FROM BEHIND

FROM BEHIND I am starting to understand why the Romanians think we are crazy and/or have some still-undisclosed reason for being here. They can't imagine why any Americans would willingly come here to live indefinitely or build a house and move all their personal belongings into it. The preferred flow of people is to the West, not East. Certainly, not everyone here would choose to move there, but 99.9% of them can't understand why we came here.

There's a difference in perspective. I concluded about a month ago that I wasn't tough enough to be Romanian. I will always be "an American in Romania" so I don't, and probably won't ever have to be a real Romanian. I think it's wonderful here, and that it feels like home, and I am fitting in nicely. It's when I am treated like everybody else that I bitch, flap around and gripe about the injustice of it all. My friends smile and say, "You are starting to understand."

A recent experience will possibly give you some insight. The story gets a bit long because the details are what makes it interesting. We have to register our car and truck with the circulation police every six months to correspond with receipt of our six month visa to reside here from the passport police. It was our first time to renew the car registration since we had initially gotten Romanian plates this past summer. They expired in November during the time we were in Kansas City. We had tried to get it done before we left but couldn't and that's a different (also long) story. So, we drove with a dirty car (hence dirty plates with obscured expiration dates) while we tried to renew them. On December 22 and 24, we stood in a cluster of people outside a police colonel's office waiting for special attention. When he finally nodded our way, we were told on the 22nd that a new law was coming, and the new process wasn't known to him yet and to come back on the 24th. We did and were told he still didn't know the new law, to come back in a week. We continued to drive with the expired plates because we figured that since the police didn't know what to do, they were over-looking all the foreigners like us who were awaiting information. We returned, and he said come back another time. Somewhere along the line, we called the American Embassy who said they couldn't help us and that we had to work it out with our local police. I went back and that time got into the office of the colonel's superior who shouted at me that he wasn't there to give information and that I should get in line like everyone else. I went home instead and cried.

We had stood there five different times in the summer during the process of getting the first set of plates, and I didn't want to get in that line until I knew I had all the correct papers. No-one could, or would, tell me in advance what I needed. It seemed so sensible to get the information and collect everything necessary BEFORE standing in a four-hour-long line. The waiting room is really a hall with doors to here and doors to there and their corresponding lines, i.e. to report traffic accidents in the city. One of these is a double door, grillwork door in front of a wooden door. Employees come and go through the grill by unlocking and locking from the outside and more than once handed the key to someone in "my" line to unlock or lock it instead of easing their hand through the grill to put the key in. They actually lock themselves in from the outside.

The area is cold, lighted by one dangling 40 watt bulb and measures about 25' x 15'. This process is necessary for everyone registering or altering a registration of a vehicle--even repainting with a different color. I hear that some people pay another person to stand there for them. Sixty to eighty people in two scraggly lines (two to four abreast) somehow manage to remember their order of arrival and slowly move to the two windows where they are served at the rate (no lie!) of about six per hour. The "window" isn't glass, but a piece of plywood slid open about twelve inches and just big enough to pass papers with one hand. The opening is probably that narrow so I can't act out my fantasy of reaching in with both hands and shaking the officer by his ears.

In January, I got there at 7:15 a.m. and was so proud of being only seventh in the line of people waiting for the building to be unlocked at 8:00. Oh well, I thought, I can get my business done quickly and besides, what's a frozen toe or two. They opened the doors into the police yard at about 8:05, and when we got into the waiting area, there were at least forty people already at the windows. Where did they come from? We could only guess they had gotten special attention at the "police only" entrance or driven in with police friends.

A friend (and former student) of mine who works at the mayor's office in our village couldn't get the information out of the police on his next visit into the city. And he's a bureaucrat himself!!! The police didn't help, so he asked another foreigner who gave us a list of things we needed. It took a day and a half, but Ed collected everything. There were about five places to go and at step four, it turned out that step one had been done wrong, and he had to go back. Kind of like the game of Chutes and Ladders.

After hearing of all our difficulty, a friend from another city came because he knew the big guy (the one who had shouted at me). Arrangements were made, our friend took Ed through one of those other doors while I was still standing behind forty people in line, and moments later returned with the plates. They gave us a temporary registration receipt because they are changing the system, and we have to go back after two months to get the new style registration form. We will have to wait in line again!

There aren't enough police to staff the registration process. There isn't money to quickly print up new rules for the police or procedures for the citizens. To survive, I felt myself going into a shell, rather like a turtle, so that nothing bothered me and I just got on with what was required. During the hours I stood in that line, I remembered the DMV offices in Kansas City and considered the difference. Cars get registered in Romania without a brightly lighted office, roped waiting line, painted walls, and marble countertop. The orderly and very sterile American approach seems unnecessary to me now, and I find that one of the things I like here is that shoulder-to-shoulder contact and a kind of relationship with everyone (even the man pressing into me from behind).