On the way to JFK airport recently I got a ride with a very friendly cabbie of about my own age. Due to a truly noxious smell in the backseat – like a fare had died back there a week ago and he had only gotten around to clearing out the body this morning — he invited me to sit upfront with him, which really facilitated our conversation, not to mention stopping me from gagging.

He had somewhat limited English and a heavy accent that I could only vaguely identify. It sounded Spanish, but I knew it wasn’t. I thought maybe Catalan. I always ask cab drivers where they are from and almost always I am rewarded with a great story. This time was no exception.

He told me he had arrived in New York from Romania about two years ago. That made sense, Romanian is the only Eastern European language that is not Slavic. It is in fact a Romance language, more closely related to Spanish or French than to Russian or Czech.

We talked about life in Romania, a country that had lived for decades under a despotic communist dictator whose name I am sure I cannot spell — here it is phonetically: chow-ches-cow. Part of this dictator’s grand scheme was to create a more populous nation, no doubt to produce more soldiers for his army. So he outlawed both birth control and abortion, and told the country that it was every woman’s responsibility to have at least 4 children.

Given the dire economic circumstances of Romania in the 1980′s even people who wanted lots of kids could not afford to feed them. “There was no milk, no bread, nothing on the shelves in the stores,” the cabbie told me. The predictable outcome was thousands of women dying from botched back-alley abortions, and tens of thousands of unwanted and unsupportable babies left to vegetate in state-run orphanages that resembled warehouses — row upon row of cribs.

And now, I asked, how is it since 1990, after the fall of the Soviet Union? Romania, he said, is now free, but economically, things are far worse.

Old people have no pensions. The privatized medical system sounds like it was modeled after our own, so only those with money can get medicine. Unemployment is rampant, as Romanian industry, long state-run and inefficient, can compete with no one. I asked if the UN or EU were helping out. He said no, they have not been asked. The current government — the freely elected one — refuses to acknowledge that starvation is widespread, that poverty is endemic. They live in a fantasy land.

There are 10% fewer people in the country now than in 1990, partly from premature deaths, and partly from the refusal of an entire generation of young people to bear children. After being forced to have babies, now the Romanians are exercising their new-found freedom to not bring them into a world of pain.

Then we arrived at JFK.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Assorted Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.