A Note On… The Greenhouse Team

Some of the most recent greenhouse produce.

It’s hard to summarize all of the areas NetWorks works in, a mixture of social work, micro enterprise, self help, kids work… the list goes on (have a look at our website for a better overview here). I have mostly been working on the Greenhouse Team (a.k.a the “self help massive”), we sit somewhere between the realms of self help and micro enterprise. I really buzz for big projects that call for people to pull together to get things done, so this team has been perfect for me, even though I’m not a big fan of gardening! I joined the GH team which also consisted of Elise, herbalism expert and  general wonder woman, Dan, a great man with some serious practical skills, Hans, a Dutch master who taught me how to weld* and Tim, a giant of a man and the leader of our team.

The basic idea behind the greenhouses project is to give some of the families we work with greater means by which to support themselves. Produce can either be sold in local markets or to the larger Metro stores that we deal with. As we don’t have resources to install greenhouses in every garden we look to how well they have tended their gardens in the past, and those showing willing to work hard can be selected for the investment of a greenhouse. One of the first projects I took on was the building of three smaller wooden greenhouses. We can build these for very little cost and they serve as test  cases for a families ability to work in larger greenhouses, which require a serious commitment. I was building these in the Autumn, alongside the people who were going to be working them. Having only been in the country for 8 weeks at that point can I remember it being a comical struggle at times given my pidgin Romanian. Imagine a large Roma man repeatedly shouting the Romanian word for nail at me, me looking slightly bemused, and you begin to get the picture.

Working on the bending table.

If the wooden greenhouses are well stewarded we can look at installing larger ones which consist of a series of iron hoops planted in the ground, with polythene sheeting stretched over the top. To keep the cost of these down we fabricate the hoops from scratch, first bending the straight poles into shape, followed by welding on the feet and cross bar supports. I can’t stress how much enjoyment I have gotten from working with my hands, the satisfaction of a job well done is huge, but that’s just half the story. The real joy comes from seeing the smiles on the faces of the people we are trying to help. I’ve seen that people are often lacking the self-belief that they could take on the task of working a 10x6m or 30x6m greenhouse, so to see how proud they are, and the self-confidence gained, from what they can achieve is amazing.   To be beckoned in to a greenhouse that I hadn’t seen for while by one of the people we work with, eyes bright with excitement, is a feeling I can’t forget.

*I’m planning  a separate post on the frustratingly fine art of welding. 

Lastly, this song has nothing to do with greenhouses, but deserves to heard. 

A note on… winter.

Crisp morning looking towards the hills which border Siria.

It must be wildly inappropriate to talk about a Romanian winter as this much hyped heat wave continues to grip the UK, giving us a glimpse of a real summer, as well as something else to moan about. But I’m going to anyway.

I’d heard fabled stories about long, dark, tough Romania winters on both of the previous occasions I had visited NetWorks before heading out long term last September. Tales of living in the same thermals and not washing for weeks, frozen fingers fumbling on office keyboards and battling through for the arrival of spring. What I imagined to be at least partial exaggerations continued over the induction weekend, “brace yourselves” was effectively the message. And it was hard to take seriously with mild temperatures lasting into early November.

A sudden shift in the dominate weather pattern was enough to bring the first snow, and the first heavy snow in mid-December. This was officially cold, freezing in your nostrils, breath condensing in your bedroom of a morning, 6 layers of clothes, cold. Winter had arrived. It’s not so unbearably cold that it hits you immediately, and the shift is almost a novelty to begin with- but twelve weeks later when it’s still snowing at the beginning of March it really begins to wear. Fortunately as a team we were able to get through with a combination of grim determination, deep sarcasm in morning meetings and vast quantities of firewood. I now have axe wielding skills to rival Gimley.

This is also very challenging time of year for the families we work with, although some will have made some provision to have wood to burn in their homes, other more vulnerable families may be constantly faced with the threat of running out. This is a serious problem when day time temperatures can hover around freezing for weeks at a time. We do have wood which we hand out to those in desperate need, but choosing who to give to is far from easy. We also  try to make sure people are not dependent upon us, which makes the task even harder. Luckily one of the things I have seen in abundance working with the Roma is resourcefulness. Cycling out to the forest with nothing more than a simple axe, and returning with a weeks’ worth of wood skilfully balanced on the sloping top tube is a regular occurrence. Despite this I really struggled at times knowing that when I left the community at the end of the day I could go home to a fire and a big plate of food, leaving these people we were trying to help in such tough conditions. Of course if we lived the same way as them we would struggle to do the work we are doing, and they would have survived many winters before I’d even heard of Romania, but it’s still a hard one to fathom out.

The bad news is that the winter we’ve just had was fairly mild compared to some years, who knows what the next one will bring. The good news, I should be there to see it.

A note on… coffee.

As a way of portraying different aspects of life in Romania over the last nine months, and feeding back on the experiences I’ve had, I’m going to write a series of “a note on” posts focusing on a separate topic in each post. Coffee may seem like a slightly odd place to start this series, but bear with me.

If you’ve spent much time around cyclists you may have noticed that we can get pretty serious about a good cup of coffee. Whether it’s Team Sky riders pointing at the coffee machine on the latest video tour of their infamous bus, weekend club riders ordering that double espresso or trendy fixed riders waiting for a flat white in Shoreditch – the coffee matters. The same fate of coffee snobbery had befallen me whilst cycling and studying in Sheffield, only pandered to by the opening of boutique café Tamper Coffee. I took just one packet of coffee with me when I flew out of Luton last September, and it looked like the coffee love affair was about to take a hiatus.

It was to my delight, then, to find people on the team I was joining that were equally serious about coffee, most notably the Swedes. Thank goodness for that, I might have sacrificed having running water where I was living for the last two months I was out there, but coffee is a big deal. The Swedish have this great invention “fika”, a kind of suped up coffee break accompanied by at least one kind of cake. The need to uphold this cultural tradition, and to keep the caffeine levels of the team topped up, means there is a fairly constant supply of nice coffee from Sweden or the UK. Addicts? You decide.

The most important point I want to make about coffee, though, is the impact it has had on my working day. I worked predominantly on the greenhouses team, installing and helping to maintain greenhouses to promote self-sufficiency. This often involves visiting the families we are working with, to see how they are getting on, and if things are going well it’s quite common to be greeted with an enormous smile, and invited in for a coffee. I remember this as quite an awkward affair in the first few months. But by the time I’d learnt enough Romanian to keep a basic conversation going it offers the perfect opportunity to build relationship, beyond discussing the progress of their tomato plant seedlings.  Although the Roma people are much maligned by the media, often with good reason, at the end of the day they are just people. Perhaps very different to what might be considered “normal” but still kind, loving, funny people. And by spending more time with them in these situations I got to see a more gentle side of the people we work with. I’m looking forward to seeing more of this, and more coffee, when I get back in the autumn.