My husband inquired one day if I would have preferred to have lived in the 19thcentury America or 20th century Romania when communists ruled. I gave him a‘I’m glad you asked the question’ look and launched into a tirade of what it was like living with my grandparents continuously for the first six years of my life before I went to first grade and then every summer until I was eighteen and able to choose for myself.
Most young Americans, blinded by school indoctrination, don’t realize that, under the socialist republic controlled by the Communist Party, population control and submission to their whim were the most important goals. They did not care about the happiness and health of the citizenry despite the heavy rhetoric to that effect.
A family was not allowed to move from the village to the city without proper permit from the Communists. If caught living in the city, a person would be subjected to fines, imprisonment, or both.
Mom’s parents, like all villagers, did not have electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing in the tiny village six miles outside of the largest metropolitan area in the south.
Natural gas, compressed in small containers called “butelie,” was used for cooking in summer time. In winter most villagers used a wood burning stove with an iron cast top for heat and cooking. Ducts would carry hot air to the next room. The two tiny rooms did not have taper candles for illumination but oil lamps with clear glass fluted covers that gave us the ability to walk in the house without groping in the dark.
When night fell, the stars were brilliant on clear nights, surrounded by the pitch blackness devoid of any ambient light. It was fun for kids to catch lightning bugs or creep up on older folk sitting on stoops outside the fenced yard and listen to their gossip and tales of old. Younger neighbors, walking in the dark from the latest bus after a long day’s work, would stop and chat before they dragged their tired bodies home to eat and fall asleep with their work clothes on.
The village was compact, demarcations of living space done by communist party organizers with their directives from the top – no waste of agricultural land which needed to be planted with corn and wheat for export and survival rations of food. There was little space between homes, just enough for a wooden fence to separate one small house from the next.
Like 19th century inhabitants, women did not have much in the vein of health care, save for the village mid-wife who tended to births. Women made do with strips of old clothing or rags to protect themselves during menses.
Toilet paper was either the communist newspaper, Scânteia (The Spark), or România liberă (Free Romania) attached to the wooden wall of the outhouse with a long nail. It gave us great pleasure to use the Communist Party’s propaganda to wipe our arses with. The newspaper,România liberă, communist propaganda rag from cover to cover, was a joke as nobody was free in Romania, we were prisoners of the totalitarian communist state. When far from any outhouse, we used the smooth side of any plant leaves we could find, especially corn ones.
Eventually the communists decided to modernize us and manufactured rough brown toilet paper with large and visible splinters in it. We were already used to splinters in our bums from sitting on the unfinished wood platform over the outhouse hole. But using toilet paper with splinters was a new experience. It would be surprising to learn what you can get used to in order to survive.
It never bothered us that we did not wash our hands or brush our teeth. We washed our faces before church but sported a neckline of dirt where the soap and water had stopped. It never occurred to us that hygiene was important to survival. We climbed in a fruit tree not far from the outhouse, buzzing with fat and hungry flies, and we ate with gusto the unwashed but ripen fruits called “dude.”
We played in the muddy ditches when it rained or when grandpa was watering his corn and garden and open the sluices of irrigation. We bathed in the creek or river when we went fishing. It was such a far walk that, when we came back after frolicking in the crystal-clear water, we were covered again in a serious layer of dust. Grandma told us to wash our feet and hands before we went to bed, but she was often tired and forgot to enforce the cleanliness rules. And nobody had a toothbrush or toothpaste.
Adults traveled to the city bathhouses once or twice a year for a good bath. Cleanliness is next to godliness but there was a shortage of bath soap and water was a precious commodity; we had to pump drinking water out of the ground. Taking a bath meant heating large amounts of water and a large enough tub which nobody owned nor could afford. Villagers who had relatives in the city with tiny cinder block apartments with running water traveled once a month or so to bathe if the water supply was running or was hot. As the 19th century brethren would have said, they had a bath every so many months whether they needed it or not.
Grandpa had rigged a small tin tank near the outhouse, about five feet in the air. One person at a time could soap first and then rinse with the lukewarm water dripping from the tank; once empty, it had to be refilled; the sun would warm the water a little bit and the first person was the lucky bather. It was an amazing experience to get rid of the mud and dirt even if it was so short-lived.
We went barefoot most of the time in summer, the yard was a mess, covered with geese, chicken, and duck poop which squished between our toes. I have an icky feeling to this day when I go barefoot. I seldom go without shoes except in sand, and I refuse to go camping.
A few of my childhood friends died of untreated hookworms. Those who survived got treated with heavy and nasty-tasting medicinal syrup provided by my mom who made determined trips to the government polyclinic in town.
I suppose we lived a tad better than the 19th century America as we at least had a rickety bus with holes on the floorboard for transportation or we had rusty trains with steam locomotives that covered us in a decent coating of dark and smelly coal soot. And we did have some drugs and vaccines which increased our chances of survival.
