Cluj

We returned to Budapest on Saturday. Tari did several loads of laundry so we would have enough to last us for the next week in Cluj, Romania. On Sunday we went to Deak ter Erzsébet tér and took pictures of the art work representing inventions for women—a large washing machine you could stand in, a vacuum cleaner, an electric iron, a giant lipstick and eyelash mascara applicator with a woman’s pant suit in between, a giant leg with a nylon stocking and a bra.

We got up bright and early Monday morning to catch the train at Keleti pu for Cluj. It is about a seven hour train ride, but it was cheaper than flying and we arrived about the same time we would have if we had flown. We were in first class which had electric outlets so I could plug in my computer and work for quite a while.

We were met by Eugen and Melita his graduate student at the train station. I had met Eugen on my first trip to Cluj in 1999. MSU and Roger Hamlin had sent me there for a month as part of an exchange program with Babes Bolyai University on the topic of civil society. I was sent back two years later for another month and Eugen and I worked on a paper we later presented at APHA in Chicago. I was in Cluj a third time for a week on my own in 2003.

Eugen was going to arrange a conference presentation for me on Health Care Reform: Clinton to Obama. I thought it was going to be on Tuesday but he said it had to be moved to Thursday to accommodate some people who had classes on Tuesday. I had been revising my presentation almost daily as events over the past two week culminated in the passage of the Senate’s health care bill by the House, Obama signing it, and then the passage of the side car fix it bill in the House, then by the Senate. I expected Obama to sign it on Monday but he made a surprise visit to Afghanistan. He did sign on it Wednesday so with that last revision, my presentation was complete.

On Monday night we went to the Cluj Jewish Community Seder. We arrive about 7:40 around sunset, but learned the actual service had begun around 7. It looked like they had gone straight through the service, for as we entered they were singing the traditional songs accompanied by a piano and violin. A woman with a trained voice sang Next Year in Jerusalem. So we sat down and after a few minutes began to eat. The food was very good—the matzo balls were really light. We guess about 100 people were there and two tables seemed to have the cantor and choir for they occasionally broke into song and at the end led a chain dance around the room. We sat at what was the head table with the congregation religious leader who was a professor of physical chemistry and his wife, the retired head of the Judaic studies and his wife, and the president of the community group.

On Tuesday we walked around the downtown area. It had changed quite a bit over the ten years. Two way streets were now one way—a sure sign of urban maturity; and a boulevard now has traffic in only one diretion, and thre traffic lanes on the other side were made into a pedestrian walkway. Several of the older hotels and restaurants were closed, and a few rather upscale restaurants had opened. The streets and sidewalks were in good condition. Our hotel, which was an old one had been refurbished.

That evening we had dinner with Shari a Fulbrighter from Rutgers teaching in Social Work. She was in the same department as Eugen but she didn’t know him. She had become very ill during the Fulbright orientation in Bucharest in February and had to be hospitalized. She was grateful for the visits from both the Romanian Fulbright office and someone from the US embassy in Bucharest. She was able to return to Cluj but had taken things easy the past several weeks. She had earned her bachelors and PhD degree from MSU and we quickly found many people in common, including one of her professors who had been a neighbor of ours in East Lansing. He retired and she had been unable to get in touch with him. We had visited him on the West Coast a few years ago and I later sent them both emails to put them back in touch.

We had lunch with the Brubecks on Wednesday. We got more details on their activities in Cluj and the complications of trying to arrange charity concerts in May despite the Cluj airport being closed for a week.

That afternoon we attended a social work class involving dealing with teen pregnancy and smoking. One of the student had planned a set of exercises, role playing etc. It was interesting. Someone sat near us and gave us a rough translation of the main points during the role playing.

My presentation was on Thursday afternoon. Before it began I was interviewed by two local TV stations and a newspaper reported. They wanted to know what could be learned for Romania from the US experience. I said that it was more a matter of political will and politics than rational economic decision making. A large majority was needed and Obama had just enough votes to carry in the Senate. Building a large majority in a Parliamentary system such as Romania might prove to be difficult. The Conservatives would not want anything changed and the liberals would want more than they could possibly get. Obama had spent the previous year making deals with the pharmaceutical companies, American Medical Association, the hospitals, unions etc. I also said that Romania was coming from a different situation than the US. Most Romanian physicians were either hospital employees or got paid by the one single insurance company, compared to US physicians who at one point were more like small businesses and were paid differing amounts by various insurance plans. Many US hospitals had been developed by religious groups so there were Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist and Jewish hospitals. These had their own financial resources, and the hospitals also were paid by several different insurance plans. Finally physicians and hospital staff in Central and Eastern Europe were often given extra money under the table by patients and their families. When the move towards market insurance and deductibles was put in place a few years earlier, people rebelled. Why pay above the table for something that might be less than what you would get under the “old” system of paying under the table.

The presentation itself went about an hour with a translation after each slide. At first no one asked questions but then some did and the session went on for another twenty minutes or so. Shari was there as was Paul, another Fulbrighter whom I had met on his first Fulbright in 1999. He asked me what I thought would happen in the November elections. I said for the democrats, they would have trouble selling umbrellas on a rainy day. They just never seemed able to get their point across in a way that both captured the media attention and explained what their positions were. But the phasing in of the Health Care reforms over the year—things starting April 1st July 1st and October 1st would give them three built in opportunities to get the word out to different constituencies that would gain benefits. For the republicans, they might be able to take advantage of the confusion and hostility related to such a large change, but for the first time their slogan of Repeal and Restart was not on a par with Contract for America that they used in 1994 after defeating Clinton. While the right wing tea party could keep up the emotional fervor they could also split the party in the forthcoming primaries and possibly in November as well. I thought that was an even handed assessment without a true prediction.

The train ride back was uneventful. It was strange to realize that our home was now the flat, and it was good to get back to familiar surroundings. Having been in Germany and Romania, we were, however, afraid that we had lost what little Hungarian we had picked up.