- a Romania OCC distribution story from December 2005
With six cartons of boxes loaded into the back of the van, we headed north out of town. The metalled road gave way to a track, on which we slowly wound our way up the side of the Carpathian Mountains . Before many miles the cartons had been offloaded onto a horse driven chariot, which carefully slopped its way through mud and puddles to our final destination. We hadn't arrived at the end of the earth, but surely this place must have shared the same postcode.
Not a soul could be seen. In the middle of nowhere stood two forlorn housing blocks, adjacent to a dilapidated collective farm, another failed government initiative from the oppressive Ceausescu regime. But instead of moving the workers and their families into town, and abandoning the buildings to the harsh Romanian weather, it was the community itself that had been abandoned. Because as we arrived, from around the corner bounded about twenty excited children, broad smiles of nervous anticipation peeping out from behind their grubby faces.
The whole community (forty families, several dogs, two chariots, two old cars) still live within the two housing blocks. Families (i.e. mothers with five children) that used to have three rooms have been forced to abandon two of them as windows and doors fell apart and roofs collapsed. There has been no employment here for years, and we were left wondering what exactly goes on in the psyche of these friendly but abandoned peoples' minds. This is Europe , 2005.
With so little hope and colour in the community, your shoeboxes bring with them a real sense of joy, to parents as well as to the children. While mums lean contentedly against the wall, with arms folded and proud smiles on their faces, their children sing us a long Christmas song as their precious gift to their foreign visitors. We distribute your wonderful gifts, and once more experience the massive privilege of being the final conduit that has delivered a splash the colour of hope into the lives of the greyest of communities.
Alan Cutting
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