The Hidden Library of Schinoasa

“We had a library here for forty-three years. This is my house and I have been renting a room to the council of Tibirica since then.”

While we are walking along the main road of Schinoasa, a Roma village in Calarasi district, an old man waves a stick to attract our attention. He seems to have something urgent to say and he literally drags us into his house.

His name is Vasile Gheorghe Vornicoiu. He was born in 1939 and worked in the vineyards of the local kolkhoz for most of his life. He opens up a padlock and lets us into a room. We are almost incredulous when we see a small library there, kept inside these premises like a secret.

Schinoasa is a very unlikely place to discover a library. It is a village blighted by poverty, inhabited by a few hundred people, without a single shop. It sits in an isolated valley a few kilometres away from Tibirica, a nearby Moldovan village. Until a few years ago no public transport was provided and children had to walk all the way through the forest to reach the school. Later a bus stop was build, providing some form of transport to the villagers.

Children come to the library and they want to take books from Vasile, but he is not allowed to lend the books out as he is not the librarian.

Vasile looks afflicted. “We had a library here for forty-three years. This is my house and I have been renting a room to the council of Tibirica since then. For a long time, everything was fine. Then, in 2013, the librarian stopped working and I had to find a replacement. My daughter applied for the position and she got the role. It was clearly written on the contract that she should have been paid 427 lei (21 euro) monthly. Instead, the people at the council retained half of the official pay, without any reason, leaving her with a meagre salary. So she resigned.”

Vasile is enraged when he finishes his story. “I have made a complaint to the town hall and they hired a new person who has only shown up just a couple of times.” Vasile only receives 50 lei (2.50 euro) a month for storing and cleaning the library. ”Why do I need to keep these books in my house for 50 lei?” He would like to receive some justice and fair compensation and his frustration is growing. “I even thought about throwing the books away, dumping them. But I’m afraid I will be held responsible. The law in the Calarasi district says: `The library must work as it has done until now’. But the librarian has only been here twice since New Year’s and we are now in August.”

Vasile is not only fighting for a better pay: he cares about the education of the kids in Schinoasa. Children come to the library and they want to take books from Vasile, but he is not allowed to lend the books out as he is not the librarian. There are several hundred books on the shelves. Mostly French and Russian classics, textbooks and Soviet booklets in Moldovan language (Romanian written in Cyrillic alphabet, as it was in use when Moldova was one of the Soviet Republics): a rarity for a village where illiteracy and early school leaving are rife.

Almost no one in the Moldovan Roma community of Schinoasa speaks Romani: they all speak Romanian. Nevertheless, locals from nearby villages have often shown distrust and indifference towards the destiny of this impoverished Roma settlement, considering them like second-class citizens.

We are about to leave and Vasile grabs us for one last time, under the porch of his house. Tenaciously but with a smile, he says: “Make this public!”