Romania
November 12, 2007
Acum Pot
Shelly
Roberts Bucureşti
Let’s enter the Way-Back machine. The year is 2003. I’m a lost puppy sent as
an advertising guru to a country whose language is supposed to make sense to
me because I parla Italiana, but doesn’t. I’m stuck with a driver who
charges me double for everything I need because he knows I can’t fend for
myself. He won’t show up to take me home past 19:00 hours (7pm) when I work
daily till 21:00 (9pm) fiecare zi (every day) unless I bribe him adequately,
which I don’t think to do, because, well, because I am an American, and we
don’t think to do such things.
He works three jobs. His mother, who used to be employed by the state in a
factory that doesn’t exist any more, and hasn’t yet been sold to foreign
investors, would work if anyone would make her an offer, but they don’t.
She’s almost fifty, and there aren’t many opportunities. His brother drives
a taxi, works construction, and sells cigarettes on the side to foreigners
who will pay outrageous prices for Winstons that tongue-burn on ignition
from being so far beyond their expiration date. He never speaks of his
father, and I don’t inquire.
They all tend vegetables in window boxes in every window of their bloc
apartment (to eat themselves or sell) which houses three generations in the
space solitary American grad students complain about. And they make do.
Waiting for better. He would like me, when I go back home, to send him boxes
of American sneakers which he could black market for a profit. I decline.
His best hope is to one day own a Volkswagen Passat. It is, for him, a very
big dream. They are a too typical urban Romanian family caught in transition.
And the crossfire. I don’t know this at first. But I learn. Optimism is a
very expensive and painful luxury in this land of promising disenchantment.
And the energy of the country is like quicksand.
It is a strange, stalled, static charge, rank with the bouquet of
disappointment and frustration. Romania has one foot on the gas pedal and
one foot on the brake, restlessly waiting for the light to turn green.
Romania is a finally-liberated country desperately waiting for someone to
tell it what to do. While I am here, no one does.
Fast Forward:
“You won’t recognize this place when you get here.” Andreea e-informs me as
I pack for my short-project trip, the one that will ultimately culminate in
signing on for long-term plans to ride the Romanian tidal wave.
“Everything’s changed.”
Was she ever right.
Now the energy is organized. There is an in-spite-of-everything optimism as
the undertone. There is a flourishing and energetic world-class force that
is emerging. Romania is rising. While America is still sinking under
government stupidity and an aberrant, non-leadership, sock-puppet president,
Romania has one of the few economies that is growing.
Multi-nationals have found a new exploitation target, which is really good
for its victims. Personal income taxes have been lowered from 50% to 16%
uniformly. Several corrupt politicians have gone to jail for being corrupt
politicians. Banks issue debit cards now, and credit cards aren’t far behind.
With real, professional jobs comes money. With money comes credit. With
credit comes houses, and cars, and consumer economies, and every weekend can
be Crăciun (Christmas) with an embossed plastic rectangle in your pocket,
and malls opening everywhere you’d want to plunk them down. Yee haw, it’s
capitalism. At last!
Right now Romania is drunk on money and choices.
Streams of Nissans, and Fords, Peugeots and BMWs, HumVees, and Mercedes
necklace the better blocs and neighborhoods and flood every road. Versace
wafts through Dorobanti and St. John’s and Armani walk hand in hand down the
better boulevards. This is the show-off phase that comes after such a long
and empty drought. Because they can.
The multi-nationals bring jobs, and with them the possibility of careers
again. Lives again. Anything is possible. In Romania now, everything, after
waiting through two thousand years of occupation, is finally possible.
FlashBack #2: Same time. Same station:
(Being prescient is not always an evil gift.)
I may not have known it at the time, but maybe I did when I wrote some lyric
prose to Romanians for my then client, Connex, the country’s biggest telecom
company at the time. It never got out of the agency, because the Romanians
making the decision about what would go to client and what would go waste
bin, didn’t have quite the confidence that what I saw was possible. It is
called Acum Pot. (Now I can.)
I Am Romanian
I have survived two thousand years of others who believed that they knew
what was best for me. And again and again, I told them that I know what was
best for me.
I have survived hardships to work hard for myself. And for my freedom.
Now I can build businesses from mere ideas. Build my family’s life the way
we wish it to be.
I am no longer a shepherd who is willing any more simply to lie down and
accept my fate. I see fate as clay. I will mold myself new fate.
I look around and see my history in every street, but I also find there new
possibilities and opportunities for change.
I am descended from brave-hearted Dacian kings and Roman emperors. I am
Romanian. And I can do anything.
I invite tomorrow and I swallow opportunity in one bite.
Where others doubt, I believe. And what I believe, I can do.
I believe that doubt is defeat, and inaction is every opportunity missed.
And I don’t want to miss anything now. Because I believe that next thing I
do is the first thing that brings me closer to whatever I can dream.
I move and change and dream in my own best interest now.
And now. I can do anything. Acum pot. Sunt roman.
Present Time:
It is now nearly 2008. Four years nearly to the zi.
Bucureşti is exciting in the way that the Wild West frontier was. The way
1960’s New York was. The way Amelia Erhart and Henry ford were. It’s the
discovery excitement of Columbus, and Thomas Edison and Carl Sagen, to go
American on you for a moment. It’s the innocent optimism America has lost,
temporarily, I hope. It’s why I came back to Romania. Though the natives
cannot always see it for themselves. Sometimes it takes someone who hasn’t
seen it every day (fiecare zi) to see what’s going on.
And everywhere I turn, here, now, I see Acum Pot. It’s why I came back.
And why I think I'm going to stick around for a while.
Shelly Roberts
STAMPEDE Shelly Roberts
I am now official.
It isn't just that I have a company. Everyone in Romania, it seems, has a
company.
It is that now I have a STAMP!
Now a stamp in Romania is the zenith and apex, acme, apogee, cap, capstone,
climax, crest, crown, culmination, cusp, grand finale, head, max, meridian,
peak, perihelion, pinnacle, point, quintessence, sublimity, summit, tip,
top, tops, turning point, vertex.
'Cuz when you have a stamp here, you have moved up from merely being a
physical person to being OFFICIAL!
You get a stamp when the notary has taken between two to three hours to sign,
and of course stamp, a pile of very official papers that move you into this
lofty society wherein you become a "firma." Well, you don't exactly
GET a stamp then. You have
to walk to the nearest Stamp Magazine (store) which are everywhere, (and now
you know why) to BUY a
stamp.
Then you can walk into a bank with your head held high. You can buy things
and register for things and invoice for things, full well knowing that at
the culmination of the transaction, you will not merely affix pen to paper,
but you will as well have the full body satisfaction of not only hearing the
krinng-kachunk of stampile crashing down marking paper,
YOU WILL HAVE CAUSED IT.
(And they say the influence of the party is dead here.)
But that's ok. Now I have my own stamp! And that's official.
By the way, according to my accountant, there is absolutely no written law
that contracts, invoices, mergers, receipts or anything official actually
requires a stamp. But, God, please don't tell that to the Romanians! Shelly Roberts
june 2008
Stampede