Scena9 editor Ioana Pelehatai examines how a programme providing monetary help to Ukrainian refugees and their hosts works in observe. In Romania, a family accommodating Ukrainian refugees can internet 10 euros and one other 4 euros for board per particular person per day. In a metropolis like Bucharest, it’s subsequently extra worthwhile for property house owners to host a household of refugees of their condominium and preserve the cash ‘for lodging’ than put the condominium up for hire. By internet hosting a household of 4, an proprietor could make 1,200 euros, versus 500 euros if renting out an condominium on market phrases.
This has led to a state of affairs wherein some folks make a residing off the refugees – not what the programme was designed for. And, as one refugee explains, medical and different wants can’t be coated from the every day allowance of 4 euros, their sole supply of earnings.
Indiana Jones of the Balkans
Ionut Sociu writes on the lifetime of the Transylvanian baron Francz Nopcsa (1877–1933). A palaeontologist, ethnologist, traveller and explorer, Nopcsa escapes easy definitions. Apart from fossils and Balkan customs, he was notably eager about Albania, a lot in order that he made an unsuccessful bid to turn into the nation’s king. For some time he additionally spied for the Austro-Hungarians. Tasked with investigating life in Romanian lands that didn’t belong to the empire, he preferred to disguise himself as a shepherd and sleep open air with the flock.
His nomadic life adopted a cycle, writes Sociu: He had lengthy durations ‘within the discipline’, exploring all of the corners of the Balkans. Nopcsa would then withdraw to Vienna, Budapest or the northern Romanian village of Sacel, the place he became a researcher, spending his time amongst books, research and maps. ‘After which he began over again.’
Nopcsa was gay and shared his life together with his secretary and accomplice, the Albanian Baiazid Doda – additionally a proficient ethnographer and photographer. Earlier than killing himself on the age of 56, Nopcsa shot Baiazid in his sleep. In a suicide word, he defined that he had performed it to keep away from ‘leaving Baiazid behind, sick, in distress and poverty, as a result of he would have suffered loads’.
Similar to us
Mihai Gavril Dragolea’s Ca Noi (‘Similar to us’) is a collection of brief video portraits of individuals ‘to whom life didn’t give a lot, however who made it anyway’. Impressed by David Lynch’s ‘The Interview Venture’ (2009), the collection is each a meditation on loneliness and an anthropological research of individuals residing on the peripheries of rural and concrete areas in Romania.
Rodica, for instance, is a former hairdresser who ended up unemployed after being run over by a automobile on a pedestrian crossing. She now lives in a trailer close to a lake within the south of the nation, accompanied solely by canine and cats. After folks and politics let her down, she says, she prefers the isolation. ‘It’s true although, if I didn’t learn, I’d go loopy,’ she displays.
Meluta is a handbook employee from Buzau rejected by others for trivial causes comparable to ‘being ugly’. To take care of his loneliness, he writes poetry; and when he retires, he plans to go and dwell in a nursing residence and donate his condominium to homeless folks.
After spending 19 years in jail, Aurel (now 49) ‘rebuilt’ his life: he married, had a baby, and acquired a horse and cart. He exhibits off a tattoo of his mom, who died throughout his final stint in jail. He’s happy with his achievements after incarceration, saying many others wouldn’t not have been capable of do the identical.
