take portraits, we could bring a backdrop and a reflector, we could set up a studio outside. These people will think we are very very strange, but we could do that."
"It's settled then," says Laura, "Tomorrow we will meet you at seven in the morning and we will go to Calugareni."
I make it back to the hotel just in time for the meeting. I stand off to the side and try to be visible enough only to be seen, otherwise I am a camoflagued lizard in a tree waiting for the sun to set ...
South.
The hotel wake up call knocks me out of bed like a cattle prod -- it's some cross between a cheap car alarm, and an electric beheading. I dress hurriedly, excited from the newness of the place & from the crepuscular glow I can see across my balcony. Outside I look around. The sun is just coming up, the city is hazed in smog and golden light and it looks strange -- the architecture, the faces of the people, everything about this place is different. I eat a very quick breakfast in the hotel restaurant (the buffet spread is more art than food -- lots of little slices of meat folded into origami.) Yannis arrives, I pause briefly to photograph some stray dogs in front of the Presidential Palace while we wait for Laura to come downstairs, and we head out of Bucharest, on the road South, towards Bulgaria.
The dogs and the palace go together paw in paw, so to speak, so it's only natural to mention them together. When Ceausesceau began planning this giant building;--the zillion room mansion which dominates downtown Bucharest like a moored blimp -- in the early 1980's, he wanted to put it smack into prime real estate already occupied by some 1,500 of Bucharest's best and oldest buildings, not to mention 40,000 families. Being a dictator has it's advantages, one of which is that you don't really need anybody's permission to do something foolish. So he bulldozed the downtown (including some fine 18th century churches), sent 40,000 families packing, and started construction on his pyramid. The 40,000 newly homeless families had other things to be concerned about than their 3,000 or so pet dogs, so they were cast on the streets as well.
Laws in Romania at the time decreed that all Romanian women would have a minimum of four children -- after which they would be recognized as having done their duty to populate the state and permitted to use contraception. Romanian women were not great fans of this policy and legalized both contraception and abortion swiftly after the revolution. The dogs, however, were a sight more patriotic (not being able to read, nor to listen to Radio Free Europe for the skinny on what was actually going on) and continued to breed at an amazing pace, increasing their numbers to more than a quarter of a million by the year 2001.
These dogs are ubiquitous. They're on every corner, sleeping in every patch of light, running through the streets alone or in packs, doing the sorts of things that dogs do everywhere. Some of the packs of dogs have turned violent and stories of being bitten or attacked by a mob of dogs are not uncommon. The embassy staffer I sat next to on the plane from Frankfurt had a bruise on his thigh the size and shape of a baseball from a dog that took a fancy to his leg the week before.
Many of the locals take great delight in these dogs, treating them somewhat like large squirrel. They feed them, even tie kerchief's around some of their necks, but they usually draw short of bringing them inside. No more than an American would consider bringing a 60 pound squirrel inside. This is the way it is, this is where they belong.
So it's not unusual to see a ratty ugly dog totting along with five cute, but very filthy, puppies in tow to a park bench where someone's throwing them bread or dog biscuits. The mayor of Bucharest had recently decided to start killing the dogs, after so many attacks on the townspeople, but was thwarted early in the procedure by a public outcry lead by former French film bombshell and current dog fancier Bridget Bardot who flew to Bucharest to adopt three of the four legged gangsters and present the mayor with $150,000 to use in a "spay and release" program, Every Romanian I talked to had a strong feeling on one side of the issue or another.
The Road To Bulgaria Is Paved With Dead Dogs
The road to Bulgaria looks like this: vast empty plain, vast empty plain vast empty plain, dead dog, vast empty plain, dead dog, horse and wagon, dead dog, huge abandoned concrete structure that could hold five shopping malls and looks like the sort of place where rockets may have been assembled, vast empty plain, dead dog, horse cart parked on side of the road with gutted pigs hanging from it, vast empty plain, dead dog, dead dog, vast empty plain, enormous unfinished canal, started in the 1980's to bring water to one of the five CANDU nuclear reactors Nicolai Ceausesceau began to build and like everything else, no one worked a dot more after the day he died, dead dog, vast empty plain.....
We pull over into the village of Calugareni, about 30 kilometers from the Bulgarian border (as an American, I wouldn't be allowed to cross into Bulgaria without a visa -- that might be for the best). The village, the sight of a famous battle with the Turks in 1595, is weird weird weird. We are completely invisible with our motor car and our fancy city clothes and our cameras. Men in fur hats straight out of National Geographic stand next to carts looking right through us while hunched backed toothless women hawk garlic and chickens in a cloud of smoke billowing from fifty grills charring globs of pork fat.
This is how pigs die
About 30 minutes after we get there, we hear a terrible screaming, like men on fire. At the source of the sound, two men are trying to pull a 300 pound pig out of a cage. One is yanking on it by a wire wrapped around it's upper jaw, the other has it by the tail. It is crystal clear that the pig does not want to get out. Around them are more cages with more pigs, all of whom are getting increasingly agitated by all the pig-screaming going on. Finally, the men, assisted by two others, drag the pig out and onto the ground. They push it over on its side and it flops like a dying fish trying to right itself and escape. Suddenly and without warning one of these men pulls out a huge knife and starts stabbing the pig in the neck, blood squirts everywhere, maybe a foot horizontally in a red stream like water from a cut garden hose.
It thrashes with completely renewed energy, blood flecks hit me in the face and dot my clothes. While this is going on, every pig who can see what's happening starts absolutely freaking out -- screaming and banging into the sides of their cages trying to get out. It's so loud I have to cover my ears. The man with the knife keeps stabbing but his pig won't die. Finally, he reaches a hand in through the hole he's made in it's neck and rips out it's esophagus. The screaming stops, but now there are gasping sounds for the next ten minutes before its eyes finally close and the men get up off of it. They grab it by the legs and toss it into the back of a wagon.
This is a dance that's repeated a dozen times in the next hour and a half. (Concerned with the outbreak of hoof and mouth in europe, U.S. Customs will be so concerned by my photos that they disinfect me with chlorine.)
We move through the market and Yannis is photographing everybody -- he has this great photographers personality -- something that I really need to work on myself. I don't know a word that he's speaking, but I understand completely everything he's saying, it doesn't matter that the words are Romanian, the tone is universal. It goes something like this:
"Madam! You are beautiful! You have such a face! I would cut my throat if I went home without photographing that face! Oh my! Stand for me, right here! And your friend! Your beautiful sister! Your mother you say?! You take me for a fool! She is so young! Very well! Your mother then! Two beautiful ladies right here! What will I do! Now show me your basket of eggs! You are so wonderful! You are a star! I would kiss you were not your strong handsome husband standing right here!"Everybody loves Yannis. No one can refuse him a photograph, they laugh, they smile, they insist upon hugging him after he has photographed them. He's made their lives a little better today -- and to top it off, he's more than twice the photographer I'll ever be. Men run in front of him shouting "Pose! Pose!" ("Photograph! Photograph!") I'm amazed at the way he can go up to people, grab them by the shoulders, "Place your bicycle this way, sir, now stand here and hold the chicken as you were just doing!" and they love it.
By far the most spectacular DIE livestock operation, however, was the one run between 1958 and 1965 smuggling live, uncastrated Danish Landrace pigs out of Denmark.... The white, op-eared Landrace pig found in Central and Eastern Europe had been transformed in Denmark into a superior hog by selective breeding ... extremely high prices [were maintained] by strictly prohibiting the export of Landrace pigs for breeding. Over a period of seven years, however, the DIE smuggled thousands of piglets out of Denmark. They were anesthetized and transported, first in diplomatic automobiles, then in special diplomatic pouches, and finally in large TIR trucks protected by diplomatic seals. Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa, Red Horizons, p. 75
Hello From The Gutter: Bucharest's Street Kids
I want to find some of Bucharest's 5,000 street kids. Later I run into heavy opposition from many of the Romanian women I meet at the conference when I mention that I want to do a photo essay on the street orphans. The prevailing attitude is that it's a hoax -- that these kids are neither homeless, nor orphans, nor even hungry, for the most part. That they are the products of lazy parents who dress them in rags and send them out into the streets begging. Later, I will discover that some of this is indeed true, though only in the most tangential ways and that the real picture is even bigger and uglier and more complex than I had initially thought.
The kids I meet outside the presidential palace are very young, the oldest is only about ten. They live and interact with the 200,000 stray dogs in the city, a result of the 40,000 families made homeless when their houses were demolished to make way for the presidential palace. I can't seem to make any inroads with these kids though -- they're probably too young and I don't have an unlimited amount of time. They know three English words "money!" and "so hungry!" Myself, I only know four Romanian words, "bun" (good), "multumesc" (thanks), "va rog" (please), and "nu!" (no). So the only real conversation we're able to have goes like this:
"Money?""Nai."
"So hungry!"
"Nai!"
Though it's obvious looking at them they're not exactly hungry. They have their pockets stuffed with loaves of bread which I've been watching them feed to stray dogs for the last twenty minutes. But, as the old saying goes,when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Also, you probably don't get a lot of money out of tourists holding up an empty plastic sack, presenting a pathetic face and crying "I need money for glue!" Huffing is a serious problem among street kids, nearly all of whom are inhaling the noxious fumes of a metallic paint called aurolac to get high. The paint is part of a Romanian tradition, ironically it's used to paint the halos of religious icons. Attempts to make it illegal to sell aurolac to children in recent years have been surprisingly difficult. Before I go I pass out a couple hundred thousand lei and the kids run around laughing like they've just taken me to the cleaners.
I get back to the hotel later in the day to find that the rest of the group went on a tour of the peasant museum.
"Shortly after Romanian aviation pioneer Henry Coanda puzzled crowds with his new propellerless aircraft, he wheeled his invention onto the Issy-les-Molineaux plain and startled even himself by making the first ever air-reactive, or jet propulsion, flight. Coanda had only intended to test his aircraft engine, but he gained enough speed so that the aircraft left the ground, making history before crash-landing and bursting into flames." "Welcome to Bucharest: Guest Information" p. 52
At Work
The jet lag and my crazy work/work schedule makes me freakishly tired at strange times, and it might be all the running around, and it might be all the weird things like watching pigs get stabbed with butcher knives, but it seems like it's been a Very Long Time since I've been anywhere other than Romania and like it's been a Very Long Time since I actually had to do something.A shot to the head
I'm shooting for Women's Campaign International, upon whose dime I'm currently in Bucharest.
WCI asked me to come along to Bucharest to photograph their conference "New Voices: Women In Politics" held here the 9th through the 16th of March, 2001. WCI is an outreach group that works with USAID to train women in emerging democracies how to run for political office. As a proud member of the feminist-conspiracy, I'm happy to do any little bit I can to support their Good Work. That means I'm here shooting talking heads behind microphones; like this:
Out on the town
Georgiana and Maria, two women who work at the hotel, have fallen head over heels for Cuffe Biden-Owens, who looks a lot like he should be in the Wallflowers. He's the son of one of the trainers and is currently visiting us from Italy. He's got this suave charm and a disarming smile that make him the center of attention whether he wants it or not, he could probably have a seizure from all the eyelids batting at him. The women invite him out to some Bucharest bars. He, in turn, invites everybody else to tag along and so nine of us leave in three taxi's. We go first to Cuando, a red, underground puffy cushioned trendy cellar bar where we drink shots of tuica and Tuborg beer. Tuica, the national firewater, is a brandy made out of plumbs, often you find it in fancy bottles with a full sized pear bobbleing around in it. A bunch of students are with us -- Dana & Ran, as well as Adrianne, a guy who works at the hotel. The Romanians produce massive numbers of cigarettes and begin to smoke like kerosene fires. At about midnight, Alison gets up to leave, the students follow her like ducks in tow. I make an attempt to bring up the end but Maria grabs me by the arm -- "You should stay! Don't leave yet!" So I stay. More tuica, more Tuborg, and at about 2:00 we leave Cuando for another bar called Actors.
Actors is actually a cooler looking bar than Cuando. It too is in a basement, but instead of looking like the Devil's waiting room, Actors looks like a cave. It's nearly empty when we get there and the bartender says something in Romanian. This translates into, Maria tells us, "He wants to go home because it is late so he will close up the bar. We will go to someplace other than this." So out the door, into the strange Bucharest night of cobblestones and Dascha Taxi's.This is a strange city -- it's a grey city, completely grey, the buildings are grey, the people are grey, it's filled with stray dogs, they're grey too. The grey people never smile, I never see anyone playing with their children. It's a city that has different priorities from an American city, which is what makes it seem so strange. There are so many partially completed buildings like ghosts, leaning over top of everything, you can still see Ceausesceau everywhere in the rusting construction equipment and mad projects left to decay in the sun and rain. This is also a post-revolutionary city, its citizens are living in the haze of taking someone out back and pumping him full of holes -- that has to change your perspective on things, it's a very extreme form of impechement. It's also a city that's seen it's last election usurped. The young people are disenfranchised. I ask Maria if she voted, "Yes, in the first election, but after we were down to two candidates, Illesceau and ultra-nationalist Corneliu Vadim Tudor, why bother? Illesceau? why bother?" On the other hand, this is a capitol city in Europe with fashion and entertainment -- it really is the Paris of the Third World. The dichotomy of money/no-money is extremely noticeable. The average monthly salary for a university professor here is $130 a month, fully 100 times less than a starting tenured faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania can make. The Crowne Plaza Hotel, where we're staying is $260/night and it costs $8 to have the hotel laundry wash two pairs of socks. (Something Mark Mezvenski found out the hard way.)
I've been washing my clothes in the tub and drying them in the pants press. I'm clever that way.
Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa, Red Horizons, p. 65
A drink at the hotel bar is about $7 though our bill at Terminus was about 600,000 lei for five of us ($24, which Cuffe and I tried to pay ourselves explaining that it was really a trivial amount of money for us due to favorable exchange rates, but Georgiana and Maria insisted on paying half.)
"What do you do?" I ask Georgiana."Do? I work in the hotel."
"But that's not what you do -- you don't want to spend the rest of your life in the hotel do you?"
"Ah yes, I see what you are saying. I have a ... degree ... in Economics ... from the university. I am working at the hotel to improve my English ... and my French. For three years now I have worked there."
The balcony of the Party Headquarters where Ceausesecau gave his last speech on December 21, 1989. 8 minutes into the speech, which was fabricated as a pro-government demonstration, word got through to the assembled crowd that the military was backing anti-Ceausesceau demonstrators in Timisoara (pronounced "Timishoara"), where the revolution was starting. Soon the crowd began to chant "Timisoara! Timisoara!" Ceauseseceau looked shocked and t.v. censors pulled the plug on the broadcast. Nicolai and Elena retreated into the building and made the fatal mistake of waiting until the next morning to try and escape. They were captured, four days later they were convicted of crimes against humanity in a trial that lasted twenty minutes. With a justice reserved for dictators, they were taken to the nearest wall and riddled with bullets minutes later.
We passed the balcony at about 3:00 in the morning while leaving Terminus for a bar called Actors. It's not far from our hotel. Maria said "I've never been out in Bucharest at this time of the morning, you are turning me into a Bad Girl." I didn't mention that I'd tried to go home at midnight to leave them alone with Cuffe and they wouldn't let me.
We get back at 5:30 in the morning. I schedule a wakeup call for 7:30 to be at the conference in time. I'm eating diet pills like candy now.
Head full of cotton
Can a body be this tired? I briefly wonder what time it is in Philadelphia but quickly wring the thought from my head.With 1 and 1/2 hours of sleep I crawl out of bed for the conference, greatful for once that it's in the same hotel I'm staying in.
Every time there's a break, I run upstairs and take a nap, calling down to the front desk for a wakeup call in 15 minutes. They no doubt think I'm a lunatic. At lunch I get to sleep for a marvelous hour. I find it impossible to eat lunch with the group in any event -- Romanians smoke everywhere and they smoke all the time. The natural state of a Romanian is smoking a cigarette and talking on a cell phone. Any time this practice is interrupted in the least, they get antsy. They smoke in restaurants, they smoke in shopping malls, they smoke on airplanes, and though I have not observed it personally, I can only assume that they smoke in church too. Consequently, when 150 Romanian women descend on the hotel restaurant for lunch, they light about 140 cigarettes -- then about 2 minutes go by and the 10 remaining women either find, buy, or borrow the cigarettes they neglected to light in synch with the team.During one of the breaks, I meet up with Sue Bates, who runs Inasmuch, a Christian relief organization that works with Romania's homeless kids. I'd seen her on television when I was in Iceland last year and gave her a call when I heard I was coming with Romania. I was hoping I'd be able to give her the opportunity to meet with some women Romanian politicians and talk about some of the problems facing her, trying to run two orphanages in Bucharest and a leper colony in Moldova. But it seems I can't really find a Romanian politician who wants to do anything other than smoke and eat finger foods and it's somewhat obvious Sue's not in her element here among the smart suits, miniskirts and three-inch heels.
There's also a powerful racism at work here. Two men in a bar dismiss the orphans outright saying simply they're gypsy's with a wave of a hand, can't you tell by the way they look? They do this to themselves. When I try and explain that saying someone looked like a gypsy in America isn't an insult and, in fact, many people might take it as a complement, one of them gets angry. Don't even say that, he says, you joke about someone looking like a gypsy here, you're going to get into a fight. Your best friend would walk away from you forever for making a joke like that.
I walk Sue to her car, she says she'll send someone for me at 8:00 tonight. "You could go during the day, but if you do, they're all out begging. At night they're all at home in the canals."
The conference ends at 5:00 and I go to sleep until 7:30 when I meet Ioan Nica, Sue's Romanian administrator, in the lobby. Yannis and Laura show up directly and we leave for Central Station, where the bulk of the street kids live and work.
In the car I try to pump Ioan for the story of the revolution.
"I was here, of course, in Bucharest. We heard that the troops were supporting the demonstrators in Timosaura. I was happy at the time. There were people in the streets, day and night there was a feeling about. I didn't stay out too late at night, I went home. I don't think they should have killed Ceausesceau though, that was wrong. Nobody asked me. They weren't acting for me when they did that. There were some things that he did right -- these homeless kids, they weren't there during Ceausesceau. One thing he did, he could not stand to see anybody without a job, so everybody had a job. You might not like your job, but everybody was employed. Now, we have 11% unemployment. These kids showed up right after the revolution."Later I meet up with some women while visiting Ceausesceau's grave and find out that he was indeed not universally reviled as I'd thought. A contingency of women in their 50's are holding court there, lighting candles, praying and weeping like babies while walking back and forth between Nicolai and Elena's graves (separated, ironically, finally in death). My French is pretty good when I'm talking to myself in a mirror, but in practice, conversing with someone with a full vocabulary, I find myself sorely lacking and it's like pulling my own teeth to talk to them. I have to keep rephrasing my understanding of what they'd said and they'd either tell me that I had it right or they'd try again.
"They never respected Elena," one of them tells me, "they treated her badly, and they killed her, and they killed him, and now we have no jobs and we have no money and our country is no good."Many of these children were the progeny of Ceausesceau's own population plans -- with laws outlawing contraception and abortion and forcing women to have at least four children, Ceausesceau hoped to populate Romania. Unfortunately, the economy to support the accelerated growth never materialized and in a mad dash to save the economy, somebody started adding zeroes to the money, the bottom fell out of everything and 5,000 kids ended up living in sewers under Bucharest.
Notes From The Underground: Bucharest's Street Kids
It's eight o'clock at night and I had no idea how absolutely unprepared I was for meeting these kids. There's nothing really that you can do to prepare for it short of surviving a war.
"Take your money out of your pockets, leave your jewelry somewhere else. These kids are thieves, every one of them. They'll rob you blind and they'll pick your pockets before you know it."We get out of the cars, Sue carrying a big bag of bread loaves and a giant salami -- something's no doubt become of all those pigs I saw go down on Saturday. Within a couple seconds the first kid materializes, running up shouting "Mamma Sue! Mamma Sue!" and throwing his arms around her. I mistake her for a 10 year old boy, but later Sue tells me it's actually a girl about 15, named Gabrielle. "She was pregnant last year, but they caught her and induced labor." Which I don't realize until much later probably means "they" (whoever that is) aborted her baby. Gabrielle speaks English, reads some even. She shakes my hand and says "I'm Gabrelle." Within half a minute, fifty children had appeared, coming from all directions. They hug Sue, they fall on the ground in front of her, they kiss her hand, everyone's shouting "Mamma Sue! Mamma Sue!" They treat this woman like a Saint, she's the only light they have, the only person who's cared to even talk to them. In the crowd I can feel hands all over me, half a dozen kids are trying to put their hands in my pockets, which is really freaking me out. One of them finds about 200,000 lei in small bills through the fabric of my pants and I have to keep pushing him away, but he comes back, staring blankly at me and saying "You give me" -- which is better English than my Romanian. I'm constantly brushing hands away, kids everywhere, it's extraordinarily confusing -- like I'm in the ocean, being carried away from shore by the tides, I keep looking up to make sure the others are still around. I see a woman shove a baby an inch from Lincoln's face with one hand and reach for his pocket with the other. Then a flash goes off -- I look away and it's Yannis -- doing the Yannis thing:
"All right! The two of you, right here! Ah! beautiful! You should give up this life and become models! And you! What a great looking kid you are! Yes, you are fabulous! Now the two of you, right there! Ah! what a fantastic photograph! Soon now we shall all be famous!"And the kids are enjoying themselves. It's like someone shaking me awake, suddenly there's noise and motion where before I was standing in a dazed silence. I start shooting too and the place goes nuts, suddenly, like a door slamming. It's like trying to take pictures while slathered in bacon grease and left in a swamp for the mosquitoes, I'm shooting with one hand and pulling hands out of my pockets with the other. It's some sort of circus pandemonium. I'm reminded of a pond of koi coming to the surface for food. We're the center of attention, they're curious, they also see opportunity, and, like any teenagers, they want to be important.
One of the important lessons that photography has taught me is that everybody wants to be recognized, everybody wants to feel like they're important, everybody has some story that they want people to be interested in. Whether the story is I built this vast empire with my bare hands! Or their story is simply I live, I breathe -- photography has given me a reason and an opportunity to be the person listening.
There's a fierce jealousy between the kids -- severe competition for attention, they all want to talk to me, they all want to be the one who sits next to me, they push one another out of the way, they all want me to follow them somewhere where one by one they want me to give them my watch, my wedding ring, something.
And as day's go by, it gets easier. Some of my novelty wears off and I start to fit in. Wondering how much of this I'll be able to do, how long can I keep up not sleeping and staying out all night. The lack of rest is painful, but I'm driven by knowing that I'll miss too much.
Later, looking at the digital photos on a laptop, Georgiana says "It's sad. They are nice pictures and they are very sad. It's sad too that you will take these back to America and show people these horrible things about Romania." But it's not a horrible thing about Romania. The fact that Sue and Ron are there, that people are trying to help, makes it a beautiful thing about Romania. The fact that a problem exists isn't in and of itself an enditement, the search for a solution is a salvation.
Ron and Sue Bates saw photos of the Romanian street children on television right after the revolution and decided they had to do something. They sold their house in Texas and moved here to work full time trying to help. They've never been back and never intend to....Later Sue introduces me to "The Four Star Canal" where a group of about 12 kids have moved away from Central Station to live on their own. About two kilometers away, they live in a storm sewer at the Brancoveanu subway stop, in the parking lot of a McDonalds. Whereas the kids at Central Station are little more than a mob, the residents of the Four Star are something different -- a family. Headed by Cola and his wife Daniella, everybody has a place, be it brother, sister, uncle or child. The kids at the Four Star function as a family, although none of them are related, they watch out for each other, they share food and clothes, rather than preying upon one another, which is the rule at Central Station.
With her dark complexion, and really genuine smile, my friend Lipika's a big hit with all the kids. "They think she's a Gypsy," Nica says, "like them." Everybody wants to stand next to Lipika, they'll grab her around the neck and wave at me, "Pose! Pose!" I oblige. Lipika doesn't seem to mind the attention.Though these kids living in the Four Star Sewer are on the whole a lot cleaner than your average kid living in a sewer, there is a range cleanliness within their group. I suspect it has something to do with how much they're huffing. Some of them. especially the ones we met at Central Station are constantly stoned and act like zombies.
"We're working on a booklet about Aurolac that we're going to give to parliament," Sue tells me, "It's so easy to get, and there are no laws against selling it to children."At the Four Star, evidence of aurolac isn't as pronounced -- though one of the kids, Marcel, who always wears pajamas in the hopes that people will think he just got out of the hospital, is huffing every time we meet. I can't understand a word he says. He's prone to pulling his lip up to show me that he's missing his two front teeth, then he'll laugh and often burst into song, slurring his words with his eyes half open, his arms raised up in the air (this actually isn't an uncommon practice among those who are huffing, starting at about 10 at night Central Station sounds like a bar letting out). Most everyone else is a lot better off. Daniela and Cola are, figuratively, mother and father to all the kids. Cola, who's real name is Florin, is twenty-five. He's been at the Four Star for twelve years now. Daniela's probably somewhere between 19 and 22. At the moment, she's six months pregnant, eagerly she lifts up her shirt to show me her baby, rubbing her hand across her stomach. She and Cola have one real child already, a year and a half old. Until last month, he was staying in Sue's orphanage when Child Protective Services took him away saying that Inasmuch didn't have the proper license. They're not sure where it is now though Sue thinks they'll probably be able to get it back after the right person is found and bribed. Such is the way the wheels turn in Romania. And to be truthful, the position of Child Protective Services isn't exactly unwarranted -- it's not uncommon for people here to sell their children to rich American or English families for ten, twenty or even thirty thousand dollars. CPS is caught on the cusp of wanting to end the sale of children and wanting a piece of the action for themselves.
Sue says, "If you want, the kids will show you where they live. I just want to tell you right now, you don't have to go. Nobody's going to make you -- but you'll be safe if you do go with them." Then she leaves us to our new friends.
The sewers run for miles under the city. I won't lie, the thought of climbing down is terrifying, but I figure I've gone this far, now's not the time to wimp out. Besides, I've already been pawed, picked clean, and ultimately accepted by a rough crowd of glue-fueled zombies -- what's crawling into the safest sewer in town with some homeless kids I already know?)
Once inside, the thing that strikes me most, after the pretty nasty odor, is how clean it actually is. The kids all have their own beds, which they'd constructed themselves. The crazy thing about the beds is that they're all made with covers neatly tucked beneath pillows. My bed at home isn't made. I've even been leaving the "do not disturb" sign on my door at the hotel so that no one would make my bed here in Bucharest. These kids have their clothes folded and their cooking utensils stowed away in neat little rows. They use candles to see underground and about ten of them light the place up pretty well. We sit down there and talk for a long time and then they take us to see their shower, which they are consumately proud of -- it's an exit pipe in the water main about half a kilometer away from their main room -- to get to it you have to climb over a huge pipe, about six feet tall, and then crawl through some very tight places. Access to water to wash with is one of the things that keeps them apart from the mass of really filthy kids at Central Station and seems to be one of the things that keeps them sane -- knowing that although they're living on the street, they're not uncivilized.
Julian's about ten years old. He's been living in the sewer for two years. His mother's an alcoholic and was physically abusing him. He says he's doing a lot better here without her. He speaks excellent English, almost without an accent (though he's never heard the word "flash light" and I can't think of any way to describe it.) I talk with him for a long time. While we're walking he asks if I'll come back, I say I will, but that I'm leaving for good eventually and I probably wouldn't see him after that. I promise him that I'll raise some money for Mamma Sue when I get back to the States. He asks me if I'm a rock star. I tell him that just my hair is.
"You're going back to your wife and your house and your car."
"Yeah."
"To your kids."
"No kids."
"Your dog."
"Cat."
"Heh. A cat. Yes, back to your world that is so far away from this one. And it's bye-bye kids and you won't think of me anymore, but I'll be thinking of you."I ask him if he wants anything when I come back.
"Shoes. I'd really like some shoes."
Later, when I leave he calls after me: "Kyle! ... I love you man, I really do. Don't you forget me when you're back in your world with your cat and your house."
From the crazy palace in the clouds to this weird burning hole in a McDonalds parking lot, Bucharest is really a fairy town populated by the most incredible people. It's unbelievable. I never thought I could possibly like it as much as I do. It's an absolutely different world, there is no common point of reference here -- without a doubt, it is the strangest place I've ever seen -- and I'm including Texas in there. We get back to the hotel and we're all too excited to sleep. Rather than hang around that depressing castle, we head out to an all night restaurant. As the conference winds down, people start to leave. I don't want to go, I've been transformed by something powerful that I don't understand yet and I'm afraid I'll lose it if I go.
Another effect that it's had is that I absolutely reek of the underground -- a smell of wet and stale bodies compacted together in high heat. One of the girls, Flora, 19 or 20 years old, told me that she used to be in an orphanage, she had a job, but she had to leave the orphanage at age 18 and move back to the Four Star, despite the shower and their best efforts, she wasn't able to shake the smell of the sewer and lost her job.
As my time in Romania runs out Yannis and Laura take me out and bid me farewell. It's a sad parting for me, but they seem so cheerful. I take a taxi back to the hotel, the cab driver rips me off for 25,000 lei and drives away laughing with the passenger door open. One of the bell boys runs after him shouting in Romanian with a fist in the air, but I can hardly begrudge a working guy 90 cents.
The end of things
The conference ends on a Wednesday and there is a tint of sadness in the air between the Romanian women and the American women who have been arm-in-arm head-in-smoke with them. There's lots of hugging and running around to find someone who speaks both Romanian and English so someone can pass along a second hand goodbye to a special friend they've known only as a voice in a pair of simultanieously translated headphones. I take a group photo outside. Lucky Strike's are produced, everybody lights up.
Tonight we're going to the American Ambassador's residence where each of the Romanians will be presented with a certificate. The American Ambassador, Jim Rosapepe, doesn't live in the Ambassador's residence anymore, he left last month. In fact, no one lives in the Ambassador's residence; Rosapepe also took all the art off the walls with him. So it's just a big empty house with bare walls and a half-empty indoor swimming pool and a bunch of guards with machine guns standing outside.
Susan R.Johnston, until very recently Deputy Head of Mission, but now, Charge d’Affairs (as close to an ambassador as we have until George W. Bush and Colin Powell get around to appointing someone), the highest ranking American Diplomat in country, greets us at the embassy. We eat little quiches and drink warm soda. No one in this country has yet taken to the idea of putting ice in drinks. They look at you funny when you ask. Ms. Johnston is a small woman. But she stands on a box and thanks the women for coming, and expresses the need for more women in politics, especially in places like Romania.
New Bucharest
On the northeast outskirts of the town lies New Bucharest (Bucurestii Noi), a people's theater built in the 1960's, during the height of the communist era. Since that time, it's fallen apart like a Greek ruin and it lies, mostly forgotten it seems, at the back of a long park and garden. In the warm spring weather, the park is filled with people -- kids sitting on benches or rollerblading, playing cards, guitars, old people walk arm in arm, mothers walk with toddlers. At the front steps of the theater someone has set up two of the most unsafe looking carnival rides I've ever seen -- as decrepitious as the structure itself. In fact, until they were started up and creaked into rusty motion, I thought they had been abandoned with the theater. But no; they have not. To one side of the theater is a shooting gallery, festooned with paintings of cowboys where for some amount of lei, you can shoot an air rifle at a target. If there are prizes to be won, I don't see them.
New Bucharest is a perfect synecoche for this city. Huge, beautiful, and forgotten of its original purpose, people living in the shell without contemplating a repair. It's as though Atlantis has been discovered and there are people living in it, oblivious to what it once was.But now, in some slight way even, America is colliding with Romania in the manner in which America will collide into everything eventually. Smelling money or opportunity, first we send Baywatch followed by cigarettes and then a spate of Hollywood movies like Runaway Bride. Pretty soon the revolution's over and the prisoners are lining themselves up against the walls to buy FILA t-shirts and Zippo lighters. Then we ship over a bunch of businessmen who construct a factory which makes Chevy Blazers, employ a bunch of cheap labor and start churning out the American dream. When an American sees a place like New Bucharest, the first thing they think of is "how can I get that cheap?" followed by "how can I sell it back to them at an absurd profit?"
I've been blasting Taxi, a Romanian Grunge-Pop band, in my hotel room since I arrived. Half hoping to annoy some American businessman and his high-class escort in the next room but as it turns out, the rooms on either side of me are empty anyway.
"You know Taxi?!" asks Georgiana, "They're from Bucharest.""I love Taxi."
And I do. They're infectious. Of course, I have no idea what they're saying. Which is enough to kill an album in the states. In Romania, they pretty much listen to whatever we listen to in the U.S. Every time I turn on a radio I hear Madonna singing "American Pie", I never hear anyone singing in Romanian.
You Can't Take It With You
One thing that I find consumately strange about this place is the penchant for shopping for coffins along the side of the road. It's not unusual at all to find a kiosk stuck in front of a cemetery selling caskets, with a dozen samples propped up against a wall. Wanting to diversify, there's one Servicii Funerare in the south part of town that's also an autobody repair and a rug store. There's a place you have to visit at least once.
Nowhere is the coffin hawking more popular than outside of the cemetery where Nicolai and Elena Ceausesceau are buried. Not just caskets, but incense, candles, and candle holders line the exterior walls and helpful sales people will fit you to the right coffin for you or your loved one.
Initially, Nicolai and Elena were buried under pseudonyms. A few years later, for reasons unknown to me, their graves were marked.
It's safe to say that during her lifetime, not many people genuinely liked Elena Ceausesceau. In the 1970's after meeting Juan Perone's second wife, Elena was bitten by the bug to become an intellectual. The difficult way to become an intellectual is to study. The easy way; when you're the wife of the dictator; is to hire people to be intellectual for you. And so Elena employed a staff of scientists who wrote chemestry papers day and night and published them under her name in journals throughout the world. Her cleverest scheme however, was sending her team out researching Western patent applications for useful discoveries, then forging paperwork to back-date a Romanian patent on the invention and taking credit for it when the Western application was "noticed". She was quick to become enraged and absolutely despised the peasant class, strange, as she was, herself, largely illiterate. She also had a habit of making outrageous demands. When the Ceausescu's were touring America in 1976 she expected to be presented with lavish gifts at various intervals throughout the tour -- she expected, for example, electronics manufacturer Texas Instruments to present her with a mink coat when she toured their facility. She was livid when this didn't happen. She once threw a tantrum when King Hussen of Jordan refused to give her a yacht belonging to his wife, Queen Nir. When Hussein had an identical boat built and shipped to Mrs. Ceausescu, it sat lonley in a dock for years. She never went to lay eyes upon it.
Nicolai's penchants were less petty, but not less nefarious. He was more interested in power, espionage, disinformation, and assissanation. When protesters ringed his hotel in America, the furious dictator called Jimmy Carter and demanded that they be killed. Carter deferred to New York mayor Ed Kotch who tried to explain that in America you just couldn't have someone killed because they were waving a sign that compared you to Dracula. Enraged by the inneffectiveness of the American political powers to rub out his enemies, Ceausescu took matters into his own hands, called his secret police and had the leader of the anti-Romanian protesters run off the road and killed that nightl...
Saying Goodbye
The last day that I'll see Georgiana and Maria together is sad, I've grown to think of them both as friends. We sit outside and Dana takes a photo of us. I promise that I'll keep in touch. I also promise that I'll come back. Maria will be working Thursday during the day and Georgiana, Friday morning when I check out.
"We have for you, a special gift," says Maria, pulling a small bottle from under the counter, "This is a bottle of Tuica, specially made in 1973, that we would like for you to take with you."I'm not sure where I want to go, but I know it is far far away from this hotel, which is a little too much like a marble palace to Western ideals for my liking. Throughout my life I've usually been broke and the idea of servitude for the sake of oppulance is abhorent to me. I don't want anyone making my bed in the morning, let alone dunking my teabag and opening my sugar packets. Later I tell Maria "This hotel is like a little slice of America." "Thank you," she says, but I hadn't mean it as a complement.
While waiting in the lobby at three in the morning I have the pleasure of watching two drunk Italian businessmen berate Georgiana for twenty minutes because they haven't bothered to make a reservation and arrived to find a hotel booked solid. Eventually a hotel staffer in tight pants and a pushup bra who looks more like a stripper than a hostess is able to diffuse the situation by planting a few big wet kisses and dangling about their necks like jewelry. The businessmen will share a room for the night until another opens up.
Winding down
Free time is something I've been really longing for, but this day comes with a quieting pall too; it's my last full day in Bucharest. Almost everyone else is gone, either on a plane already or in a bus going to visit the town of Brasov, about four hours away by bus into Transylvania, into the into the Carpathians -- a beautiful place I'm told, but too far away for me, I can't conscion spending 8 of my last 24 hours here on a bus when I know my heart lies somewhere else.Breakfast -- sun coming up -- in the restaurant of the hotel, picking through the strange selection of sliced meat -- settling on a dish of sliced cucumbers and diced tomatoes with a bowl (yes, a whole bowl) of cashew nuts and almonds on the side. Drinking tea while the four middle-aged American idiots behind me bitch about Jessee Jackson. They must love it in Bucharest, where the only black face we've seen was a waiter serving drinks at the Ambassador's house. It's good to know that America is reinforcing our employment stereotypes throughout the world.
The hotel itself freaks me out as a safe little American island -- half way between the airport and center city Bucharest it attracts the opulent sort of clientele like these racist goons behind me who want to hide in complete isolation from anything unfamiliar.
This lifestyle is a slap in the face of the locals who ought to burn this place to the ground rather than continue working like they do to fold our socks and make our beds and pick up the trash we leave lying on the floor of our rooms.
The owner of the hotel also owns a Romanian soccer team, a bakery, and a restaurant called Le Bonne Epoch. When I tell people where I'm saying they all express their concerns that anybody could get so much money so quickly legally. The speculation is that they had some ill-gotten funds during the revolution that they're laundering. A player from the soccer team is staying at the hotel -- there are t.v. crews camped out waiting for him and he's been the talk of the student body for two days now. After all, now that Cuffe's back in Italy, fixations must settle somewhere. I never see him. But then, I haven't been spending a lot of time at the hotel.
In the business center I send an email home and spend 15 fruitless minutes trying to explain what pro-wrestling is to the baffled attendant watching Jessee Ventura on CNN in the lounge.
Back to the sewers
I call Yannis, he's home. He swings by and picks me up and we breeze through the old part of town to check out the antique stores. They stand out from American antique stores because there's nothing kitch -- Romania seems to have been able to successfully avoid that horrible period of design during the 50's and 60's (although the Stalin era architecture of the period is nothing to be proud of).
We wander into a camera shop and bump into the unofficial Bucharest Leica Users Group. There are four men standing in the back of the smallest camera store I've ever been in, each with a brand new Leica around his neck. They're milling about, doing nothing productive. Yannis greets them in Romanian and they start talking, passing one another's cameras around, looking through the viewfinders to see if perhaps the world looks different through somebody elses viewfinder.
"Get out your Leica!" Yannis says. I pull it from a pocket and drape it around my neck like a dead chiuaua. One of the Romanian crowd frowns and runs a finger along the top edge, which is so dented from me banging it into things one might call it serrated. He frowns, shakes his head and, as if that weren't enough, waggles his finger at me.
I walk outside and take some photos in the street. Inside the discussion continues, though I'm not sure what they're talking about -- we all have the same camera.
This city is filled with ghosts, unreconciled with one another. It is beautiful in a very sad way -- like something tragically and heroically dead. But like a science fiction movie too -- a new society living in the ruins of the old, some parts more civilized than others -- ballgowns and mobsters, poverty and old world opulence arm in arm with another. It is a place where you can rise to the top but no one will give you a leg up, it's a circus without nets where death and poverty and abandonment are absolutely real.This place is one giant photographic backdrop, it's a picture waiting to be taken, it's cheating even, to point one's camera and press the button, whatever direction you look, there's a photograph. It's a riot of visuals competing for your attention.
I see what I take at first to be a dead dog on the sidewalk. When I get closer and look down at it, it moves, trying to get up; I realize it has a broken leg. It lifts it's head and looks up at me, I'm horrified to see that it has only one eye; the other socket is filled with wet meat.
At the Four Star Sewer I see Dany and Flora sitting on a concrete piling talking and throwing pebbles down the open manhole at their feet. They both come running over when they see me, I give them a bag full of stuff, soap and shampoo, a bunch of clothes people from the conference left behind, my collection of power bars, the jetsam of the jetset. Flora takes the bag but doesn't open it. She smiles and says "It's so good that you came back, we were hoping to see you again. Julian was really hoping you'd come back."
"Hey!" I say, "where is Julian?" Dany runs off to get him and soon everyone is back, they're all excited to see us. The place looks very different during the day -- like a carnival. All the kiosks are open, selling CD's, tapes, magazines, cigarettes, people are milling about. We're all hanging out in a dirt lot surrounded by stalls, open manhole in the center. Julian comes running up, he throws his arms around my waist.
"You did come back," he says.
"Of course," I tell him.
Later he and Flora and I take a walk around the station.
"Flora's my girlfriend," Julian explains to me, "not my girlfriend," he flaps his arms in the air like a dying pigeon, trying to find the word he's looking for, "she's my friend -- she's a girl, you know, the two of us, we take care of each other. She's what I have."
They've been an inseparable pair for nearly two years and I suddenly have so much faith and respect for them, together through all this. I think that if they just had the resources, Flora and Julian, at the very least, have a chance at the kind of life that includes a wife and a car and a cat. But not here, not at the Four Star. The place is filled with cops in grey camoflague carrying submachine guns but nobody seems to notice them. To an outsider, to an American, it's unsettling.
"Will you come back?" asks Julian. I don't tell him that I've been up for two days wondering if it would be feasible, practactical, legal, or even possible to adopt him. I don't even know how he'd feel about the idea -- let alone how my wife and my cat would feel about me bringing a ten year old almost-orphan home with me. And one who smokes at that. ("You shouldn't smoke," I say to him, "you're too young to be making such bad decisions." "Yeah," he answers, taking a drag of his cigarette, "That's a big problem with this rotten country, isn't it? We all smoke too much.")
"I'd like to come back. I'd like very much to come back. I think there's a lot I can do here, I just have to find a way to get here."
"When will you come back? Two years? Three Years? Twelve years?"
"You won't still be here in twelve years, will you?"
"Sure I will, I'll be right here. I'll be right here waiting for you."
"Isn't there somewhere else you'd rather go?" This seems to catch him off guard. He has to think about it for a minute.
"I'd like to go to Pakistan. The people there aren't so ugly."
"The people here aren't ugly at all."
"You really think so?"
"I think the people here are beautiful."
"You're kidding? This place is shit -- this whole country is shit. You don't like this place, do you?"
And behind him the sun is boiling down into the sky like fire into the ocean, clouds as brilliant red as blood spew across a horizon like ash from a living volcano. There's strange music pulsing from the kiosks -- shouting and laughter and breathing and the frantic beat of life all around me -- a clutching, gasping life like the mad determination to live of the pigs at Calugari. This country is thrashing to stay alive with the fierce intensity of something being stabbed. This is a life much more desperate to continue than anything I've ever experienced.
"This is the most beautiful place I've ever seen," I say....
Post Script: Ron Bates died July 31, 2007. Sue followed him shortly afterwards. After coming back to the U.S. I, along with several of the people from the WCI conference hosted several fundraisers to send money back to Bucharest. In 2004 I sponsored a fundraiser to pay for a photojournalism student to spend a summer at the Four Star. Scott Squire produced some amazing images from there. Julian vanished shortly after I left Romania and his current whereabouts are unknown.
