Romanian Summer Diary 4

Sunday 22nd July--The summer school runs for two stretches of nine days and this weekend is a working one. Some children’s attitude to conversational English on a Sunday verges on the cavalier, but those who turn up do want to talk; airing opinions in British company is an opportunity not to be missed.

One of the older boys had witnessed an accident: woman munching burger hit by boy-racer on zebra crossing, he described it, in near-perfect British journalese. Doctors had her down as sixty; she turned out to be seventy-six; the driver was twenty-one. More than anything it was the shock of seeing the little everyday items – a shoe, her shopping, the chips – scattered along the street. Bringing this all up was not about displaying proficiency in English, but sheer shock.

We know of thousands of deaths: why should this one so affect us, our Sunday student wanted to know. Was it the banality of the woman’s shopping bag? The randomness of the choice of victim? Whose choice? Would anything change had it been a tramp? Or a model run over by an old dear on the way to church? Would watching violent films have prepared us for it? Or Titus Andronicus? Or Aeschylus, for that matter?

Monday is another day.

Cristina Pascu-Tulbure.

British-Romanian Connections has been operating in Romania since 1991, and each year Cristina organizes the summer schools staffed with young British volunteers. She says the fascination lies in watching British and Romanians alike teaching and learning, as well as seeing the yearly changes in attitudes, the vernacular, and the home-grown notion of what it is to have achieved the Romanian Dream. It’s a heady mix of old culture, second-hand Western ideals, slight embarrassment about one’s history, and variations on a theme of European unity. Cristina is in Romania with a party of girls from Wirral Grammar School.