The Worksite

Monday morning we all met for breakfast in the "Business Room" at 8:00 for your typical Romanian breakfast: Slices of meat and cheese on a platter, Cucumber and sliced tomato platter, and lots of bread. After a hearty sandwich, we called 3 taxis that transported us to the worksite. It is up on a hill just outside of downtown in a nice neighborhood, it stuck out like a sore thumb, but the house that will replace it fits in nicely. Before habitat started to build at this site, the family lived in a 4 meter by 4 meter shack, with one small window and a door. They had an outhouse behind that had no running water or electricity. The family consists of Alli, his wife Jetta, and their 12 year old daughter. This was no place for a family of 3 to be living and they were put on top of the waiting list for people requesting homes.
In order for a family to qualify for housing they have to volunteer at least 100 hours beforehand working on other habitat projects in the area, as well as 1500 hours on their own house. Sweat equity (sweaquity) is 500 hours per person in the family.
There have been 4 habitat teams who helped build this house (1 team for demo, land clearing and utilities, one for the foundation, one for the basic beam structure, then the team I was in for the inner walls, insulation, stucco and painting/roofing). It was awesome to be the last team because we got to see the finished product of the house! The family was so nice and they really worked hard, it was fun to try and interact with them because they couldnt speak a lick of english and our translater wasnt always around. There were a few times where we would listen to them try and point to what they wanted us to do..and we would all look at each other and come to a conclusion together of what they wanted and went for it. They now have a 2 story house with two bedrooms and a full kitchen and bathroom, with a small view of the city below. It was so much fun! Most of our team was from the US. There were 2 of us that were 21 and the rest were late 20's and early 30's, the youngest group and the only Americans to work on the project! We would work 8 hours with a lunch break, then head back to our hotel to shower and change for dinner. Every night we went out to different places and cuisines and it was pretty much hit or miss everytime.

I arrived during the weekend and I learnt fast that every night most of the team goes out to party till 4am or later, usually to a cool live band karaoke place or my favorite, Club Janis (Named after Janis Joplin) where it was all underground in what would be my guess a couple brick storage rooms with little access doors to each room and mid 90's-early 2000 pop music, and its HUGE over there. Tons of Backstreet Boys and some rap here and there. Every single person smokes over there and you can smoke wherever you want, outside, inside, but only the taxi-drivers can smoke inside their cars.
On our last night in Cluj we went to a terrace bar that overlooked most of the city that was really nice and an excellent way to end the trip!