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Siminoc Village
Siminoc village is about a 20-minute drive from Constanta. It has around 300 families ranging in age from babies to those in their late eighties. Siminoc has a Kindergarten and First school, for Senior School the children travel to town of Basarabi.
The people in the village are lovely, very welcoming and keen and interested in the project we are starting. We spent a weekend with one family and could not of asked for nicer people. Whoever you meet one of the first questions they asked is "Will there be a job for us?" or "Can you teach us as well?"
Schooling
The schooling in Romania starts with Kindergarten at the age of 5 years old; there are about 30 children in Siminoc Kindergarten. At the age of 7 years old they move to First School, there are about 70 children in Siminoc First School.
When they reach 14 years old they move to senior school in town and they are there are until they are 18 years old. Kindergarten starts at 8:00am and finishes at 12:00pm. The first school is split into two sessions half the school attend school in the morning and half the school attend school in the afternoon. Morning school starts at 7:30am and finishes at 12:00pm the second session starts at 12:00pm and finishes 6:00pm.
The senior school works in the same way but they start at 7:00am and finish at 1:00pm the second session start at 2:00pm and finish at 8:00pm.The schools are very basic and all in need of refurbishment and stock for the children, but there is no money to do it.
Village Consortium
A well organised consortium is run in the village, they have harvesters, tractors, trailers, ploughs and a host of other equipment that all the villagers use. You pay for the work, the men from the village then get paid for their time at work. The harrowing and ploughing of our land has taken 5 days, the planting will take another 3 days for the wheat and 3 days for the oats and the total cost will be 70, 000, 000 Lei, out of this money comes the wages, fuel, and maintenance so as you can imagine there is not a lot of profit. Especially as the consortium is still owed for work done earlier in spring 2003. They ploughed and planted for poor families with the promise of payment when the crop was in, four days of non stop rain at the beginning of September meant the crop was affected and 4.5 million Lei was paid per hectare for the crop instead of 10.5 million Lei per hectare. The consortium will have to wait for some of the money or the families will go hungry. Using the consortium saves us the cost of a tractor, and its maintenance, and for it to then sit around half the year doing nothing.
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