CAYLA BLEOAJA

Cayla Bleoaja is a current Fulbright research scholar based in Timisoara, Romania. Her work is focused on the relationship between trauma and resilience, specifically in the contexts of narrative and identity. She studied sociology and psychology at the University of Oxford, where her Master’s research modelling mechanisms of collective resilience won the A. H. Halsey Prize for best thesis.

“Faithfulness in the Little Things”

Q: Tell us a few things about you! Your background, your childhood and early beginnings! 

I was born in the US to Romanian political refugees and was raised in a small community of Romanian immigrants. Romanian was my first language. I was home-schooled. I wanted to be a film-scorer and a fantasy writer. I was very shy and mostly lived in my head.

Q: What are some of the key challenges in your society currently?

I have returned to Romania to apply my research in Psychology and Sociology to issues faced by disadvantaged communities in rural regions, mainly the Turk and Roma minorities.

Q: Share with us some of the hurdles that you had to overcome in your life so far? How did you handle them? 

I spent a year living on the streets and eating out of garbage cans, which made me grateful and unable to waste the gift of every crumb.

Q: Why is the role of a mentor important for you? 

I don't have many adults in my life that I can go to for professional advice or feedback. Having a mentor who can guide me through the anxieties of transitioning from being a student to working in the real world has been an incredible support.

Q: Do you have a lesson that life has taught you and you would like to share? 

You are not a machine. You are more like a garden. You need different things on different days. A little sun today, a little less water tomorrow. You have fallow and fruitful seasons. It is not a design flaw. It is wiser than perpetual sameness. What does your garden need today?

Q: Name a project, a foundation or a person in your country that you think is doing great work in helping improve other people's lives! 

In Bucharest, Romania’s capital and the eighth largest city in the EU, Roma live in slums outside of Bucharest, in neighborhoods like Ferentari, Pantelimon, Sintesti, and Fundeni. Without infrastructure like an official power grid, water or roads, Roma residents live in makeshift homes among trash dumps lined with unofficially rigged electricity cables. They illegally burn metal and plastic to sell, hiking up the city’s pollution levels by as much as 20-30%. Local authorities turn a blind eye both to their environmental breaches and toxic living conditions. 

Ana Vale and her brother are both under 25 and children raised in one of these neighborhood slums. Ana has a Law degree and has returned to her home to teach over 30 children of all ages how to read. Their evening school programme, run solely by the two of them, is a defiant effort to break the poverty of cycle they have, through hard work, overcome. 

They are doing invisible and infinitely meaningful work in a part of Romania where no one wants to look.

Q: What are some of the challenges that women in your country face and what efforts are being made towards gender equality?

Outside Constanta, Romania’s fourth largest city, in a slum outside Medgidia, a community of 5,000 Horahai and Tatar Roma (Turkish Roma who are Muslim) are not even acknowledged to exist. They are excluded from both the Roma and Turkish communities. Their children are born into large families to illiterate parents who do not register them or send them to school. Girls are sold into marriage between 10-14 years old, perpetuating a cycle of poverty. Not much is being done to help girls in such communities. My work aims to raise awareness and support local leaders who are integrated in and have history with these communities.

Q: Share with us a motto you live by. 

Faithfulness in the little things.

Q: If you had all the money needed to launch the project of your dreams, can you describe what you would do? 

My dream project targets a minority population that remains largely unacknowledged and unaddressed by Romanian government. It identifies community leaders in specific areas that have established ties with locals and supports them in making educational initiatives available to children who would otherwise be illiterate and stuck in a perpetuating cycle of poverty.

Q: Anything else that you may wish to add? 

My grandmother was born in a house of dirt and my grandfather was a shepherd who didn't have a pair of shoes until he was 14. Both never received more than 4 years of education. When my mother, who was born in Communist Romania and fled the regime at 20, landed in the US, she didn't know how to flush a toilet. I am the first person in my family to have gone to college and received a full- ride scholarship to the University of Oxford for my Masters. I stand on the shoulders of the women in my family who fought for more in life and refused to be crushed. I hope to be one of them.