ROMANIA: Romanian woman is the only person living in her village

Just one woman remains in a village in southern Romania, a poignant example of the changing face of Romanian agriculture. 75-year old Ecaterina Serban poses a lonely figure as she walks along the road to the picturesque hilltop village of Bozieni in southern Romania. Bozieni was once home to 100 families, but now Serban is the last remaining resident. Most of her neighbours left soon after 1977, when an earthquake struck south east Romania destroying almost all the houses in the village. "I was born here and I spent whole my life here. I'm 75 now and I have never left this place," Serban said. She has lived completely alone since her husband died ten years ago. "My children had to leave. They got an education and they left for better jobs. There is nothing around, what can you do here?" she explains. Similar situations are occurring all over Romania, as one of the European Union's poorest and most backward members tries to modernize its antiquated agricultural sector. Of almost 13,000 villages in Romania with an average of 800 inhabitants, 100 villages are completely empty and some 1,500 villages have under 100 people, according to the National Statistics Institute. Some 40 percent of Romania's 22 million people still live in the countryside. It is common to see them working the fields with their hands or with wooden implements and driving horses and carts. Many villages still lack running water. But modern technology such as the mobile phone does make an occasional appearance in the countryside. Serban uses her phone to keep in touch with her children. And three years ago one of her sons brought her a television from Germany, where he works. The television provides company of sorts. "I'm talking to my TV. What you can do here? I use to stay in bed and watch TV before I went to sleep. What tragedies you can see on TV. In my whole life I haven't seen things like this," she said. Economists may regard Serban as a dinosaur. But she knows no other life and is determined to remain in her deserted village 100 km east of Bucharest until the day she dies. Still, change is happening. Investors, many from outside the country, are buying small land plots from peasants to merge them into profitable farms, forcing the rural population into find jobs in emerging and workforce-needy cities. Around Bozieni, a french wine company has brought up much of the surrounding land, creating a large vineyard. "It's not good that the French guys buy all the land here," Serban said. "I have also sold, not a big piece, but everybody around me use to sell. They are now buying up the hill, they are buying everything they can," she added. Around one in five Romanians has a small farm of an average 2 hectares of land and one-third of the active population lives on subsistence farming, official data show. Romania, a traditional producer of wheat and maize, was the breadbasket of central Europe before World War Two. Analysts expect the process of modernizing fragmented farms to be slow as conservative villagers like Serban would not give up their only source of living easily to try adapting to big, growing communities.

ITN Source | November 21, 2007

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