Going back to Romania

Many young people are looking for opportunities abroad

By Oana Lungescu in Bucharest

On the plane to the capital, Bucharest, I kept going back to one question: How many of the class of '81 had actually stayed in Romania - and how many of us had emigrated?

We had started off as a select group of 25, an unusually small group compared to the 200 or so who studied English in the previous years.

We were forbidden to work in Romania's big cities, where the universities were

But, back in 1977, when we took our university entrance exam, communist Romania's brief flirtation with the West came to an abrupt end.

The Romanian President, Nicolae Ceausescu, had decided foreign languages were a waste of time - the country would pay off its entire foreign debt and become self-sufficient. The excellent English language high school that I and many of my friends attended in Bucharest was turned, almost overnight, into a chemistry high school.

Why chemistry? Simply because Mrs Ceausescu fancied herself as a specialist in plastics. Anyway, the university entrance quota for English was also slashed. And I must admit that, having done very badly in my Romanian grammar paper, I only just managed to get that coveted university place.

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Four years later, as we prepared to graduate, our teachers told us we were the best students they had ever had - but sadly, they could not offer any of us an academic career.

We were forbidden to work in Romania's big cities, where the universities were. We could only choose from an official list of jobs in small towns or villages in the provinces. So, for a couple of years, as a teacher, I commuted to my school in a mountain town, three hours away. Dirty and unheated, the five o'clock commuter train harboured a small tribe of mice and a whole gallery of downtrodden humanity.

It was the women who struck me most. The old farmer, wrapped in a black shawl, carrying huge suitcases filled with loaves of bread, because there was none in her remote village. The young engineer who had lain bleeding in a hospital after an abortion, with the state prosecutor shouting at her, "either you tell me the name of the doctor who did it, or you'll die here". Abortions were illegal in a country that had few other means of contraception and very little to feed its people.

Leaving in droves

Nicolae Ceausescu wanted to increase the number of his subjects, but, as in everything else, he failed disastrously. Those who didn't vote with their wombs voted with their feet.

In 1990, the year following Ceausescu's bloody overthrow, 100,000 Romanians emigrated. I, and many of my friends, had already left by then.

Out of our class of 25, 14 had gone abroad

But how many of us altogether? As we sat down to our 20th reunion dinner in Bucharest, we started counting. Several lived in France, mostly working with international organisations. A few had married and gone to Britain. One had started her own IT company in Canada, and had now moved on to California.

Yet another was running, of all things, the office of the International Organisation for Migrations in a Middle Eastern capital. One became a university lecturer, sharing her time between Germany and Romania.

And another, who had gone to Israel, had decided to return and was now a magazine editor in Bucharest.

Out of our class of 25, 14 had gone abroad. Ten, we thought, had stayed. One woman had committed suicide in Romania.

Tough questions

Looking around the table, I could see little difference between those who had left and those who had stayed. We were all slightly greyer but, in our own ways, successful. Those who lived in Romania had at last achieved the important academic posts forbidden to us 20 years ago.

I wondered how different my life would have been if I had stayed

But many juggled several jobs at once, to keep abreast of the 40% annual rate of inflation. And when the restaurant bill came, I felt embarrassed to pay my $30, half the monthly wage of the Romanian university lecturer sitting next to me.

But there was one among us who had neither left Romania, nor followed the academic path. After graduation, he reached an important national position in the Communist Youth League, whose patron was Ceausescu's younger son, Nicu.

These days, he looks as much as ever like a coiled spring. And he still seems to know all the top players in Romania's murky politics - but on his card, his title is "marketing director".

He has got an import business and collects hefty commissions from foreign investors. The old boys' network obviously still works. And after all, what else could an ambitious young man do in these 20 years that have seen Romania swing from the harshest police system to a confusing cocktail of violent protests, failed reforms and lost hopes?

With Bucharest pink and white with spring blossoms, I wondered how different my life would have been if I had stayed - and how different Romania would have been if so many of us had not gone.

There are no easy answers - and even the ones we settle for may be wrong. In the 1950s the communists imprisoned or killed a whole generation of Romanians. In the 1980s, another generation opted out and went into self-imposed exile. Up to 10,000 a year are still emigrating. Think of the price.