Books for young Romanians in Ukraine
 2009-08-08/10:06 Young people from Chisinau went yesterday to the National Theatre of Opera and Ballet to donate books for the Romanians from Novosiolovka, Ukraine. This was a gesture of support for the students of the Romanian-language school from the village. The donation includes a collection of school textbooks for different grades as well as literature, dictionaries etc.
As a child, Andrei Creacico, the initiator of this project, was spending all of his vacations at his grandparents in this village. Now he is a student in Bucharest. He says he doesn’t agree with the situation created in the Romanian villages of Ukraine, where, in the last years the process of “Ukrainization” becomes more and more obvious.
“I am well aware of the situation in Satul Nou /Novosiolovka/ and I thought how I could help them. First of all, I brought them some of my own books, then I asked for my friends’ help and they agreed to assist me. Thus, we decided to organise something bigger”, Andrei confessed.
“It’s a noble gesture. I don’t know too much about those young people from the Romanian villages of the Odessa region, but I think they need our help”, Stela Vulpe, Andrei’s friend mentioned.
Grigorie Ciobanu, who came with a set of books, said that even though his contribution is not big, he hopes it will find its place on the village library’s shelves and will be useful to his peers. “I brought several books on history, literature, textbooks of Romanian language and Math”, he said.
Dinu-Cristian Cibotaru, the coordinator of the event, said that “it is a natural desire to help your conationals , your brothers”. “This young people are “encouraged” by the Ukrainian authorities to forget their mother tongue, but they deserve our respect for using it the way they do. It is a serious situation, which we, Moldovans, are likely to face soon, if we don’t change our path towards our authentic non-politicized values”, Dinu-Cristian believes.
Novosiolovka is part of the Sarata district, Odessa Region. Between the two World Wars, Satul Nou was part of the Cetatea-Alba County. The village is more the 200 years old, while its main population has always been composed of Romanians.
More than 120,000 Romanian-speakers live in the Odessa Region. The number of Romanian-language schools however, reduces each year. Most of them are transformed to mixed schools (Ukrainian-Romanian or Russian-Romanian), while in the rest Romanian is no longer a study language, but only one of the subjects in the school curriculum.
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