♫♫ Rising Voices ♫♫ Most of my nice memories from that point in time are related to playing tennis. I was very impressed by playing tennis on the next tennis court to the one where the famous Ion Ţiriac was playing He's world known even now. I was completely forgetting what to do. My team was vitally interested in me gaining that play because it was sort of a small scale Davis Cup so my team had to gain that point. They all went to have lunch and they left me there because they were very sure that I was going to win. And by the time they came back I was led by the other girl who was very very weak at that time compared to me but still I was all ears and eyes to see what happens to the famous player I still remember, it was one of the very few slaps in my face that I got from my couch. David: He literally slapped you in your face? He did, he did. Twice. ♫♫♫ ♫♫♫ David: What was the first time that you left Eastern Europe? It was shortly after the revolution. When I started working with the hospice. David: And when you told people that you were Romanian, what were their reactions? What did they associate with Romania? Very early after the revolution in Romania I remember people had heard ... at least in the environments that I visited in the UK I remember I was at a school to talk about the revolution and tell people how it was to live in Romania and most of the things that they had heard about Romania were related to nightmarish stories like children in orphanages or children being infected with HIV so that was probably the first images for the western countries from Romania. Which is sad because we were put under this stigma of poor children and in fact there were poor and neglected children in society which was and is a truth unfortunately even now for some children But for me I found it unfair because actually my country has other things as well to show and to give. Apart from that, we were also frustrated because we had been living for so many years in that communist system. without knowing that there were such unfortunate children living probably very close to us in orphanages and we hadn't had an idea of how terrible their situation was. With the EU accession some things are slowly - probably too slowly - but are changing toward the better. Because some European rules or standards are trying to be if not imposed at least suggested to the country. which are in fact good. We probably would like to see changes being more rapid. I remember after the fall of communism in 1989 one of our famous political How do you call them? People who make comments on politics? David: Analyst? Analyst, yeah. Political analyst. He said our Romania will need at least 20 years to recover after communism and we were all laughing. And here we are, exactly after 20 years seeing that he was perfectly right. And probably from somewhere up there he is smiling to see that he was more than right. And changes are very slow. ♫♫ Rising Voices ♫♫