Romania first 3 days: Abridged

After 22 hours of flying, lost luggage and 5 hour bus ride from Budapest, Hungary to Romania, we arrived at our destination of Timisaora, Romania on Thursday night the 1st of April. No Joke. After a fabulous dinner and filling dinner with UNHCR Officer, Marie Wilson, our small group slept like hybernating bears.

When we woke we were met with a beautiful spring day as we headed over to Generatie Tanera Romania (GTR). GTR is one of the NGOs we will be working with. The GTR team, led by the fearless Mariana, is a fine tuned machine of volunteers from all over the world united in the fight agains sex trafficking.
Mariana gave us a detailed and engaging meeting over coffee, invited us for dinner and sent us to the the Emergency Transit Center (ETC), where we met Marie and toured the camp. At present there are no refugees in residence, as they have just left for their respective host countries. Next week however, they are expecting a major influx of refugees.

When we finished at the camp, we returned home and got ready for dinner. One of the benefits of having no suitcase is it really takes the guess work out of  what to wear. The folks at GTR prepared a fabulous and filling dinner of stuffed mushrooms, cheese, breaded veal, legume bean soup (my new favorite) and other traditional Romanian foods. Some of the guests included asylum seekers from Tunisia and Algeria. Their contributions to the evening's conversations were beyond enlightening. Our group was struck by the fact none of the asylum seekers wanted sympathy or money. They just waned safety and ultimately their basic human rights. The sub-human conditions those seeking democracy  are often subjected to are staggering; prisons, starvation, rats, beatings, and false mental analysis (in some cases they were accused of being terrorists). The "issues" in the Northern African and the Middle Eastern countries are not minor conflicts that happen to appear in the news. Their problems are global. They need to be viewed as "our problems"  because they will continue to affect us in the west on an increasing scale.

My thoughts so far are overwhelming and busy, but all of them remind me that I am connected to each of these problems as I am connected to you back home. Perhaps I am what bridges you to Cristina who was sold by her family in to the sex trade at the age of 9. Last night I shared dinner with a man from Tunisia who had to leave his country and family to because he wanted the right to vote. My hope is to bring people together so that we share the same problems and ultmately the same solutions.   

Here is the website if you want to check out GTC and more of what they do: http://www.generatietanara.ro/