Photo: BIRN

For most Europeans, indoor bathrooms and toilets became the norm at last half-a-century ago. Not so in Romania, where almost half of Romania’s 19.5 million people still live in rural areas and many lack even the most basic facilities.

Daniela Nica lives in a village only 14 kilometres from Bucharest with her husband and their three-year old daughter. But her one-room house does not even boast running water.

“We have to heat the water on the wood stove and we use a plastic basin for washing ourselves or our daughter. We can’t afford a bathroom,” the 26-year-old woman said.

“I am not employed, I do the housework and my husband works only occasionally. Our average monthly income is about 900 lei [200 euro],” she added.

Sociologists say that basic hygiene and health are still seen as a luxury in rural parts of Romania.

“We wash up to three times a week but my grandmother, for instance, washes only on Saturdays, at the end of the working week,” Nica observed.

According to statistics, only 28 per cent of households in the rural areas of Romania have an indoor bathroom and less than half are connected to water mains, while only some 60 per cent have a toilet inside the house.

Social Democrat MP Aurelia Cristea recently asked the government to introduce a national program, called “First Bathroom” or “From Basin to Bathroom”, which would grant 200 euro to families to install bathrooms in households that don’t have one.

According to Cristea, some 17 per cent of Romanian rural households would benefit from this program, meaning households with running water but which do not have indoor bathrooms.

“A program such as the one I am proposing would contribute to significantly increasing living standards, health awareness and hygiene indices in the countryside,” Cristea said, emphasizing the need to address the health risks facing a great number of Romanians in rural areas.