Romania

[robot_mel]

I was going to write about The Wedding of the Dead an anthropological account of life in a village in Romania during the late 70's and early 80's under communism. But first I wanted to mention an article I saw on the BBC about Romanian children living on the streets. I remember when the iron curtain fell and pictures of children in Romanian orphanages were flooding the tv screen. Today there was an article about the large numbers of children living on the streets, and under them in steam tunnels, huffing glue to kill the hunger pains and getting raped, sold into prostitution and generally living squalid horrible and unspeakable lives. It seemed miles and miles away from the world of ritual and cherished children, whose lives were often short but were always valued in the descriptions given in the book. When I finished the book I was wondering how life had changed for these people since the book was written 20 years ago. Now it just seems another of the world's many tragedies. An anthropologists role is to observe and try and portray what they see about a culture and the human race. But sometimes I just feel a greater social responsibility to do something more meaningful and less clinical. I do still want to write about the book I read though. I really enjoyed it, it was full of beautiful and sad poetry. But I think that will have to be a separate post.