We brought with us colored paper, glue crayons, pens, pencils, paints, some Hungarian books, notebooks and a globe. I also brought food coloring and cream of tarter to make playdough for the classrooms to use. I am hoping they will make their own materials, beyond just playdough, with some of the art supplies we brought. Life is hard in this village to be sure. The people are hard- working subsistence farmers struggling to maintain their own ethnic identity in a changing political climate that they have difficulty understanding.
News seems to come from word of mouth and television broadcasts.
There is a television in almost every home. Children, faced with little hope for economic progress, leave home to work in the factories and jobs of the cities or move to Hungary. So the villages are aging rapidly and in real risk of dying out. In order to educate their children past the 8th grade parents must send them to board with family or friends in larger towns where there is a high school. And while this seems a small amount to us, it is more than half a month s salary for most of these people.