A MEMORY FROM THE STUDENT TIMES

Dormitory sleeps next to the mechanism that holds the gum that transports the coal down the gallery to the skip mine. Around two o’clock in the morning, I’m sitting on a blackboard that someone improvised in front of me, and on my knee is a student’s notebook, from which I was going to reread some notes, but I couldn’t concentrate and finally fell asleep.

It was supposed to be the summer session, but that year – 1988 – the Ministry of Mines and the Ministry of Defense failed in their negotiations and the soldiers were barracked, temporarily leaving the mines in the Jiu Valley without (presumably) a third of the workforce. The party found a way out together with the Senate of the Institute of Mining: we postpone the session for a month and put the students in the mine until the soldiers return. After all, this is the best way to learn a craft!

I start from sleep and see laser beams from three or four lamps far down the gallery, I carefully stand up, pick up a shovel lying on the gallery armature nearby, and pretend to work, aimlessly slapping the conveyor belt past. I was inspired. An excited engineer ran in uninvited, followed by a foreman and about two more miners by the color of their helmets.

“What are you,” the engineer quickly asks me, “are you a student or on a business trip?” A student, I say. fine. – Shall we take him? he asks turning back. – Yes, Mr. Engineer, we need to take, we need a lot of shovels for carom! OK, he decides, and then to me: “Come on! Take this shovel with you! I obey and follow them.” On the way, he begins to collect in a long procession whoever he meets, most of them, like me, are students.

– Where does this take us? – one of my colleagues asks me, I didn’t know him very well, he was from another TV series. “I don’t know, I have no idea, but I think this leads us to an inclined plane from the silo,” I express my opinion, interpreting fragments of their discussions. “But why?” – he was officially surprised. “I don’t know bro, we’ll see! Yeah, I think there’s a carom and another nasty one I hear!”

I was actually very aware that it was a lane stuck in tons of mud on the silo and that we would have to shovel until our hands fell off to free it and it would start pouring again. Since it was two o’clock in the morning, I didn’t feel like talking, my head was dizzy from the thoughts of what was to come.

When I got there, I saw a management man (probably the chief engineer) who was very nervous, shouting orders and cursing at the top of his lungs: “Well, you students have to put all this crap in the bunker! With your nails?” What’s wrong with this, he’s stupid, we look at each other confused. And slowly, slowly, we understand: one of ours – this time it turned out to be my close colleague, I knew him well – fell asleep and did not see that the tape was turning, stopped and muted, after which it broke and slid down one third. Not just a car accident, but a broken lane! Great grief! Scandal!

Let’s get to work. We, like robots, whip our shovels with curses for the fact that the mine is with production, that the students sleep on the job and do not do their work: “Well, what kind of engineers will you be, bastards, shit… in… scoundrels who come to sleep at me!” Meanwhile, another engineer arrived from outside, short and fat, notebook in hand, approaches each student and writes down their names. We watch in amazement as he painstakingly writes down name after name like a bureaucrat, and curse him in our thoughts.

At about four in the morning we cleared as much space as we could and then they had us pull on some ropes to get the rubber mat back into position for stitching[2]. The tape turned out to be extremely difficult to lift, and we chose a new tub of swearing, among the most current. At about half past five I put the ends of the rubber conveyor mat in place and the two vulcanizer miners began stitching.

We ask for permission to go to the well, to go to the surface, because the frame was ending. We get a new stream of abuse and this time we rebel, we fight back, we abuse back. Mahar shouted until he lost his voice, “I imprison you all without motivation! I am reporting on you the rector and I am proud! Well… in the village… fools! Because of you, the mine is standing! and you want to go out?” And he keeps like that for about half an hour, then he lets us go outside or we forced something, I don’t remember well.

When we get to the changing rooms, we can’t find hot water, and then, as if it could be another surprise, there is no bus at the convention to take us home. In the evening, when we returned to duty, we found that the driver really wanted to shorten our working day, as he had promised, but the manager agreed only in the case of our unfortunate colleague, who fell asleep and did not supervise the machine, and the rest of us, from the fat list, he left us two hours out of eight, the very night we were working on the cheese.

“Well, why aren’t those who forgot to check the protection and automation on the conveyor also cut the wages?” we make insulting comments on the way to our workplaces and decide that if we are faced with such a situation, harassment, we will accept rudeness and stop working. There was no need, there was an unspoken pact of mutual ignorance for the rest of the days we were to spend underground.

Looking back, I am well aware that this incident, as well as others I encountered in my youth – as a high school student or university student – in contact with the “work environment” and “production” made me bitterly regret not having fought harder, more seriously with myself, with my family, with my teachers for my dream to study not technology, but history or philosophy, as I secretly dreamed. Later, after three or more years of production, at the first opportunity I left mining and chose another life, another profession, another future.

In fact, everything is an illusion, because the mine as I knew it, then the mining communities, the whole atmosphere in which I grew up, studied and developed, remained in my blood. When it comes to pleasant memories, I sometimes have to search for them because they come back to my mind harder than the unpleasant ones that come up and are more painful, but nevertheless I am attached to Jiu Valley until then while I live in -a a story of love and hate which cannot be redeemed.

AND LIVING JOY TODAY

This is not the first time I have written about Valea Jiului – I sincerely apologize to those who are fed up with this topic – and I want to hope that after a long preamble I will be better understood if I say that I do not pay for mines that close , but I deeply regret the inept, sometimes malicious management of the current process of deindustrialization of the Gee Valley.

What gives me hope are the many private initiatives that are emerging in Val Dziului with the stated aim of reuniting the community – after the communist strikes after the 1977 strike that were intended to tear it apart – and to preserve the memory of 150 years of mining minerals, without which the Jiului Valley would not exist, or laying the foundations of the region’s new economic infrastructure, from tourism to high-end industrial production.

Last year, I was delighted to visit a complex of murals created in the pilot project of events Bright Jiu Valleydeveloped by civil society ie allied NGOs in the Jiu Valley Coalition[3]. This year Bright Jiu Valley it took place at different coordinates, eight days, but I was able to attend only the first two. – Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro