Romania: The Gypsy Baby Biter ( Part One )

This story available with photographs at: http://www.thelifeofanaverageperson.com/


The overwhelming smell of urine greeted me as I stepped off the train in Transylvania, Romania. The stations here were decaying: cracked tile, broken benches and trains disregarding schedules to arrive at their own whim. I took a deep breath, preparing myself for a disappointing experience.

I was wrong.

Amidst the poverty, I found a vibrant people, friendly and honest who loved to help; people proud of their heritage but angry with their government. Those that spoke even three words of English eagerly jumped at the chance to offer assistance, escorting us to our destinations and pushing aside offers of money.

And then, there were the Gypsies.

The Gypsies, or the Roma as they call themselves, have been portrayed as thieves and tricksters throughout history. It was obvious these beliefs still burned in the hearts of the Romanian people and perhaps rightly so. Each time I mentioned the word 'Gypsy', eyes would dart to the side and mouths would tighten. Some showed a combination of pity and disgust. Others were angry the government compensated the gypsies for each child, a practice that encouraged a large brood and provided little incentive for them to progress.

My first encounter with the Gypsies was in Cluj-Napoca and it still wrenches my heart: A young woman on the street, face swollen and clutching her stomach as she backed timidly away from a reeking dark-skinned man. He was shouting, shaking a threatening fist as he advanced. A handful of men watched, almost bored, from a dilapidated shoe repair shop that also sold newspapers, cigarettes and tea. I would never put up with such blatant abuse. Had a man treated me so, I would have promptly chopped his head off. However, it was obvious this woman did not have the right. Ashamed I could not help, I walked away.

After wandering in Cluj-Napoca for an hour, lost and dragging suitcases, we finally stopped at the nearest restaurant and asked for directions to our hotel.

“Too far for you!” The women standing outside shook their heads, clucking, "No walk! We call taxi!"

I hesitated at first. As a rule, I travel cheaply in order to experience more of the world. In addition, the Romanian travel forums warned both taxi drivers and waiters preyed on innocent tourists (situations I never encountered the entire trip). This was a double whammy. However, I was tired after the long train journey so, with a sigh, I agreed.

As we waited for the taxi, the man in charge of the restaurant eagerly pulled out a tourist map. Brushing his customers aside, he enthusiastically began to mark the “must see” sights. His clientele did not mind the wait; instead, they chimed in with opinions, pouring over the map and circling their personal favorites. Everyone was smiling, gesturing broadly and speaking loudly.

Our taxi arrived. The driver was a young, cheerful man named Radu.

“English! I can practice English now!” He smiled, thrilled, running his hand over his shaved head. After loading our luggage, he took off, threading wildly through the traffic at high speeds. A song by Wham began playing on the radio and he pointed to the receiver, “I learn English from listening and watching Tom and Jerry!”

We laughed. We were all Tom fans and agreed he deserved to eat that pesky mouse. I yawned, worn-out, telling him we had been walking since the train station.

“Why?” He asked, clearly confused.

“I love to travel.” I said, “I always try to walk, anything I can do to save money for future adventures. Every drop in the ocean counts.”

He broke into peals of laughter, almost rear-ending the car in front of us. Finally, he said, “In Romania, you are only saving ‘steam’!”

He was right. The entire trip cost less than $3.00.

As Radu drove, he pointed out a medical school, saying Cluj was a college town. I asked him about the Gypsies and education. He was one of the rare few that seemed more sympathetic than anything else. He stated the government encouraged the Gypsies to attend school. Spots in each college were reserved only for them, but few took advantage of it. I wondered if they even knew or understood what that meant.

After settling into our hotel, we hailed another cab back to the historic district. It was a Sunday, only a few restaurants were open. I picked an outside café. There were a variety of dishes on the menu, but as I was soon to discover, most would never be available. Invariably, anything containing cabbage was, and that night, I chose cabbage and noodles.

As I waited for my food, I watched the people on the street. There were a few obvious tourists, stopping to browse the menus and the locals hurrying from the buses, carrying bags. Then, there were the gypsies. They were easily recognizable. Their clothes were stained, their hair and skin dirty. They looked as if they hadn’t bathed in months. If you made eye contact, they came running.

A rail thin boy approached. He couldn’t have been more than 10. His eyes were the most unusual green, his skin tanned and his brown hair pulled back tight in a pony tail. His clothes were filthy. He held his hand out as he passed by, eyes riveted to mine and speaking words I did not understand.

He was followed by a little boy of two, wearing pink crocs and playing with a stick in the gutter. Across the street and a fair distance away, a woman slowly followed. I couldn’t imagine anyone letting a two year old navigate street traffic on their own. Horrified, I held out a few lei to the child. He was well trained. He ran forward and snatched it away.

I had little time to feel pleased, however. Almost immediately, the older boy returned, but he was belligerent, beating his hands on his chest, his brows drawn in a scowl. He began to yell, obviously demanding his share. Even at his tender age, he was intimidating. A little shocked, I quickly pressed some money into his hand, simply to make him go away. He flashed a grin and obliged.

This was enough to interest the mother, seeing her children’s success, she picked up her pace and crossed the street. Adopting a sad expression, she hovered over our table, but always on the alert, looking from side to side as if preparing to run.

“Baby, hospital. Baby, hospital.” She kept repeating. Words I would soon hear from every gypsy woman I encountered.

“No.” I said, shaking my head. I was done distributing money to this particular group and shook my head. After a while, she bobbed her head and joined her children to disappear around the end of the block.

Cluj was interesting; most of it rundown by American standards. Everything was cheap. I wandered through the historic district, eating Kurtoskalacs, the local pastry made of dough twisted on a cylinder, rolled in butter, dipped in cinnamon, and then roasted over coals like marshmallows. I happened upon a small almost Italian looking piazza, complete with statues, pigeons and performing artists, but with peeling paint and graffiti tainted walls.

There were abundant, unsecured wireless networks, so I sat on a bench to see if I could latch onto one. There, I noticed a gypsy couple. The woman was young, but downtrodden, appearing strangely old. The husband was much the same, jiggling the baby on his knee. Both looked very sad.

After awhile, the young woman stood, and as modestly as possible, maneuvered under her skirt to remove her underwear. My shock soon turned to pity as she proceeded to wash it at the public drinking fountain, though her washing was continually interrupted by the local children skipping up to take a drink. Satisfied they were clean, she donned them on again. They were obviously the only pair she had.

The baby was changed next. She had no diaper, but two pairs of pants. The soiled ones were washed in the fountain, and then, they walked away; the father carrying the baby while the mother followed, swinging the wet pants in the air to dry them faster.

Not all Gypsies are destitute, I was told. Some live in villages with televisions and gardens, but that seems to be a precious few. We encountered an interesting group at the local MacDonald’s. They were clean and brightly dressed. The women wore voluminous skirts, glittery tops with dangling gold colored coins and purple kerchiefs on their heads. The men stood at the head of the tables, passing out burgers and fries while watching the game on the flat screen TV.

We observed them for awhile. After eating, they moved outside to beg money from tourists while their green-eyed children rolled cherries like marbles down the wheelchair ramp.

This group was laughing, almost playful and we finally asked to take their pictures.

“Lei.” We said to one of the younger women, holding out a few Romanian bills.

The woman held out five fingers.

“Ok.” We agreed finally, pointing to the camera. “Five Lei.”

She nodded.

We gave her the money, but as soon as she had it in her hand, she giggled. Covering her face with her arm, she ran around the corner. We couldn’t help but laugh. Her companions descended upon us, all playing the same game. As soon as they had a few lei in their hands, they would block their faces and laugh. Eventually, we succeeded, but only because we were crafty, tricking them by holding the cameras away from our faces. They didn’t know we could still take pictures that way.

On the train to Sighisoara, we met a retired schoolteacher, Dania. It was hard to live in Romania, she told us. She used her entire pension simply to pay the monthly heating bills. The average family struggled, and could only afford maybe 1 or 2 children. When those children were grown, they had no future, no choice but to leave the country. Her children lived in Boston. When I asked what she thought of the gypsies, she told me that they had huge families, but most lived in poverty. The children ran wild, wandering and begging on their own to return only to the parents at night.

“They are stuck in the medieval days.” She said, shaking her head, “They marry their children off at age 12. They don’t read and write. They migrate to Italy, Spain and France, but the governments send them back to Romania. They sneak back and it starts all over again.”

“Do they have the opportunity to work?” I asked.

“Of course!” She said, “They can sweep the streets, things like that, but they complain about those jobs.”

It was their culture, she said, they simply did not want to advance.

Mayonnaise and Goldfish: The Life of an Arabian Horse Breeder

( for this same story with pictures, see: http://www.thelifeofanaverageperson.com/ )

Names like Lake Pleasant and Happy Valley seem decidedly at odds with the surrounding barren and hostile landscape. Quail dart across the desert road trailed by babies the size of my thumb. Some of the bigger dust devils manage to airlift a few tumbleweeds before swirling into non-existence in the intense heat.

At first glance, this stretch of the Carefree Highway in Arizona looks like all the rest: sand, saguaro cactus, mesquite trees, rocks and ... more sand. But, stopping to take a deeper look revealed a hidden treasure within the Sonoran Desert, one I hadn’t expect to find here, and that was the mysterious world of the Arabian horse.

A left turn off the Carefree highway revealed a white adobe house perched on the desert’s edge, the front yard filled with rocks, purple sage, and a variety of cacti. The matching wall surrounding the land behind it permitted only the top of a barn to be seen. A particularly large lizard perched on the sign simply stating, “Binx Arabians”.

“No, not Jar-Jar Binx.” The owner laughed, referencing Star Wars, “Binx stands for Binky’s Arabians.”

Rae “Binky” Weaver, a delicate woman in her fifties, is not someone you would imagine handling 800 lb horses on a daily basis. The nickname Binky stems from a long family tradition of fondly renaming its members to commemorate events or changing roles. These names stick. Binky has been living with hers since birth; a gift bestowed by her grandfather, “Pappy”, after a particularly colicky episode was quelled by a pacifier sold under the name of “Binky”.

“I fell in love with Arabians as a kid.” She explains, taking me through her house to the enclosed complex in the back, “We lived next to Kellogg’s farm in California.”

Binky recounted history I must have heard before, and while you might hear of General Patton rescuing the Polish Arabians in WWII and starting the “Calvary Breeding” program with Kellogg, the cereal maker, you rarely hear about the ripples these events have long after the news flash is gone. Every Sunday, a young girl and her grandfather Pappy made the trip to admire these animals, a ritual that shaped Binky’s entire life, instilling a passion for the breed that still makes her entire face glow.

Pappy bought her a horse, saddle, and all the trimmings including a ½ ton of hay. The price tag for the lot: $80.00.

“It was a horrible horse.” Binky smiled, shaking her head. With difficulty, she recalled the name, Copper, and even then wasn’t confident. But, she had no problem remembering every minute detail about its foal, “Boogaloo Baby” and his illustrious vaulting career in the Olympics. Her grandfather, dying of cancer, had somehow convinced the Kellogg farm to breed her old nag to one of its stallions, Zadir. “Pappy sat in his lawn chair every evening, waiting for that foal.” Binky’s voice softened, “He died two days after it was born.”

It was the beginning of her life with Arabians. The years moved Binky through many states, but there was rarely a time she wasn’t involved in the Arabian community. She introduced me to her mares. The first one was Melania IA, a black bay, who looks just like her grandsire, the well known Magic Dream. “This one is Melly, she descends from one of my own horses, years ago, named Bold Darling.”

Binky has only had Melly a week and the neighboring mare, DSB Justa Princess, is jealous of the newcomer. Princess leans into the adjoining pen drinking only from her rival’s water and inserts her head between me and Melly at every opportunity.

There are other mares, including two daughters of Marwan al Shaqab, and an adorable foal named Fancy, but it is Felicity L R, a granddaughter of Padron’s Psyche (who recently sold for $20 million at the ripe age of 24) that caught my attention.

Felicity stood proud, basking in the attention, a young beautiful brown chestnut, with bumps under her jaw indicating molars were arriving. She thrust her soft nose into my face, in what Binky explained was a horse greeting. Holding still, I followed Binky’s instructions and let her sniff my breath, relieved when she turned away. I took a step forward, preparing to move on, when she surprised me by leaning over my shoulder and plunging her nose down my shirt.
“Felicity is our pickpocket.” Binky laughed, “She steals eyeglasses and car keys.” Upon securing them, she gleefully gallops in her pen, enjoying the chase before exchanging them for a good back rub. She also plays with balls, but her favorite toy is an empty milk carton. Holding it with her lips, she’ll drag it across the fence, enjoying the whack-whack-whack as the plastic hits metal bars.

I try to move on, but Felicity huffs and whinnies, nodding her head up and down when I look at her. Unable to resist the big brown eyes, I found myself leaning through the fence and scratching her neck. She snuffled in my ear, and as I hit a particular spot, nibbled my shoulder with her lips.
“They say 'I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.’ comes from communal horse grooming.” Binky told me, grabbing a broom to sweep the rocks and dust from Felicity’s hay rack. Felicity snorted and intercepted the broom, maneuvering until Binky was scratching her back with it instead.

I’m used to horses displaying interest in me only for carrots, an interest microscopically short lived when the treat is not produced forthwith, but these horses were different. They craved human interaction. They were just like big dogs.

“When Arabians are born, they are held first by humans and then given to the mother.” Binky explained, “They were bred for companionship, they lived in the desert in the tents, slept in them, had their babies in them, right next to their humans.”

I’ve always heard that Arabians were bred for the desert, but I’ve always been skeptical. Relationships aside, what horse would actually enjoy the heat and dust? These things had hair and lots of it. Yet, each of the mares, including the foal, was voluntarily standing in the sun, ignoring the shade of the shelters just a few feet away.

A casual glance into the water troughs revealed several large gold fish and I watched, horrified, as Felicity dipped her nose for a drink.

Binky found my ignorance amusing, “Those fish live in there for years. They keep the tank clean.” Most of her horses have the new version of the horse water fountain, but after chewing hers, Felicity is relegated to the tank and fish. I couldn’t help but think she planned it that way; they were very pretty and fun to watch.

The barn stood in the center of the property, amazingly cool, the heavy insulation providing ample protection from the hot desert sun. Around the perimeter, mushrooms pushed up through the sand, evidence of recent rain, and particularly bold rabbits snack on alfalfa under the horse’s feet.

“A few months ago, a rabbit came here and had a couple of babies, all pink and ugly, no hair.” Binky pointed to the neatly stacked alfalfa in the barn, “The mother just looked at me; she didn’t think it was a problem.” The big, burly men that deliver her hay carefully surrounded the young family with a few bales, creating an igloo fortress. The rabbits stayed almost a month, until they all hopped off. Binky shook her head, “Crazy rabbits.”

It is a complex combination of bloodlines, what horse is bred to who. These breeders generally know what the foal would look like before they even start the process. They speak their own language of gaskins, stifles and croups, describing horses with such language as: “the horse has a star strip, snip and lower lip with a right hind coronet”, translating into the horse has white on the forehead, down it to the lip and a white smidgeon on the back leg. The lingo was too much and my eyes glazed over.

The next morning was cool, Felicity was cantering in the arena. When she noticed our arrival, she altered her course to prance back and forth in front of the camera.
“She thinks she is at a show.” Binky shook her head at Felicity’s antics. “She poses after her bath, ready for pictures.”

After a few minutes, Felicity is given a shower and Binky asks me if I know what breeders rub on Arabian’s to make them shine for the show. “Mayonnaise.” She grins, “Huge barrels of the stuff. It does wonders.”

That afternoon, coming back from the grocery store, Binky notices Felicity down in her pen. The response is immediate. Before the groceries are even put away, she is out in the sun, next to the mare. Finally responding to Binky’s insistent orders, Felicity staggered to her feet. It was an obvious effort. Binky’s concern grows. As she readies a syringe of pain killer, she calls the vet, fearing colic.

“We lost a mare to colic just a few months ago.” Binky is clearly worried, “That, or she might be slipping the foal.”

Faster than the average 911 response, the vet is there. He listens to Felicity’s bowels, inspects the pen for her latest droppings. Taking no chances, he grabs a bucket and a hose from his truck. Felicity doesn’t care for plastic tubing being shoved down her nose, but the painkiller is already taking affect, and resistance was short lived as the vet gave her oil, electrolytes and more painkillers.

“If she’s in bad shape, those drugs will have no effect on her.” The vet tells Binky. But, before he could even make it back to his truck, Felicity wobbled toward her hay rack.
Everyone visibly relaxed.

“That horse is the biggest wuss.” The vet growls fondly, “Probably just a slight stomach ache.”
“She’s stoned.” Binky grins in relief.

Felicity bounces back strong and by the next morning, it was as if nothing had happened. “Except she is spoiled now…” Binky smiles, “Someone has been checking on her every hour, now she expects constant attention.”

It is a pleasant evening; bats are migrating through the area now, sipping the nectar of the saguaro cactus. In the distance, you can see the Four Peaks rising in the distance, 100 miles away. It is a peaceful place.

I walk over to Felicity one last time; she places her nostrils next to mine for almost a minute, this time, I fondly sniff her hay scented breath and then she gently lips my cheek twice as if she knows I was saying goodbye. I’ll miss this place and that unique horse scent that I sometimes wish could be bottled, a combination of leather and good old-fashioned horse.

The horses here are big business, even the local Mexican restaurant, El Encanto Dos, caters to these creatures, alongside the parking lot is a corral and hitching posts, sights rarely seen in today’s world. Nearby, the Scottsdale show attracts buyers and their private jets from around the world. Sheiks, princesses and celebrities snap cell phone pictures of these magnificent beasts, shoulder to shoulder with horse breeders and those who simply admire the breed.

The full-blooded sister’s of Binky’s mares, bred to the same sires as hers, have produced foals ranging from 200K-500K. But, for Binky, it is not prestige or the Holy Grail of payoffs that keeps her in this business; it is what was born on those Sunday visits to the Kellogg farm with Pappy, the love of Arabian horses.