The desperately poor hosts didn’t have much to give, but they gave everything. On an aid trip to Romania, Aaron Scoones discovered a country desperate to join the promised land of the EU while still struggling with the legacy of communism WHAT is a life-changing experience?

That can be a pretty hard question to answer. But when I drove to Romania with two Guernsey mates, Nigel Govett and Garry MacDonald, to deliver humanitarian aid for the Guernsey-based charity Friends of Romania, it was as near as damn it to being one.

Life-changing? Nigel, 32, said he wouldn’t quite call it that. But it opened his eyes – not just to what other people don’t have, but to how much we have and how lucky we are.

It was first time that Nigel and I had ever done anything like this, though Garry did the trip last year.

In all, we were away for 10 days. It took us three to complete the 2,000km journey down to the Transylvanian town of Bistrita, where we were dropping off our cargo.

In truth, as you would expect of three lads travelling across Europe, the journey there and back is worthy of an article of its own. We had been given extensive instructions by Wilf Holland, the secretary of Friends of Romania, about procedures at the borders and with Customs.

But this did not help when we narrowly escaped being shot at by guards on the Hungarian-Romanian border after I misunderstood an instruction to move onto the next post to have our van checked – and instead drove past and towards the border.

Obviously they did not find this at all funny, as they went for their guns before I had realised what was going on and slammed on the brakes. We were sent back to the post as they thoroughly checked our van and gave us a ticking-off.

Stories abound when you are on a road trip, but what the road does is give you time to think – although in truth, there is little opportunity for this when you are stuck between two blokes who are in desperate need of a shower.

None of us is small and we were crammed into the front of a red Ford Transit like proverbial sardines.

Thank God for iPods. The thousands of tunes available kept us sane.

We stayed in Le Mans, Linz in Austria, Budapest and, on the way back, Budapest again, Nuremburg and a little village just south of Paris.

If I had to recommend one of these places to visit, it would be the delightful provincial town of Linz. Near the German border, it has gorgeous baroque buildings and a vibrant nightlife.

And for me, the Austrian people seemed to be the friendliest bunch we met on our travels. When you drive through Europe and go through the borders, you don’t notice much difference between France, Germany and Austria.

Being in the EU, you are able to fly through without stopping.

But when you cross into Hungary, although it has recently joined the Union, you have to stop for the first time and soon realise that you are in the former eastern bloc. You immediately sense a drop in the general wealth.

The roads become dotted with potholes and suddenly up spring hideous concrete tower blocks by the side of the roads.

And when you make your way through Hungary to Romania and out of the EU, the level drops again. The potholes get bigger and more of the communist housing monstrosities appear.

Romania and especially Transylvania, have beautiful countryside. But the towns can be dire, ruined by communist concrete.

The country’s last communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, had a vision and that vision was that everyone would be housed. He ruled Romania for 21 years before being shot by firing squad, along with his wife, Elena, on Christmas Day 1989 after a bloody uprising by the people.

The tower blocks are not the only legacy he left behind. It is impossible to talk to any Romanian without his name being mentioned.

He has left a mark on all, young and old. The people there are friendly but they are slow to trust – a hang-up from life under Ceausescu.

‘Christmas 1989 was the day The Pig died,’ confirmed Dani Podea.

Dani is only 17 years old and was a baby when Ceausescu was alive. He is the son of Tica, who is one of the organisers of Tabita 96, the sister charity of Friends of Romania, which hands out the donated goods to the needy.

Dani is part of a Romanian generation brought up after the fall of Ceasusecu. He and his peers now look, think and act as any other European teenager would.

They are part of a Romania that is looking to join the EU next year. The gold stars flag of the union hangs from the lamp posts, as the average Romanian is desperate to join the promised land. But there are a lot of issues in the way before that happens.

One of these is poverty. In Bistrita we stayed with the Suciu family.

The father, Iustin, was seriously ill in hospital when we arrived, but his wife, Lenuta, still went out of her way to look after us and the kindness that she and her four children, Raul, Damaris, Horatiu and Luican, showed us when we were there deeply touched me.

They live on the ground floor of an old terraced house near the centre of Bistrita. It has only one bedroom, where three of the children sleep, the parents sleeping on put-up beds in the living room.

Another child usually sleeps in a side room, but when we arrived we were given the living room and his room. Two of the children then had to sleep in the small kitchen, accessed through a back courtyard that featured a chickens’ hutch.

The bathroom was also through the courtyard. These people did not have much to give, but they gave us everything.

During the three days we stayed with the Sucius we ate like kings. We’d have meat and bread for breakfast and then for lunch and dinner we would have three-course meals.

The first would always be soup. Soup is big in Romania.

One night we ate at Tica’s place, housed in one of Ceausescu’s tower blocks, with him and his family.

After the soup we were given mamaliga, a traditional Romanian dish that is basically boiled-up yellow maize with salt and can be mixed with almost anything – in this case, cheese.

I liked the stuff, though its texture is a bit like a week-old blancmange. Dani’s all-time favourite dish is mamaliga with honey and milk.

At dinner I had a chance to talk to Tica, who has been a pastor for 10 years. A plumber by trade, on Sundays he preaches at two Romanian gypsy churches.

Romanian gypsies are characterised by their darker skin and communicate in their own language, which Tica speaks fluently.

No one is quite sure where they came from – ‘India or Egypt,’ guesses Tica.

‘The gypsy word for money is “lovele” and it is similar to the Indian word.’

We took with us to Romania 20 footballs donated by Collas Day and gave one to a little gypsy boy called Zoli, who lives with his family in the same street as the Sucius. Their house had no front door, there was no glass in any of the windows, no carpets and the walls were devoid of plaster, exposing bare bricks.

They lived with chickens in this shell of a house.

The clothes, food, household appliances and all the other items donated by the Guernsey public to the Friends of Romania end up going to families like Zoli’s.

‘We learned in school about Guernsey but we didn’t know what the people of Guernsey were like,’ said Tica.

‘But we now know that the people of Guernsey are great. [Their] help for Romania is very, very necessary and many, many people can say “thank you Guernsey”.’

Was it a life-changing experience for me? I don’t know.

I’m not religious but I think it moved me spiritually. The kindness I experienced in Romania, from Tica and Lenuta and their families, was truly amazing and humbling.

I can’t wait to go back.

* For more information on Guernsey Friends of Romania, contact the secretary, Wilf Holland, on 255129.