Do you sometimes/often feel like complaining about your living conditions while volunteering in Arad? Is the room too small or are there too many people in your apartment? Is there sometimes no hot water or is it leaking in the bathroom? Fridge is broken or there is no place to wash your clothes.
Those are problems? Yes. Does it take too long to fix them sometimes?Yes. Have I complained about the same things? Yes. But this weekend in a village called Lelesti near Targu Jiu opened my eyes. Some volunteers in villages live in so much worse conditions.
When you go home, it is maximum +5 degrees inside, you have to cut the wood and heat the oven and wait for hours to get warmer. Maybe after 2 hours it will be +15 degrees. For 23 degrees like it is normally in our apartment in Arad, you have to heat the oven at least for 4 hours. And when you wake up in the morning, everything starts from the beginning again. Maybe not +5 but not more than +15 degrees for sure. And about the hot water you can only dream of, when it's cold, there is probably NO water, because the pipes are frozen. No toilet inside, the only possibility is to find some less visible place outside. This was our first evening in this village.
When it's really cold, it is also possible that the pipes freeze so much that they explode and you will finally have water, but up to your knees on the floor, not in the bathroom. Everything is wet, still cold, wood also wet, heating the oven even bigger challenge then the evening before. That happened to us on the second evening there. Of course, it's not so extreme all the time. With warmer weather it's quite nice but through the cold period, every day is a hard work to maintain the warmth.
After this experience I appreciate the comforts of our apartment so much more. While being back we also lost warm water for 24 hours but it didn't disturb me so much as it would have before. Because I have realized that although it can always be always better, it can always be worse also.
