It’s becoming a habit and we must stop it, but when something like this pops up in Google Reader (as it did today, though the article was first published on March 31st) we just can’t help ourselves…
Ostensibly a travel piece on the Danube Delta for the Australian daily WA Today, it is yet another paean to poverty as a tourist attraction.
The Danube Delta, for those who may not know, is an isolated part of south-eastern Romania, where, as the name suggests, the Danube breaks up into channels before heading into the Black Sea. An area of oustanding natural beauty and famed for its wildlife, the people who live in the Delta do so by and large in abject poverty. Few houses in the Delta have indoor plumbing, some do not have electricity. Life for most people here is a grim, daily grind that consists of little except subsistence farming and fishing.
When this poverty is portrayed through misty eyes as idyllic, as it is in the WA Today article, I’m afraid we lose it big time. To read how “ families sell colossal watermelons by the roadside, fetch water from wells and ride to town in wagons” you would think they do all these things merrily and happily, and by choice.
Well, we have not been to every country in the world nor met everybody on the planet, but we can honestly say that we have never met anyone who was happy to fetch water from a well. As for ‘riding into town in wagons,’ if you offer these people the choice between a smart jeep and their horse and cart, our guess is they would take the jeep.
“I came here for a long weekend after a four-hour trip from Bucharest, mostly on bumpy back roads. I travelled in one of the resort’s Mercedes-Benz vans with Nassim, [Diwaker] Singh’s eldest son, a tall 16-year-old with the face of a cherub and the experience of a tycoon in the making. He divides his time among an English boarding school, India and Bucharest.”
Not the Delta, note.
“Too soon, the idyll was over and I was back at the Bucharest airport, watching Romania rush into the future.”
WA Today’s intrepid reporter, Susan Spano, spent her time in the Delta at the luxury Danube Delta Resort. And why not: it’s a gorgeous place. Point is, she did not spend her time doing backbreaking work picking melons or fetching water from a well. A few hours doing so might have changed her impression of how idyllic this lifestyle is.
Poverty is not a lifestyle choice.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey, we have a new visitor!
Hello Leif, nice 2 have you around. Let me make the introductions: Bucharest Life is the blog owner, Davin is from the US, Bucharestian is a young and educated Romanian guy living in Bucharest and enjoying the post-1989 times and I’m a communist, also living in Bucharest. My ID card says ‘born 1984′ but I would gladly change that for 1946 if it were possible.
You are from the US, but of Viking origins right?
Enjoy your stay!
hmm. . . yes, to live as a peasant your whole life would be tough. However, I thoroughly enjoyed it for an entire year when I was 25 in Maramures. I liked the fact that I got so strong making those haystacks. There’s a lot that is good about modern life, yet there is also a lot lacking that peasants keep alive.
Good reply, but I would add that the case you highlight is something of the proverbial exception proving the rule. The old couple you mention clearly have a choice: they are not poor and could leave their current circumstances anytime. I do – I have to admit – also know of at least one Brit who has ‘dropped out’ and who lives his life as a peasant. I also know he has several hundred thousand pounds in the bank and can likewise ‘drop back in’ anytime he likes.
As for Maramures… do not get me started. I know of at least two (foreign-led) NGOs currently trying to prevent people there building themselves new homes on the grounds that the new houses are vulgar.
Your commentary is, overall, indisputable. Though I feel compelled to draw attention to at least one instance that I’m aware of where Romanians *have* chosen to live in poverty, namely my ex-girlfriend’s grandparents. They have lived in a dirt poor village outside of Iaşi for their entire lives. They get water from the well, have a pit toilet out in the garden (it gets cold up there in winter), and a very small home that they, of course, built themselves.
However, they are *not* poor. Romania’s land return policy left them with an abundance of land, much of which they sold off during the recent property bubble and now they’re incredibly well off by Romanian standards. Yet they refuse to change anything about their lifestyle. This is simply how they have always lived and they like it. They can’t be convinced to move closer to their family in Iaşi with it’s running water and shops and restaurants where they might spend some of that bling. Mostly they just give all their money to their children and grandchildren. They still don’t have a phone. They continue to raise their tiny yard of farm animals and watch their new satellite TV (OK, they changed a little).
However, I doubt few young people are making this choice. Drive through any small village and it’s hard not to notice how they are largely deserted of people between the ages of 18 and 50. They’ve gone off to study or work abroad, leaving the grandparents and young children there, for lack of any other place to go. And I seriously doubt any of them are happy to be defecating in an outhouse and riding a wagon to their field with a pitchfork and a lunch of placinta and raw tomatoes.
Yet, we still enthusiastically promote Maramureş as the ‘last thriving peasant society in Europe’, don’t we? We kinda do. However, people are meant to stay in small pensions, more of a home-stay, and tour villages, go fishing, hiking, and take workshop of wood carving, etc, than hunker down in luxury resorts, so my conscious is clear.
Huge melons come from Oltenia where the climate is arid and perfect for growing melons. Oltenia melons are really something and – pay atention – they’re 100% natural!
We get all kinds of imported melons here in Bucharest (from Greece, from Turkey) but they’re crap compared to Oltenia melons. This is a merchandise we could export but noboy cares about it. Actually we can base a lot of our agriculture on melons because they’re quite resistant and don’t require a lot of work, with the condition to keep them as they are now – natural.