Volunteering and egg decorating in Romania

Thanks again to members on the forum, I seem at last to have cracked the menu and pages thing. So now I’ve managed to put up an article I wrote in 1998 for a Romanian magazine on my experiences as a volunteer in Romania for, at the time, five years. I went on to stay another 6.1/2 years before returning to the UK in 2004.

Another project I worked on was helping the women in Bucovina who decorate eggs with their marketing. As result I wrote a few articles about egg decorating and will be putting some of these up soon. I did quite a lot of interesting research on the tradition so it seems to me that it is worth having them on record, especially as I haven’t seen much of what I wrote recorded elsewhere. I don’t any longer have electronic versions of them (some, for a mag I was editing, were done in Quark) so I’m having to type them all in again from paper drafts which fortunately I kept, but at the same time translating them to English. I may eventually be able to find the pictures which were in the articles, or at least some of them but that might take a while so I’ll be putting them up without the pictures pretty soon and hope to find the films/prints eventually.

I’ll be back in Bucovina and Iasi for a short time in August and meeting some of the egg decorators mentioned, so it’ll be interesting to see what has happened since the time I was writing, 2002.