I unpacked my suitcase at the end of my eighth trip to Sighet, Transylvania, in Romania. Hundreds and hundreds of kilometers traveled each time by bus, covering every meter of the route on the ground, refusing to abstract it away by plane. Not that flying would have made much difference anyway—there are no airports for hours and hours in any direction.
Questions I can't escape
First, there's the "suspicious repetitiveness" of it all. Every time someone in Sighet asks how long I've been coming back, they exclaim: "You must have really loved it!" Why not seek other destinations, other places, other realities?
I first set foot in that town of a few tens of thousands of people exactly five years ago. I went by chance, with a passport rushed through the Rome police station thirty minutes before my train to Budapest was due to leave, to reach people who had already started the journey without me.
It was December 1999. On a freezing morning, a group of us Italians stepped into what they called the "Casa de batraci"—a chronic care facility for elderly people and adults with mental or physical disabilities, some mobile, some bedridden. They were crowded together indiscriminately: old and young in the same wards, men and women sharing the same rooms.
Much has changed since that day. Not just because a Dutch organization provided the entire building with new windows and heating, so that Florin and the others no longer have to walk the halls in winter wearing a coat, scarf, and hat. Not just because they installed screens that keep the flies and insects from colonizing blankets, sheets, and pajamas in summer. Now, instead of rags and torn shirts, there are proper linens on the beds and on the patients.
That isn't what changed things. At least not for me. Mrs. Emilia, Florica, Bobo, and all the others—more than 150 people—are better off materially now, living with the normal comforts of dignified life. What has profoundly changed for me is something altogether different.
I left Sighet a few days later. The first one on the minibus headed back to Italy. I was convinced I would never set foot in those dirty streets again, never breathe in the smell of spoiled food and accumulated garbage, never be surrounded by crowds of children demanding my attention, my embraces, the money they assumed I had.
In December 2004—like so many times before—I returned to Sighet with a group organized by Lega Missionaria Studenti, a Jesuit student association that had been running a stable project there since 1998. They organize work camps and solidarity missions that run for two months each year. They also founded an Italian-Romanian association, "Il Quadrifoglio," which opened three group homes in Sighet for abandoned children.
But what changed between then and now?
That day at the hospital, I felt fear—real fear—for the first time in my life. I was frightened by the deformed faces, the slightly crooked smiles, the anxious hands reaching for touch, the screams and crying. I was struck by how the hospital staff and my Italian friends, who were used to the place, could interact with everyone there so naturally, as if nothing were wrong. The memory burned itself into my mind and heart for a long time afterward, leaving me feeling guilty, unable to understand. When, in August 2001—a year and a half after my first visit—I walked down the short lane from the town center to the "Casa de batrani," my heart was in my throat, my legs trembled. I was torn between wanting to face the fears that had accumulated inside me all that time and wanting to run away. Yet the night before, when they'd asked: "Does anyone still have the strength to help us feed the hospital? We're just two people"—I had almost insisted on being there. I wanted to go! And over the following two weeks, a very singular reality revealed itself to me with natural ease. I spent a few hours each day in the same room, the one they called the "copii," the children—though they were eighteen, thirty years old or more, yet seemed like seven or eight year-olds, if not younger. I helped feed a few "patients" hesitantly, careful to listen when the nurses said the word "ferbinte"—hot—learning to wait for the pace of someone who struggles to swallow, trying to get down lunch between fits of coughing. I overcame my natural reluctance to pull someone up to sitting when they couldn't move on their own, learning where to place my hands so as not to hurt them. While I did these things, I had time to think.
Where exactly is the line between a consciously lived life? What is the meaning of mine?
Does my life mean more than Florin's, Traian's, Mircea's—who are here all day, day after day, lying in these beds, unable to move, unable to see outside, perhaps unable even to imagine an outside? Or does my life ultimately mean less than theirs, when I think about how much I complain, how little weight I give to what really matters? I shared a few words with the companions who came with me to that big green house (now painted white and red), as we ate our lunch together after we finished serving, but mostly we shared a silent feeling—that of being deeply near a mysterious reality we couldn't explain, touched by essential, vital questions we couldn't escape.
Three days ago, I spent part of the afternoon of New Year's Day at the "Casa de batrani." As I walked the corridors greeting the old women and wishing them well—they're used to seeing me wander between their beds now, and sometimes they give me a candy, a precious pickled cucumber, or a hand-embroidered doily—moving from room to room to see everyone and exchange a word with those who could speak, or a smile or a sigh with those who couldn't, I asked myself the same questions over and over. Yet I was happy to be walking those corridors again. By some strange, powerful pull, I feel at home there now. I sense it's a place to which I am truly, deeply attached—a place intimately bound to my identity.
In all these years, I haven't done anything special. I've received so much, so very much, at every step. Sometimes I've felt the weight of frustration and heaviness that hangs in the air of that place.
A small "paradise gone wrong," as I believe there are many on earth. I still haven't found many answers. If anything, every time I return, the questions become more pressing and urgent. Probably our work serves no practical purpose. It's not specialized, not continuous, not professional. I think its only merit is that it enriches those who let themselves be caught up in the deep relationships that develop there, relationships where the boundaries between "disabled" and "volunteer" dissolve. This doesn't diminish the weight of the questions that this whole experience leaves with those of us who, after spending a few days in Sighet, can choose to pack a bag and go home—a bit richer, perhaps, but carrying a few more responsibilities.
Marta Pensi, 2005
