Sorry for the lack of updates recently. We’ve been both sick and busy – not necessarily a good combo.
So from our last post, we’d had our first day and we’ve had a couple since. I’m (Glen) writing up a big post for the work with the bears, but it’s not ready yet, so I’ll just go over some basics for now. Click the link below for a fairly long write-up…
As I mentioned, we’re both sick. We’ve both caught a pretty full-on cold which has knocked us around a bit. Deb had Wednesday off and I’m having today off. Problem is – the shower @ our host family’s home hasn’t worked until today so we went 5 days with only washing with a hand towel, liquid soap and cold water. Combine that with it’s freezing over here, we can’t sleep due to the poor bedding situation, not being able to wash properly (I’m working with raw meat & rotting veggies/fruit, but using a ridiculous amount of soap and getting laughed at for using gloves) and it adds up to a pretty tough situation to recover.
We’re thinking of either going away for the weekend and staying in a nice hotel or maybe even get a hotel here in Brasov just to get some rest. It’s disappointing not to be able to do what we came here to do – and that’s help.
The shower today though certainly helped – amazing how much better you can feel after a long soak, can wash your hair and warm up again.
Speaking of warmth (or lack thereof), it snowed this morning. Only light but for early October, apparently it’s pretty rare. It was -3 up in the mountains where I’m working yesterday morning but the good part is that you make yourself work harder to keep warm.
OK, enough of the negative stuff & the whinging, here’s the good stuff…
We’re starting to feel pretty at home in the city and at our placements. Deb’s absolutely loving working with the babies and that’s where she’ll spend most of her time as the hospital is in desperate need of help. We bought some nappies the other night as they’re almost out. I’ll let Deb go into the detail, but it’s a decent set up they have apparently, just under staffed and under funded. Sound familiar?
I’m really enjoying the working with the bears @ the sanctuary. It’s hard work – there’s no getting around it, it’s a slog. I’m getting home at night pretty stuffed after going flat-out for 8hrs or so, but unlike my normal work, it’s a different kind of stuffed. It’s physical rather than mental. The beauty of that is that your mind is still active and I’ve talked myself into going out and meeting up with other volunteers for drinks the past couple of nights which has been great.
Yesterday, my 3rd day, I got to actually feed the bears. Truly amazing experience. I thought I was just going to feed one bear a crate full of fruit, but I just kept getting handed more and more stuff. So 5 crates of veggies in another “pen” (there’s 5 pens – each about 5 hectares big, so they’re, well, large) which fed another 8 bears or so. Then as I was walking back to the main house/building, the guy in charge (Lotti) drops me off about 80kg of the raw meat I had prepared on my first day to feed another 6 or 7 bears.
When I say feed, it’s not like I go in behind the fence and say, “here boy, come get your sausages!” and hand feed them. You stand behind the 4metre fence and throw it over and try and lob an equal amount to each bear. As I’ve learnt, bears are normally solitary animals so to have a bunch in put in together isn’t natural for them, so you need to work out ways where each of them gets enough food. You can easily pick the big daddy bears of the group. If they move even slightly, the others either flinch in a big way or simply run off. The oldest bear there is 30 years old and he’s big, they reckon somewhere around 450kg. Apparently he’s not the biggest, the big one stays hidden in the forest.
It’s been probably the highlight of my trip so far to watch them come right up to the fence knowing they’re about to get a feed. They look right at you with their big brown eyes and you desperately want to reach out and pat them.
We also do a heap of manual labour. For the past 2 days on-and-off, we’ve shifted a literal mountain load of old vegetable/fruit crates (the flimsy wooden ones) from one pile into disused cages to be used as firewood throughout the winter. The cartons have been partially crushed and moving them is a royal pain. There’s also no such thing as recycling in Romania that I’ve noticed. Everything is used once and either disposed of or burnt – whether it’s for warmth or to get rid of it. Think backyard burn-offs Australia used to have prior to the mid 80s.
On other days, you’ll take the veggies and prepare them (by preparation I mean taking off the stems/leaves or sorting them by type) or go and pick up food from local shops. We’re there at the beck-and-call of the guys who run the place. It’s an important time of the year as the big freeze is almost here where it gets down to -20 to -30 and lots of preparation needs to be done.
There’s 2 other girls there from another organisation volunteering as well. One, Kathy, is from Scotland and her last day was yesterday and we’ve had drinks with her and the other girl, Larissa from California, for the past couple of nights. They’re both very easy going and friendly and it makes the somewhat tedious work bearable (pun intended). Another girl from Australia starts mid-next week. Larissa has been here for 7 weeks now and knows the run of the place, so she’s very helpful to talk to. The operators’ english is sketchy at best, so my Romanesti is improving quite quickly.
We also met up with another couple from Adelaide, Sharon & Phillip who have been very sick with gastro but are now over it and also Lora (from Wisconsin) who’s here on a care placement with Deb & Sharon and a couple of others. We’ve got a Projects Abroad get-together tonight for a movie night, so that’ll be good to meet the others.
There’s dogs galore everywhere here, never seen anything like it. At the sanctuary, there’d be probably 12 dogs or so, but they’re some of the happiest dogs I’ve ever seen. They’re all fed very well (they basically come and help themselves to the meat when they’re hungry) and they all run behind the cars/vans and all they want is a pat or scratch behind the ear. There’s a dog the same as my family’s old dog, Bebe, here but a brown version. It’s a bearded collie which are pretty expensive back in Australia (somewhere around $1000 for a pure bred pup). I said to one of the guys yesterday, “Back in Australia, these cost around 3000leu (pronounced “lay” – local currency)”. He has a laugh, relays it to his friend in the local language and they both laugh for a couple of minutes before he shoots back, “Need more?”.
Speaking of money – things here are sensationally cheap. I’m at the internet cafe which costs 1leu for every 15 minutes. 1leu = 33cents. We catch taxis everywhere as a 10min taxi ride costs 6leu or $2. Door-to-door for $2? Stuff the bus. Everything here is about 10minutes, so since there’s 2 of us, it makes sense. A 500ml local beer in a nice pub is 5leu ($1.66). I bought 2 rounds of drinks a couple of nights ago for 4 of us for the massive total of about $8. You can now see why the guys had a laugh at 3000leu for a bloody dog!
Our host family is really nice and the girls have really taken a liking to us. The older one loves my iPad and asks for it every chance she gets (another Angry Birds addict) and the younger one (4) wants to play cards, Guess Who (quite a challenge in Romanian but a good learning tool we found) but moreso, she just likes to talk. I don’t think she understands we can’t understand much, if anything, of what she’s saying, but she’s always smiling so that’s good. The parents are very friendly and accommodating. And yes, I’ve fixed their computer and bought them a new keyboard – can’t help myself. $10 for a Microsoft keyboard – bargain.
We’re really enjoying what we’re doing, we just have to sort out our sleeping now and we’ll be fine. Apparently it’s almost a rite of passage to get sick when you first get here, so our aim is to get over it, keep healthy and keep doing what we came here for.
