The real treasure of Romania * Documentary

A documentary about the World changing...

I can’t hold a smile, my thought flies to the saying “the last ones will be the first ones”... maybe we are blessed because we're not such a developed country, less corrupted by the modern progress, maybe we haven’t yet ruined everything, maybe we still know how to manage living in the countryside, to consume what our garden produces, maybe because our parents are still making pickles and keep potatoes in the cellar, maybe because we still know how to make wine and cheese, because we still know to weave and get well drinking boiled plum brandy, maybe we still have a chance...

Not that this would be enough, but it still represents something; at least we don’t think that chicken is coming from the supermarket and we know how to bake a bread at home.

I'm looking how Romania is passing now in pole position, because the race took a different course, so it seems; so far we didn't have the chance walk in our new shiny shoes, there is a bumpy road ahead and luckily we still kept the gum shoes, we didn't throw them away, we have just repudiated them...

I've had lots of fun for myself in Tamera during the seminar about food; they preach the idea to come back to the habit of consuming aliments according to the season, fresh, without the killing procedures happening these days before the food gets to the supermarket - which is in fact a great idea, and correct way to feed ourselves. Maybe my mother remembers when the pea comes into season, the new potatoes, the cherries, and so on... I also used to know once and I remember that I couldn’t wait to eat the first strawberries of the season, or the first apricots. Now you may whistle for the taste, but we have them all year round: the same strawberry, in plastic, and as much as I try not to go with the wind, I cannot find something authentic Romanian to buy, not even in the villages nearby Bucharest, not talking about the city itself.

During the seminary they described different ways and attempts of food preserving, especially by dehydrating, namely drying, as a way to keep the aliments through the winter time. They were looking for alternatives... so, if you still have elders in your family, you should treasure their knowledge, ask them to teach you how to preserve apples for the winter, how to make sour cabbage, how to keep the carrots in the sand, how to keep the grapes for entire moths, because this information we will be needing all soon! Of course I have told them that we Romanians are still holding this knowledge...

With this I have really took them by surprise, I have told them we still hold these habits, that the mirage of supermarkets did not own us yet, that my mother still collects and dries herbs, keeping them in jars for her stocks! Now I get explained why in another Eco village in Germany, responsible for the farm milk was a Romanian woman! Look for the old recipes, I mean it... who wishes to go to Tamera and teach them, is welcome, they are waiting for you, seriously!

In most parts of the country side, living with what you can grow at home was mostly the traditional way of living until about 20 years ago. The ones living in the villages used to provide food to the ones living in the city. Who is now more than 40-45 years old knows exactly what I'm talking about. In the western society, this memory is still kept by those over 75 years old, maybe because they had the misfortune of being "saved" by supermarkets and the industrialized agriculture.

We Romanians still know how to cook; there are others that don’t even know how to prepare a cake, not talking about home made noodles!?!

In Tamera they were wondering how many hectares will be enough in order to feed from what they cultivate...

In the countryside my grandparents used to have a small garden for fresh vegetables and another yard of 1000 square meters, I remember... and you don’t want to know how many things they were growing there at the same time! The agricultural land outside the village was with the grape vines and the corn, the wheat...

I suddenly felt the desire to embrace everything we have in Romania, all our troubles; from there our country seems like a promised land, that I guarantee you! In a way, the fact that it wasn’t so easy for us, now it seems to be a blessing! Maybe finally we've found something to treasure!

A movie recommended by my new friends from Romania in Transition (intranzitie.org):

In Transition 1.0
(Thank you!)

Enjoy!

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Tamera's Story about Reforestation and Permaculture

I’ve posted a few days ago something about 15 of us taking care of the trees in Tamera. Just like you are doing now, I have smiled... What could possibly do a few people, just for fun, in a few days... almost nothing, it must be all about marketing.

...about 15 people, well-heeled with few reaping hooks, we arrived on the border of a dusty road, near a man made lake. Between the road and the lake there were a lot of fancy colored wildflowers and tall grass displaying their natural beauty... here are the trees, Herman says...

Where? He is must be joking...

But we soon discovered that the tall grass was hiding the enormous beds, sort of some large furrows, specific for permaculture...

Each of us received a furrow to take care of, to cut off the grass and the wild flowers, to let the sun reach down to the little trees coming to life from beneath... slowly we have learned to discover them, only 2-3 centimeters high, planted here and there, on beds.

We started to clean around carefully, without pulling them out, without getting them damaged, without taken them by mistake with some other plants... and hidden by the tall grass we also had to hold over and keep the sunflower plants, about 40 cm high, fragile and thin, meant to protect the future trees, offering them the shadow needed to futher develop.

And so, we had to pay great attention, as it was not as easy as it seemed.

Permaculture does not classify the plants upon their usage in our immediate interest, but integrates them in the circuit. For example, everything we have cut had to be left right there, lying down on top of the furrows among the little trees, in order to become food for the ground. Nothing is lost, nothing is taken out of the circuit, and everything is being reused.

The row that I've had in care was with elder berry plants. Each area is different, they have seeds gathered from all over the world and preserved, entire ecosystems are recreated, not only what it seems to be useful or edible. When the baby trees will grow a bit bigger, they will be planted on lands previously prepared by... pigs, as I have described in an older post.

The "exercise" lasted for about one hour, it was like a sort of an open lesson on ecology, ecosystems, equilibrium, ground quality, soil, about climate and human integration, we didn’t get tired in listening Herman and having him answering to our questions...

Looking back, just for the fun of it, I did some counting on the spot: on my row there were 10 plants per meter, by 5 meters long, results that I have put to light about 50 elder berry plants... I smile to them, my mother makes an wonderful elder berry juice; Ileana, the neighbor of Oana, my friend, makes a competitive fruit marmalade, the smell of which I simply adore; in the morning, here in Tamera they use to drink water with elder berry flowers, so I've just strengthened now a very special relationship.

Mathematics just wont let me go, I’ve really loved it, nowadays I bow in front of my former Master Teacher Cracana, and I cast up 15 people x 1 row x 5 meters x 10 plants/m = 750 little trees cared today! If you count that a tree needs around about 3m space to fully develop, we must have taken care for almost 1 hectare of forest!

This is a lot, if you think that such a forest is being planted at once! One single action this year and the forest will last for centuries! Whenever hearing Herman talking about centuries, suddenly time becomes irrelevant. It doesn’t really matter when and where a forest has been planted. It does matter that it exists.

For us or for our children's sake, it is important to do things like these because time flies anyway, but with or without a forest the history will not be the same.

We leave very happy... we didn’t have planted yet an entire hectare of forest but for sure it matters what we did.

Another day we have been to the green house, where we planted seeds in hotbeds and watered them. We also have seen there how a few thousand of little trees had already come to life. One thousand x 10 square meters, equals with ten thousands square meters, meaning they had there quite a few hectares of future forest. Let’s say five thousands plants = five hectares.

It's not such a big deal if you think how much we consume every day and that we actually need a few billion of hectares... But it means a lot thinking that such gestures are almost non existent.

I was impressed of how fragile the oaks, the pines, and all the majestic trees that we normally picture them when they're hundred years old were... their delicacy touched me in such a way... they were just baby trees, you could tear they down with just a few drops of water... and they really needed us, to help them become our healthy lungs once again.

I felt like asking them for forgiveness, "we did not know, please forgive us, this time we understand, we’ll stop being irresponsible, please come back among us and give us oxygen, shadow, and birds and life!"

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Forests?! Where?

Forests... all the time we hear about them, but it seems like they are not a part of our everyday life...

Since we came on this World, our forests seem to be in the same place, all along national roads, on the edge of mountain resorts, on top of the hills that we picture from the hotel parking, and all over the country on the green colored map. Hardly a change can be noticed - so it seems - or maybe we really wish to think that we didn’t blast so much.

Few acres of worthless trees... do they count? Maybe they moved over for some more valuable crops, or factories, roads or neighborhoods we really needed. I can’t take out of my mind the image of a nurse trying to put a band aid on her patient’s head, stepping on his oxygen supply tube...

The two images above are showing the deforestation process the World has suffered lately. It looks like the civilization destroys everything coming in its way. If you wish to have some fun/get back on Earth, I recommend you to click on the following link:

http://www.globalforestwatch.org/english/interactive.maps/index.htm

We Romanians aren't quite well, "we did our job" too, we laughed out loud at the matter, as the rest of Europe.

We think that cutting down the trees is about making fire, or building homes or furniture, or paper. News: nowadays the fire is made with gas... OK, so that eases a bit our concerns, we think! Also we make concrete buildings. I don’t even wish to imagine what on Earth will happen with so much brash when we will build using other less invasive materials!?

The furniture is made out of wood, at least if we had kept the real wood, but nowadays we chop forests and shred them into shivers for MDF (Medium-Density Fiberboard) and Aggregate Panels. You thought that panel shivers are from scraps? Dozens of wagons of healthy logs are chopped daily so we could change our furniture by the color that we love this year, which is in fact a pattern printed on a piece of paper applied on the pressed shivers and bounded with toxic glue... Glorious, isn’t it? And this is much more expensive than the real wood. It's just like buying some sausages from the supermarket instead of preparing a steak. I will now stop talking about furniture; unfortunately I know what I am talking about...

With the paper is another sacrilege... each day, that corner stand receives piles of waste paper for which about 20 trees were cut, this it is just like they're being delivered a truck full of logs, or a clump of trees that took a hundred years to grow. OK maybe I exaggerated a bit, let's say that it took them 50 years to grow up to that glorious moment of their lives when they become support for our information, to keep us updated about the latest gossips in the VIP frivolous world. Really, can’t we live without? The printed media was invented before the digital era and should've stayed there...

Multiply this with the number of media stands in the whole country, maybe there are a few thousand? So we are doodling more than ten thousands of trees every day? And once we finish reading we throw the newspaper/magazine away, without recycling?

Now think of all the supermarkets that are jamming into our mail boxes what? - trees... already killed. I think I have received a few acres until now. A "successful action" means a few tons of paper x 20 trees/tone, this is a glorious day, when the marketing guy sleeps happily for having accomplished his mission and as a consequence we are poorest with two acres of shadow and fresh air, in fact.

The carton... I would like to introduce a new type of police, called "The Package Police". Why do they have to pack a product in boxes 50% larger than the size needed? To look like we receive more? More we juggle ourselves... A store collects every day between a few trees and hundreds of trees at the garbage can.

I won’t discuss here the books, it seems be the only good thing made out of our woods at a large scale, to transmit the knowledge... maybe it won’t be bad not to keep all the books for ourselves, but to let them flow as much as possible?

Hold on, did you think I’m done? News: we eat forests, in fact we eat forests when we eat our stakes, salami, sausages, milk, cheese or eggs... the main purpose of the World's deforestation is to make room for cereal crops, to feed the livestock!

Tropical forests are replaced with soybean crops... So the animal breeding for the consumption industry is the main cause of deforestation. With each day passing we need larger areas to feed them, because we consume more and more meat: today almost every meal contains meat, we're not having it only on Sundays as our grandparents used to... Maybe you didn’t know, they need now enormous surfaces to cultivate fodder. But this will not happen in Germany or Austria... they always find a weak link somewhere on Earth and so you read in the news they cut the forests in Brazil. And this way the global market blooms, and we carry fodder from South America to North America, then the American chicken ends up to be sold to a market in Amarasti, a far country village in Eastern Europe. People buy it, because it is cheaper...

It doesn’t matter where the animals are breaded, or what nationality we hold, if we are 3 billiards of beef-eaters 7 days from 7... but why worry? the forests will pay off our debts, wherever they still exist. Think that when you buy a chicken or a piece or salami, you say goodbye to a hundred years old tree somewhere. The vegetarians are less invasive persons, of that I can assure you...

This is also about the atmosphere, the air we don’t have anymore. Portugal is becoming a desert, were the people were those who have destroyed their country... they had the trees cut down until there was no need in doing it, as the entire ecosystem collapsed. The soil has changed its composition and now they can hardly grow anything there, except for their own despair...

What is our guilt in all these? What power do we have?

The entire fault belongs to us, if we know and we do nothing. Maybe we did not know, maybe we did not understand, we did not wish to know... And we have all the power, for doing both good and bad.

So, each one of us is part of this. We consume trees, this is a fact and rarely have I heard of someone having planted trees.Maybe one tree, on a Sunday, in a mediated action to all friends... or maybe ten in the courtyard of their holiday house. Or as a business... two acres of rapidly growing beech? Or are we leaving this in the (not)care of the state only? Or maybe we should relax as several NGO’s were created and will take care of these problems? We don’t even pay attention to them or even offer our help.

In Tamera, reforestation is a daily deep care activity... they collect seeds, all kinds of seedling plants, not just those meant to be used by humans. It sounds a little impersonal, but this is about people who truly believe in what they're doing, about people taking action... So first they inoculate and take care of the seedling plants in the tree nursery, until they become able to be transplanted in the ground. In charge of this process in Tamera is Herman, a German forester engineer. He says Romania is his favorite country, he has traveled to Apuseni and worked for a project in a forest there and that he is totally fascinated by the natural abundance we (still) have in our countryside zones. On the very first day, he had us to take care of some beds where trees saplings were planted...

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Burda, Buddha and Bucharest

Yesterday I have brought up to life a very old hobby of mine, from about 25 years ago... I have tailored and quilted a skirt and a shirt, mainly because my daughter, Maria, had installed a tailor’s dummy just in the middle of our house and I was trying to remember how to cut and how a to apply a pattern (from an old Burda magazine - true "gold" in those times). But as I have lost my teen girl patience, I gave up canons and I cut on my own inspiration and reduced all to minimum. Now I am proud to have tailored for myself an orange prêt-a-porter skirt with variable shape and form and a shirt whose model depends on how I decide to wear it, as it’s not so clear... (for the moment, I can arrange it in 6 different ways)

I've had a lot of fun, my main goal was to be efficient rather than creative, I wished to finish the same day what I've started... it looks a bit loose, but I am comfortable with the idea that this would be very appropriate for the next escape to an Eco village, where jeans are not the best and inspired solution.

Yesterday I have packed everything, with a smile, because the skirt looks just like one of the colored cloths of the Buddhist monks!

Wearing something like this in Bucharest? No way!
But... never say never! This morning Maria comes to me and says I should - at all costs - wear that Buddha-inspired skirt because we are going to a place I would love... Really? In Bucharest?

I took the hint; I am an obedient mother...

My advice is that you should listen to your children, please stop reading now and go to Street Delivery, QUICKLY!!!! Between Carturesti and Gradina Icoanei, for a few days you can find a real oasis of wonderful ideas, beautiful smiling people, music, art and photo, architecture and "out of the box" thinking, a fair that kept me happily fainted for a day, without feeling how time flew!

Urban gardens, art and experimental workshops, books and Rosia Montana... Ecological houses, revolutionary messages (in "silk", obviously), events, concerts, lots of kids and educated ageless people, you wouldn’t believe all this until you've seen them! All Universities are present; this is not a commercial fair.

A true surprise for me was to discover, right in the middle of the park, my favorite subject - The World in Transition! While I was approaching the place, it seemed unbelievable for me... reading... that!??? I’ve lived to see with my own eyes such this happening in the middle of Bucharest? This means that we are on the right path!

Romania in Transition (intranzitie.org) was there, with their entire agenda full of wide dear subjects, from Permaculture to own currency, Eco villages, solar energy, nature, animals... lying on a blanket on the grass, seeming pretty relaxed, some young people with a clear look in their eyes hold me to chunk from their new home made bread and invite us to join them at the table, that was right before introducing myself. There was no need for more, for me to understand that we have A LOT to talk about...

They didn’t start their project for a long time, just for a few months, but it is wonderful that things like these have started happening already, people are researching... we will meet again for sure, I am very pleased with this meeting, I'm still having the smile on my face! I have leaved the place with the feeling that I could have spend here my whole day to enjoy the special energy of our meeting...

I’ve spent seven hours in the park and I've hardly had a bird's eye view... projects for "A Different Bucharest", natural gardens, various vintage objects, art, hand made, people lobbying for daring impressive causes, you could see these dreams coming to life only by looking into those people's eyes... This is a World me and I'm sure that you too, would like to live in, a World same time beautiful and decent and clean...

It will be open tonight and all day tomorrow! I will also be there tomorrow, I hope! I'm inviting you, too!

P.S. I felt perfectly fit into the atmosphere with my new skirt, and on top of all that last evening I felt like curling my hair, just like I was doing in the Eco village! Men probably will not understand the satisfaction of having followed my intuition to do this, too...

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Visit "Street Delivery"!!!!! Now! * Photos

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