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Dear friends far & wide,

Season’s Greetings. I hope this message finds you both merry and bright. 2006 has been a truly outstanding year for me. Our staff of 30 has matured and become increasingly professional and focused, our programs have gained a national reputation, and at our Halloween Charity Ball where Vanessa Redgrave gave the keynote address we netted a record €300,000. (On her way out the door yesterday, Maria agreed that it had indeed been an outstanding year. „In fact, we could have peaked,” she noted dryly.)

For once in my life, I hit almost all my goals this year:
I sold the building in Bacau (where we had our offices and ran „The American School” kindergarten) and transferred the American School to the parents of one of the children — so that enterprise continues to flourish. [The couple who bought the building was able to do so because a few years ago when they were living in Ireland they won the Irish Lottery. I will never again disparage lotteries.] The Bacau „Ready, Willing & Able” programs and offices, thanks to the mayor of Bacau, are now located in two large rooms in the public elementary school directly across the street from our old „American School.” With the proceeds from the building sale I was able to buy two floors in a building (think large Greenwich Village brownstone) in the old historic „Lipscani” area of Bucharest for our main office (and move it OUT of my living room, thanks be to God and the Irish Lottery). And just this week, I finally got my official residence permit good through 2011! (I’ve been here on 3-month tourist visas since I left the Peace Corps in 2003.)

At the moment I am downright giddy about the fact that Romania will enter the European Union on January 1. My excitement probably stems from the fact that when I arrived here in February of 2000, I heard people talk about EU as like they must have talked about going to the moon in 1962: a worthy goal but highly, highly unlikely in our lifetime. And now, here we are playing in the tall grass with the big dogs.

Fiecare Copil in Scoala („Every Child in School”) is the name we have given our crusade to get every child in Romania in school (beginning with kindergarten) and on a successful path to high school graduation by 2020. There are almost a million children today (20% of school age children) who aren’t getting beyond the eighth grade. (Alas, we’re not in Copenhagen yet, Dorothy.) But we do know why –and we know how to change it.

Attached below is a press release we sent out last week. There was a short news item about the Georghescu family on the national evening news (Pro TV) last night.

Hope you have a wonderful holiday and a very good new year. Pray for world peace, but invest in education for the poor.

Love, Leslie

Ovidiu Rom’s Alternative to Homework by Candle Light
by Simona Ilas

Dec. 22, 2006, Bucharest. Day or night, the way to the six square meter storage room in this Ferentari basement always requires a candle. Five people, Mr. & Mrs. Georghescu, age 25 and 26, and their three children, age 1, 4 and 6, live between rusty pipes, stale air and peeling walls. They live there due to the kindness of the father’s employer who owns an apartment in the building. They don’t have water, electricity, heat, or a toilet, but they consider themselves lucky to have a roof over their heads. They know how it is to live on the street and to be chased by the „masked men” out from an abandoned building in the middle of the night.

But soon they will have to leave. The apartment will be sold and with it the storage room – and it is unlikely the new owner will allow them to live there. „We should have left long ago. When those little children died of burns in the basement a few buildings away, the owner asked me to look for another place. He knows we are using candles. When I lie down at night I can’t sleep. I keep asking myself, ‘how can we get out of here?” says the heavy-hearted young father.

„How on earth did they end up in this situation?” is perhaps the question that comes to your mind. The answer is simple. Neither parent ever went to school, not even for a day. (Mr. Georghescu had a minor physical disability which his parents thought would prevent him from being accepted at school.) Consequently, qualifying for a decently paid job was never a possibility for this well-spoken, hard-working young man. The money Mr. Georghescu makes as a night watchman is not nearly enough to support a family of five.

The Georgescus are well aware that their children’s only chance for a better life is to go to school. But their oldest daughter, Ancuta, missed out on kindergarten because they feared they couldn’t come up with the money for the clothes and school supplies she would need in order to fit in.

But this year her father heard from a co-worker about Ovidiu Rom’s „Fiecare Copil in Scoala” program. With help from Ovidiu Rom’s social workers Anca registered in the summer school preparation program at Kindergarten 54 and entered the first grade in September – with school supplies provided by Ovidiu Rom.

She is now in Ovidiu Rom’s after-school program at School 141 where she gets help with her homework and a hot lunch – and for the first time in her life, she has a computer to use! At „home” in the storage room it would be much harder to do her homework and the only help she could get from her well-meaning but unschooled mother is with drawing – when what Anca really needs now is help in learning to read and write.

„Anca has been coming to our program since September,” said Vera Damian, the Ovidiu Rom center director. „She was very shy at first, but now she is as active and inquisitive as any other child. I don’t know how Anca’s life will turn out… but I know she has a sparkle in her eye when she’s in front of the computer – and that she’s very diligent about her homework.”

Abject poverty is the main cause of school abandonment. Families like Anca’s need support – from the community and from the government. It will take a concerted effort to recruit children from families in difficulty for kindergarten and to ensure they make it through elementary school and into high school – but it’s the only thing that will change Romania’s rising school abandonment rate. (Most poor Roma children receive no formal education until at least age 7 and most drop out by the eighth grade.)

Over the past five years Ovidiu Rom has developed a highly successful methodology for getting children like Anca into school and helping them excel there. Co-founder Leslie Hawke says, „Our goal now is to train other communities to adopt the same procedures and methodology so other children like Anca will have a chance for a well-paid job in 15 years and she and her children won’t be living in somebody’s cellar.”

The Alex Fund
924 West End Avenue, NY 10025
212-865-7611 www.alexfund.org
in association with
Ovidiu Rom
Bucharest, Romania
+4- 0723-222-552
www.ovid.ro

~ Fiecare copil in scoala~

Acest articol a fost publicat luni, 1 ianuarie 2007 la rubrica Dialog Intercultural.
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