Do we really want the villages to disappear?
by Patricia Cîrtog
16 years ago, the City Hall of Slimnic Commune, Sibiu County, allocated 35,000 lei to replace the latrines in the courtyard of the Russian village school with modern toilets. Everything went well, except that in Russians there was no running water and sewage, so the students never used them.
Today, the building, left in desolation by the authorities, is a youth center. And that's thanks to young people.
***
Imagine that you are up to 18 years old and you live in a village with no more than 800 inhabitants, located 23 kilometers from the city. The sports field and the schoolyard are left in disrepair. You don't have a library, a movie theater or a café. What do you do after hours? Why do the people in the city have it, right?
This is what Bogdan Mira, Cosmin Simtion and Mihai Panțiru wondered, who, in 2019, founded the Association of Knights of the Leaning Tower in Russia. They wanted to show young people that they can also develop in their commune, not just when they "go on a trip to the city".
That year, they renovated the schoolyard, where they built a greenhouse and organized a summer school. With each project, a gang of young people grew up who two years later obtained the title of European Youth Village — awarded through the European Youth Village Programme for one year. Slimnic received a continuation of the mandate, because in September he will host the Rural Youth Summit and mentor young people who want to apply.
This year, on April 16, the association inaugurated the Knights' House – a building where young people do workshops and meetings, play board games or watch movies. This "extraordinary civic acrobatics" received an award at the Public Participation Awards Gala.
***
Rus is a commune in Sibiu County, Romania. Until the Revolution, it was a Saxon settlement with about 2,000 inhabitants. Of these, more than half emigrated after '89, and currently 782 people live, mostly Romanians.
Between the Russians and the city of Sibiu there are 23 kilometers. Public transport does not run on weekends, and on weekdays only until 4 p.m. If there are not enough people, the drivers do not come to the village anymore, leaving people waiting at the station.
The train station in Sibiu is familiar to me, but I still find it difficult to find the minibus that leads to the Russians. The station is improvised in a parking lot around some blocks. On the program on the internet, the race appears at 3 p.m. I find out from Cipi, a volunteer of the association, that he leaves at 14:30. The ticket costs 10 lei and I take it directly from the driver.
I'm in the minibus with Cipi and Cătă — another volunteer from Russians. This year, they will be the leaders of a group of children from the CaVARAliada Summer School, organized every year in Russians, from 2019 onwards.
4 out of 10 children from rural areas do not participate in any extracurricular activity. (Source: Report "Child Welfare in Rural Areas in 2022", commissioned by World Vision Foundation Romania)
Ciprian Stanciu is 16 years old and is in the tenth grade at the "Independența" Technological High School in Sibiu. He has been a volunteer of the Association of Knights of the Leaning Tower since it was founded. He "didn't have much of it with school" and tells me to "talk to the girls who write projects". But Cipi is basic about physical work, guides children on hikes and teaches them to make braided bracelets.
The minibus is full from the first stations. People stand and hardly hold their shopping nets. A gentleman shouts from behind:
Hello, what do you do, do not stop?
Well, why didn't you say? I'm crazy to stop at all stations?
Until the last station in Russia, only me and Cipi remain. He leads me to school, on a gravel road, with no sidewalk on the edge. When I enter the schoolyard, I walk down a drawn alley that leads to the Knights' House, a freshly painted building with a brown double-glazed door and windows. I also see a greenhouse, a small white building, on which flowers and some colorful benches are drawn, made of pallets. The school is a Saxon, U-shaped building, painted in two colors —yellow and brown.
At the School with grades I-VIII in Russians, 60 students from Russians and Veseud, a neighboring village, are studying. The school belongs to the one in Slimnic — they have the same administration and the same principal. Because there are not enough students, the classes are done simultaneously: in the primary, preparatory class, the first and second forms a group, and the third and fourth groups. In middle school, the fifth grade is united with the seventh and sixth with the eighth.
9% of children in rural areas do not currently attend any educational institution. (Source: Report "Child Welfare in Rural Areas in 2022", commissioned by World Vision Foundation Romania)
In school, it smells of wet wood and dust. The classes have wooden floor and high ceilings. In the hallway, Cipi shows me the flag of the Knights of the Leaning Tower and a billboard with diplomas won by the association. Under the panel, I see a water dispenser and fill my bottle.
"We wanted water dispensers in school, because in Russians there is no drinking water on tap," cipi says.
Then I enter the Knights' House. It smells of paint and new furniture. The walls are white and decorated with pictures from the inauguration. On one wall, all the volunteers left their handprints with watercolors. I try to guess what Cipi's is, but I don't succeed.
Bogdan Mira says that it took a lot of physical work of the volunteers to renovate the youth center.
"It was an army of volunteers until I painted. And that's at the end. The first time, we had to repair the roof – once the tile was down, taken by hand, put that right one. I had to break at the sledgehammer. The children put their hands on the shovel and pushed all the rubble. They broomed. They're not afraid to put the bone to work."
Bogdan is 35 years old and teaches Romanian and English at the secondary schools in Russia and Slimnic. He was born in Curtea de Arges and attended the Faculty of Letters in Sibiu, where he still lives. He plans to move to Russia, where he has been teaching for 13 years and "doesn't want to leave anymore."
In 2018, together with Cosmin Simtion, a history teacher in Russia, he created a GreenIMPACT club with students at the school. The GreenIMPACT programme, founded by the New Horizons Foundation (FNO), is a network of clubs through which young people learn to promote and preserve the local heritage. To be part of the program, one or two adults in education apply and set up a GreenIMPACT club in the community.
"I started the club with 300 lei – that's how much funding was from FNO. We doubled them, that we did handmade stuff with the kids. We improvised a stall made of two tables that folded and a tent for 50 lei, we paid authorization to the city hall and we went to the center in Sibiu. We sold bracelets, bookmarks made by children and doubled our pennies."
Bogdan wears a T-shirt with Alternosfera and always makes jokes. When he arrives at the youth center, he pulls out of a pretzel closet and shows me the mascot of the association —the Croco Moco —a green dinosaur that's put on his finger. Together with his girlfriend, Livia, Bogdan holds English classes with young people. Livia Soroştinean was born in Russians, is 33 years old and has been a volunteer of the association since 2020.
The courses are part of the Learning English Village project, for which they raised funds at the Sibiu International Marathon in 2021. The project is divided into physical courses, those held by Bogdan and Livia, and online, where young people work on the Duolingo application and collect points. At the end of the project, the top three with the highest score receive prizes — a tablet, headphones and a portable speaker.
"When we submitted the project to the marathon, we thought that we would have young people who want to go outside and miss that chance, that they do not know the language. And then we chose topics to help them – job interview, doctor visits, shopping. The sessions are divided into theory – with PowerPoint presentation – and practice, where we ask them to apply.
When shopping, we improvised some stores in the school, and it was a kind of treasure hunt: [the participant] had to leave from a point, go through each store and solve a task. If he solved that task, he would get the product. By the time she got back and had all the products on the list, Livia was writing down the time and I was seeing the rankings."
47% of rural teens say they never or sometimes like school. (Source: Report "Child Welfare in Rural Areas in 2022", commissioned by World Vision Foundation Romania)
Cosmin Simtion is 47 years old, of which 24 at the department. He is a history teacher, and this year he became the director of slimnic General School. He grew up on the block, in the Vasile Aaron neighborhood of Sibiu. After graduating from the Faculty of History, he moved to Rus, his mother's native village. Since then, he lives 10 minutes from school and not a minute from the leaning tower.
The leaning tower is part of the Ensemble of the Evangelical Church in Russia, consisting of the Evangelical Church and a fortified building, where the Saxons stored food and took shelter. Built in 1749, the tower began to tilt after 30 years, due to landslides. It is a difference of 1.5 meters between its base and its top, and locals say that it is the third most inclined tower in Europe.
In 2018, with funding from the New Horizons Foundation, the GreenIMPACT club put up information panels about the Evangelical Church Ensemble. When they were thinking of a name for the club, Cosmin said, "Well, what name should we give it, when we have a tower and that's also tilted?". So they called themselves the "Knights of the Leaning Tower", to defend the element that makes them special.
Cipi takes me to see the tower, and Cosmin is waiting for us in front of the gate. He wears a straw hat on his head and shakes hands with Cipi in greeting. We sit in the shade, in the gazebo in front of the tower — two benches and a lacquered wooden table with a roof on top.
"Look, that's what we did, right, Cipi?" asks Cosmin.
They built the gazebo with the money raised at the Sibiu International Marathon in 2019. In addition, they also arranged a lookout – two benches in a place on the Veseud Hill, from where you can admire the panorama of the Russian village. They called the project a Halt at the Gate of the Past.
Because they needed help with the construction, Cosmin contacted Ovidiu Panțiru, a local who became a member of the club.
"You can't, in my opinion, make a change in our villages without having a community by your side."
Ovidiu is 40 years old and has been living in Russian since he was born. He is married and has three children, including Larisa – an active volunteer of the association. He is employed at Romgaz, he does agriculture, he is a local councilor at the city hall and he helps the association "with what is needed".
"My first thought was to do something in this village so that our youth would not leave. Let's do it, maybe we still have our young people left in the village. I didn't want to leave here even after I got married."
Less than a year after the club was founded, Bogdan, Cosmin and Ovidiu found that they would receive funding faster if they became an association. Meanwhile, Ovidiu's brother, Mihai Panțiru, returned to live in Russian, after seven years of staying in Cluj-Napoca.
"I started traveling through Europe and the States and I accumulated that frustration that at my house why not? The villages in other countries are super beautiful, arranged, people necessarily want to stay in the village and we are so left in desolation. I think out of that frustration I wanted to change something."
Mihai is 33 years old and works in IT. I talked to him on Zoom – he had a pair of high-performance headphones on his ears, and his image was much sharper than mine.
Mihai left the village at the age of 13, in the sixth grade, because he was learning well and wanted to enter "Lazarus", on the mate-info profile, one of the best high schools in Sibiu.
"I moved, because I wanted to go to a good high school and I was aware, including the teachers were telling me, that I had to go and do two years at a school in the city. At Russians, the teachers had to go with the average of the class, and we were very different in level. In the same class, we were also Olympians and kids who didn't know how to read."
He rented an aunt's house, and his parents made sacrifices to support him. She comes from a family of five siblings, her father worked as a bricklayer and her mother was a housewife.
8% of Romanians in the countryside chose to interrupt school temporarily or permanently for one or more children, in order to meet the expenses. (Source: Report "Child Welfare in Rural Areas in 2022", commissioned by World Vision Foundation Romania)
When I ask Mihai if he felt discriminated against coming from the village, he says, "Oh, well you realize it."
"It was this that if you come from the countryside, you are definitely worse. Even in the family I was told that if I go to the city I have to be careful not to remain repetitive or corigent. And I was coming in."
After high school, Mihai went to the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. When he was a student, he was a volunteer at the Transylvania International Film Festival (TIFF), which made him want cinema in his village as well.
"The first time I went to the cinema in the fifth grade. A teacher took us on a trip from Russians to Sibiu and we saw the movie "Asterix and Obelix."
With the beginning of the pandemic, he moved back to Russia. He was working remotely at an IT company, and when he heard about the activities of the Knights of the Inclined Tower club, he thought "Look, opportunity to get involved too".
In June 2019, he and Bogdan and Cosmin founded the Association of Knights of the Leaning Tower of Russians. At the beginning of the road, they looked for a place to carry out activities. They received approval in the schoolyard, which Ovidiu says "was a disaster" – only weeds grown and a building left in disrepair. Together with the children, they cleaned it, fenced it with a fence and built a solarium.
"Imagine Mihai IT's mounting in the solarium. And you could see him flowing the waters on him and that it annoys him, that he doesn't have them with that. But he knew it had to be done," Cosmin tells me.
They put in the solarium vegetables and aromatic plants, which they gave to the restaurant La Pasaj in Sibiu, in exchange for the gastronomy lessons from the chef. The children learned why it is healthy to eat local products, after which they went to the market to buy ingredients for an omelette with cheese and a vegetable salad.
In the summer of 2019, they organized their first summer school, where they did workshops on handmade things, hiking and games. Since then, CaVARAliada is held year after year and grows in line with young people, who are asked after each edition: "What do we do differently about the year?". Ioana Petrea is a volunteer and is part of the organization.
"At the summer schools, there are the children, who come and have fun as participants, and they are the adults and the leaders, with whom we meet in the morning at meetings, we see what we have to do, how we do it. After a day is over, we tell what successes we have, what failures we have and we try to do better the next day."
Ioana is 19 years old and is at the Faculty of Economic Sciences in Sibiu. Since she organizes the summer schools, the children in the village no longer greet her with "Hello!" — they befriended each other and now they make them with their hands and when she is behind the wheel.
She was born in Russians and, although it sometimes annoys her to commute to Sibiu, she never thought "to pack her bags and leave the village". He gets involved in the association as much as he can, but takes breaks when he needs it.
"I know for sure that if there was pressure, I wouldn't come to volunteer so fondly and I probably wouldn't come at all. That's cool about us, that if someone doesn't want to or doesn't have time in a while, it's OK, we'll get by."
Joan organized all the documents for the summer school in a Google Drive, because she "doesn't want to search for 100 years after a parental agreement." She's always had things in order—the "pens to pens, pencils to pencils" —and she brought that to the association as well, in addition to the donuts she made from meetings.
This year, he convinced a colleague from the faculty to run at the Sibiu International Marathon for their project – Start to read – through which they want to arrange the library in the slimnic commune.
Two years ago, Mihai enrolled a group of volunteers at EduHack — a hackathon organized in Cluj-Napoca, but which was held online in 2020, due to the pandemic. A hackathon is an event of programmers who have a time frame to develop a software project. With the help of the project, it must be possible to solve a problem proposed by them, depending on the theme of the event.
"I wanted to show them what a hackathon is and I won the hackathon. Homework was education and health, and our idea was to make a platform on which to gather students' feedback and opinions. The project had to be pitched — presented in a short and attractive way — in front of the jury," says Mihai.
Participation in the hackathon was part of the Digital Knights Project, which started in March 2020, when activities moved online due to the pandemic. Mihai gave courses with young people on Zoom, where they learned to develop websites, collaborate on code and publish online sites. They worked at a website where they could sell bookmarks or bracelets made by them, but they haven't completed it yet.
When Whatsapp groups became too loaded with messages, they started working on the Discord app. They created channels for each project, an event schedule, and a general chat. If they want to organize a movie night, for example, they go to the special channel and vote on which movie to project.
In a meeting on Zoom, they also filled in the application form for the European Youth Village. They found out about it in 2019, when the Villages and Dishes project was awarded at the Rural Youth Gala, organized by the European Youth Village Program.
"The title Of European Youth Village is thought of as a plan of activities for young people from rural areas to apply in their village", says Andra Cordoș, founder of the Go Free Association in Cluj-Napoca.
European Youth Village is a program funded with European funds through Erasmus Plus and coordinated by the Association for Active Development (ADA) in Bacau and Go Free – the Association for Supporting Civil Society in Cluj-Napoca. It includes several projects, including the title European Youth Village which is awarded to the new communes at the Youth Gala in Rural Areas.
The title is awarded for one year, and young people receive support from coordinators to keep activities in their village. In order to apply, at least five young people from rural areas must fill in an application form, modelled on the one from the European Solidarity Corps. The title does not come with an amount of money, so the form is the first step by which young people learn to apply for funding. Andra tells me that this year, 15% of the projects funded by the European Solidarity Corps are of young people who have obtained the title of European Youth Village.
Eight of the volunteers of the Knights of the Leaning Tower Association formed the Slimnic initiative group and applied for the title. They included in the candidacy the entire commune, consisting of Russians, Slimnic and Veseud, in order to expand their community of young people.
Two years ago, they received the slimnic title — European Youth Village. For the knights, it came with pressure and the impulse to increase the number of projects.
"You know what it's like, if you got a title like that, you have to respect your coat of arms after that. Are you a European Youth Village and what do you do? You can't take the title, it's butterflies to everyone and after nothing happens", says Bogdan.
After taking over the title, the coordinators of the European Youth Village program come to the commune and hold consultations with young people, where they encourage them to tell the problems in their village, but also to look for solutions. Last year, Andra Cordos held consultations with the young people of Slimnic, and the most obvious problem was the lack of drinking water in schools. They thought that a possible solution would be the water dispensers, and Ovidiu and Cosmin presented the proposal in the Local Council. The City Hall did not respond to the request, so the young people obtained the dispensers when Cosmin took over the position of director.
Then they started doing debates in the streets. On Discord, volunteers choose a theme and vote on the central question. Announce the event on Facebook, and the young people and other locals of the village, come to discuss the chosen topic. They write their ideas on colored cardboards, display them on the wall near the meeting place and present them to others.
Last June, they held a debate in Slimnic, at which they asked: "Where and how do we spend our free time?". The young people responded — an open-air cinema, café or sports field set up in Russians.
"I like that people started to tell their ideas and needs — until now, everyone was so timorous – 'how can I say I want a café in Russia'. But with the street debates, the world started to be more and more open, and it went from "I wish" to "it's normal to have," Says Mihai.
In 2021, they obtained funding for the Traveling Books project through the World Champions Program. That's how they created a mobile library with over 60 books centralized on a website. The young man fills out a form with the book he wants to read, the association buys it and then stays in the library.
"We thought about this need of young people and children from rural areas to read. We do not have a library in the village of Rus and at the school library there are old books that are not attractive. And now we have new and interesting books," says Anamaria Aldea.
Six out of 10 schools in rural areas are not equipped with a library. (Source: 2017, "Strategy on the modernization of educational infrastructure 2017-2023"- Ministry of National Education)
Anamaria is 18 years old and teaches at the "George Barițiu" Economic High School in Sibiu. She has been part of the association since it was founded, and this year she received the title of The most active volunteer involved in youth projects, at the Sibiu Youth Gala. He tripped when he went on stage and didn't know he had to give a speech. After the Gala, the team waited for her with a gift – the series "Sleeplessness" by Irina Binder, her favorite writer.
Anamaria carries a poke that says the Rural Youth Summit — an event organised by the European Youth Village Programme. Over the course of several days, young people participate in workshops, debate problems in their villages and propose solutions.
In 2021, the slimnic team attended the summit when it received an extension of the mandate of the European Youth Village.
"Of all the communes, indeed, Slimnic did the best and I said to stay and be the motor for other villages," says Andra Cordos.
Anamaria just returned from Timisoara, where she presented to other young people how they can apply for the title. This year, the slimnic team will host the Rural Youth Summit.
This year, they applied for funding to the European Solidarity Corps. They received a grant of 6000 euros for the endowment of the Knights' House. I have in mind Bogdan's reply: "I started the club with 300 lei". Now, young people are writing projects that attract funds.
"The goal is that, easy, easy, we're going to step back. Not in the sense of abandoning, we put at their fingertips what we have, we are there with them, but they get involved," says Cosmin.
Now the youngsters are in charge of organizing movie or game evenings, treasure hunts. For the last street debate, Anamaria and Cipi prepared the cards and the central question. Ioana organizes the documents for the summer school in Google Drive and talks to collaborators.
"That's cool – to see that you start a thing and, even if you don't pull the cart anymore, the horse comes to pull, to carry on the cart", says Bogdan.
The Knights of the Leaning Tower of Russia have been designated the Most Active Youth Association at the Sibiu Youth Gala in both 2019 and 2021. At this year's Gala, they had seven nominations and four awards.
In 2018, they received a special award — Junior NGO — at the Romanian Youth Gala. Bogdan pulls out the prize from a drawer and puts it on the table.
Mihai Panțiru received the award for Young Involved at the Rural Youth Gala 2020.
"In my generation, out of 23, there are two more in the village, says Mihai. And I don't blame anybody, you don't really have to stay as a young man. But I think the question is —do we really want the villages to disappear? That, at this rate, they disappear. If the young leave, they are no longer children. Last year three enrolled in school. There are no more children, no more doctor coming. And that's how the whole village is destroyed."
The knights of the Russian Leaning Tower had a weedy courtyard, an abandoned building and a sloping tower. From there, they have built a greenhouse, created a youth center and are doing activities that will attract young people to stay in the commune.
At the inauguration of the Knights' House, representatives of the Sibiu County Council, members of the Go Free Association and of the Sibiu Community Foundation, came to the village. However, there were still more young people than adults. And that leads me to believe that The Russians are not going to disappear soon.
The article was produced within the Journalism Scholarships on Philanthropy, a program developed by the Association for Community Relations and supported by Lidl Romania"
The article was published in Gen Magazine and can be found here.
Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on linkedin
LinkedIn
No comment yet, add your voice below!