Second-class citizens for the state - Ana Mocanu

I was born in Focșani. Ever since I was little, I didn’t understand why my father had to go to the fields until four in the morning and why I felt afraid that he might not come home that night - or ever. Why in autumn I could buy new jeans from the market, and in spring I ate bread with cheese and didn’t have money for deodorant. Why my mother bit her lip when she heard about another trip to Sighișoara, which, I now understand, we couldn’t afford.

Why my parents didn’t have friends and worked all day. My friends’ parents did - they went out for pizza with my classmates and went on vacation. Why did my parents have to go to Onești to sell tomatoes when we had a market right in front of our apartment building in Focșani? I later found out that the market in Onești sold better, hence the weekly commute with my father’s car loaded with bags and my mother in the passenger seat, ready for a weekend at the market after five days in the office.

We are seven siblings in our family. My father was an agricultural engineer and a farmer in the other hours of the day when he wasn’t at work. My mother was an accountant. And then, dad was no longer an engineer, and mom wasn’t an accountant anymore either. They got sick at some point - from the hardship, from the work, from exhaustion.

Seven mouths to feed, twelve including them and our cats, Buțu, Mia, and Tobi. Fourteen including the girls from the countryside whom my parents took in to look after us.

Seven mouths to feed. Education. Tutoring. Television. Toys. Money for beer in adolescence.
And for them? Nothing. Abandoned.

Abandoned - or, as the sociological studies we are currently conducting call them, those lost in transition.

And it’s not just my mother, father, and Focșani. Many citizens of this country live in this kind of reality. The change in 1989 came suddenly, with the hope of freedom - but no one was there for Romanians to give them even a grain of salt to adapt to the new social realities.

The consequences of that failed start are still felt today, 36 years after the Revolution: Romania is one of the most unequal economies in Europe, developed around growth poles in big cities, while small towns and rural areas have depopulated, and people have migrated to Bucharest, Cluj, or the diaspora in search of a better life.

This is also one of the biggest problems we will face - the demographic crisis caused by migration. And no, it’s not my fault that I didn’t stay in Focșani. It’s the state’s fault for not providing the infrastructure that would give people in small towns and rural areas access to the golden ticket of big cities.

Access means money and opportunities. But access can also mean highways, fast trains, or facilities for commuters. Luckily for my father, Onești was only two hours away from Focșani.

Of seven siblings, two are in the diaspora, three of us are in Bucharest, and two stayed in Focșani. Two out of seven.

I began to feel the frustration of living in a small town where nothing changed while I was still there. I was 15 years old. And even though I knew I couldn’t change my family’s life, I started looking for ways to pull the state’s sleeve in my own interest, as a citizen.

That’s how I ended up calling for debates on the local budget, attending hearings, writing petitions, and mobilizing young people in the city to demand our rights.

The petitions in Focșani eventually braided into my path as an NGO activist. Today, I am the executive director of Funky Citizens, and I travel to “Focșanis” across the country, where I build bridges with people who live in the world I left behind: a world where access to public services is not easy, a world where there are no spaces for people to pour out their pain and tell us - the rest of the world - how they imagine Romania should be.

We need far more people who build these kinds of spaces in the absence of a state that listens to its citizens.
We need a collective responsibility to return to the places we come from;
To talk to those who still do not have the same access that we have to proper healthcare, decent infrastructure, or better salaries.

There are many people who want to destroy, but there are far more of us who want to build bridges between us - or at least that’s what the optimist in me chooses to believe.

And those gates exist. They can be opened if we are willing to try. The world is anything but rosy right now, but we have the power to try to build, as best we can, from the bottom up, a kinder world for those left behind.

My parents don’t really understand what I do or why I do it. The truth is they probably never will - for them, who are trying to integrate into a world of possibilities, a life lived only surviving makes them feel uncomfortable when they suddenly have space to enjoy simple things like a vacation, a pizza in town, or visiting their grandchildren in the diaspora.

My parents fought so that I could live in the free world that was promised to them 36 years ago. Even if I cannot explain it to them, I’m doing it for them and for Ana, who was waiting for her father to come home.

I’m doing it in the hope that another Vasile, another Aristița, another Ana, and six other siblings won’t have to go through this in the future. Or at least, that it will be a little easier for them.