A Romanian Experience another side of globalization? Florian Maurer
“I don’t think so!” I said, to my client’s question whether this was a good property on which to build the headquarters for their social work in Romania. This is how my relationship with Ethos Open Hands began, a privately funded Swiss Christian aid organization. Craiova, a city of close to a million in the flatlands of the Danube, west of Bucharest, was the site of diverse industries which all failed when the blessings of the market economy arrived 14 years ago. It has not recovered since and now combines the poverty of a typical Third World country with the ecological debt and depressing ambience of a decaying industrial city. Ethos Open Hands does not believe the illusion that developing countries could ever attain the wealth of consumer goods and access to energy of the G-7 countries. On the contrary, once poor countries wake up and refuse to play the game as providers of cheap labour and resources, it will be the wealthy countries that will have to re-think their ways. Hence Ethos Open Hand’s strategy is to teach self reliance through neighbourly networking, and self esteem through accepting responsibility and meaningful work. They do not cooperate with governmental organizations that will have us believe that a new aluminum smelter or assembly plant for Daimler Chrysler will solve more problems than they create. Instead, their projects are at the scale of growing food, bicycle repair and sales, construction and education. People’s immediate and urgent needs must be taken care of first, thus the first project I was involved with was the construction of the Mission House — a commercial bakery and kitchen for their soup kitchen and meals-on- wheels programs, a kindergarten, and the offices of the organisation. True to the goal of self reliance, a restaurant and bakery shop generates revenues to support their work and to teach business sense. The building was a conversion of an existing masonry structure in a central location. The existing roof of ultra-thin and sagging acacia-wood rafters was taken off, seismic upgrading was carried out, and a new third storey with roof terrace was added. It was planned as a Canadian wood frame structure because of the limited bearing capacity of the underlying structure, but we soon encountered cultural resistance. Romanian authorities did not have provisions for wooden buildings, the population knew wooden buildings only from their slums, if at all, and the Swiss client thought 2x6s were just too thin to be used in buildings. The need for the building was urgent and there was no time to embark on a slow education
The mission house, Casa Ethos, before and after the renovation. The second hand windows in the new third storey come from an old hotel in Basel/Switzerland. Unfortunately the construction crew cut down the beautiful mature trees before we had a chance to intervene.
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