The 'crazy Englishman' who doesn't leave his battlefield

When he was a wild, untamed kid, and a bully and when the headmaster gave him the task to come to school a half hour earlier everyday and to put all the clocks at the correct time, Ian Tilling understood one of the most important lessons of his life: Give people responsibility and they’ll take it. As we sit down at our table and order coffees, Ian hands me some papers, saying that they might help me with the article. At this point of our meeting, I’m as clueless about Ian as you probably are. All I know are a few details about his work here. So he gives me these lines he wrote about himself for another project. On top of the page I see a quote, made up of about ten simple words which run directly to the heart, like a very strong drink. “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” The words are a small excerpt from a song called “Anthem”, written by Leonard Cohen in 1992. It starts like this: “The birds they sang at the break of day Start again I heard them say Don’t dwell on what has passed away or What is yet to be.” When Leonard Cohen wrote this song, he was 58, had a whole career behind him and his voice was no longer soft. But after decades of melancholy, Leonard Cohen discovered hope and he was preaching it with a powerful, harsh voice. Ian Tilling first listened to Leonard Cohen in Vama Veche, in 1994. He had been in Romania for two years, and had gone from enthusiasm to desperation. But much like Leonard, he too discovered hope later in his life. Ian and I sat talking for hours and at some point I stopped the recorder. We had become old friends talking about fight, loss, redemption and all the tiny and big things which make up a life. So this story about Ian will inevitably be a story about all this and sometimes won’t be very different from an anthem, because should there be no cracks, how would the light get in? The beginnings Before he first got to Romania, in 1990, Ian had been working in the UK police, so when it came to human misery and suffering, he was no apprentice. “I’ve seen all sorts of horrors, but there was nothing, absolutely nothing that could prepare me for what was here. It was misery on the worst scale. ” Right after the 1989 Romanian Revolution, the Western countries were flooded with pictures of the Romanian orphanages and care institutions, terrible pictures which seemed almost unreal. “The idea was to come over here for one month and do what we could and to see for ourselves what the situation was, because often what you get on TV is perverted.” But it was much worse than anything they had shown on TV. “You got a bunch of kids who spent seven and a half, eight years in coops, lying up against each other; never left their coops, still wearing nappies, half the size of seven years old. They weren’t walking and as soon we got them lifted out of their coops and unto the floor to play with them, they started screamed. They lost all their security. Sooner or later they started engaging with each other, started walking. It was a whole learning thing. We gave them toys, they had no idea what a toy was.“ Ian was just one of the thousands foreigners who came here at the beginning of the ‘90s. Other than war time, Europe has never seen such a mobilization of people - just ordinary men and women who decided they wanted to help this country in the middle of nowhere, Ian says. But people got disillusioned quite quickly. “It’s a difficult country here to work. They would be donating furniture and other things and coming back a few months later to discover that what they donated was no longer there.” After spending one month at a child institution in Plataresti, while he was driving back to the UK, Ian knew he never ever wanted to return to Romania. “It was awful. My heart felt empty, it was like somebody sucked me dry.” So he decided to drive from Bucharest to Vienna just to get out of this part of Europe. “We woke up, we got breakfast and we started walking around Vienna. And then I saw this shop window that was displaying sanitary items, but at the view of it I was so God -smacked. It was such a change of colors. I’ve lived in a world without any colors only for a month and it was an extraordinary impact.” Thousands of miles away from Bucharest, deep in the heart of a prosperous Western city, Ian understood that this world he was getting back to was already settled down and no longer needed anything. “I suppose as much as it was a cultural shock going from West to East, it was a bigger cultural shock going back. In the sense that you got used to living with very little, to being very resourceful and then you went back to a town where nobody wanted you for anything, shops were full and there were 20 brands of dog food on the shell.” Instead of following the normal path for the retired policemen in the UK, managing some security company and getting paid a nice salary again, Ian jumped at the chance of coming back. So there he was in Bucharest, in 1992, putting on his “Romanian head” again, as he says, and preparing to make things move. The start was promising, as the Romanian Government gave them an apartment block in Ferentari. The idea was to create on each of the five floors a social home. Two people would act as foster parents and the children from Plataresti could live there, six on each wing and they would live like a normal family, in a normal apartment block, in a normal community. But it never happened. “They broke all their promises. Effectively we couldn’t get registered, without registration we couldn’t have a stamp and so on,” says Ian. “They were lazy bastards, nobody could see the potential, because their personal interest wasn’t met and we weren’t giving spaga (bribe), they knew that as soon as we arrived. I kind of ended up with the Romanian Government saying the project was dead, with absolutely no prospects, with nothing.” His perseverance to carry out his project despite all odds, his guts and determination in that rat race, gained him a nickname among some of its Ferentari neighbours. He was “Englezul Nebun” ( The crazy Englishman) who wouldn't give up and leave. This wasn’t just a failed business. On the Christmas before he came to Romania one of his sons was killed in a car accident. So this project was Ian’s attempt to resist the bitterness, to literally fight for life, the Plataresti kids’ life and his own life. “It was about this time when I actually had a break down. I generally went down very quickly. The woman I was working with, Cristina, now my wife, kind of took me to her parents’ house a couple of times a week, kind of fed me . And some day I met some English friends who told me to go home, because I was finished.” But on the next morning after that meeting, he woke up, went through the boxes, found a suit, a tie, got himself sober and started visiting some foreign businesses, asking for support and the result was fantastic. He slowly got the project back on its feet. “We founded an NGO called Johanna’s House, which we changed it to Casa Ioana and I ended up marrying Cristina.” What saved you? I ask Ian. “Two things,” he answers without hesitation. “Cristina, she invested a lot of time and effort in me. To have somebody who believes in you, when you’ve lost all belief in yourself, is strong. Particularly when your closest friends are saying: Go back, you’re finished, there’s nothing here, go back. And there was somebody who was Romanian and was saying: We actually need you.” “Then I really switched to becoming more Romanian. It was like a rebirth. Since those days, I haven’t seen Romania other then my own country,” says Ian. These are big words that he’s using, but there’s absolutely no trace of pretense in what he’s saying. He’s firm, straight and very honest. As we get lost in conversation he fails to mention the other thing that saved him and I fail to ask him. So when Ian’s energy was switched back on, somebody unexpected knocked at his door. The municipality of Bucharest, in the person of the mayor of Bucharest Viorel Lis asked him to do a night shelter for the homeless people. “I said no because I had no experience with homeless people. But in the end me and a Romanian friend started visiting homeless people at Gara de Nord and in some parks.” He would go there and meet about 20 of them, three, four times a week and they would get coffee and would sit there on the grass and talk. “What I said was: Look, the mayor wants us to build a night shelter, I have no idea what a night shelter is, you’re the experts, and you tell me what you need. Between us, we designed the night shelter that had a capacity for 20 men.” He also told them that he wanted two of them to supervise all the rest and they would get paid, but they needed to be responsible for the night shelter. At the opening night, the mayor came, looked around and asked where the staff is. “It’s over there, they are the supervisors,” said Ian pointing to the two homeless people. “But they are homeless people,” said Viorel Lis. “But who can have more experience with these issues than these people?” Ian answered back. Right before the official opening of the night shelter and the mayor’s visit, Ian saw an old man crying. “What’s happening? What’s the problem?” he asked. “No, no, you got it all wrong. I’ve never been so happy in my life. This is the first time I’ve been in a bed in five and a half years,” the man said. “The following morning I went there, I asked another guy how he had slept and he said: You got to be joking, I never was that comfortable in my life, I wasn’t going to waste it sleeping.” But Ian soon understood that giving them a bed won’t solve anything. “So there was this whole new concept, not getting them a new social benefit, but getting them back to work. I was telling them, there are no social apartments around, so you’re never going to get one.” Ian got some social workers to work with them, help and motivate them, help them engage with employees, get them into detox. It’s an almost impossible task because some of these guys have been on the streets for almost 10 years by this stage, Ian says. “We had some successes, but the vast majority fell because it was just me and a couple of social workers and the world. And there was no support from the Health Ministry. Nobody wanted to know.” He fully implemented his ideas in the Casa Ioana project, where the main idea is not to offer the homeless families only long-term accommodation, but to help them get a job and solve the issues that made them homeless in the first place. “80 percent of the people who come to Casa Ioana and stay on average between seven and eight months and move in into accommodation afterwards. If they run into a crisis in the future, they’ve got the necessary resources to stop them become homeless again.” The whole aim is to empower individuals, Ian says. “Empower and empowerment are words used by everybody and the people who use the word empowerment actually don’t understand it properly. Empowerment literally means taking the word power out of empowerment and giving it to somebody and saying: you have the power.” “In Casa Ioana, there’s no member staff there. The beneficiaries are responsible for looking after the accommodation, cleaning it. It’s their responsibility. Give people responsibility and they''ll take it. And they want to recover themselves. They don’t want to be in Casa Ioana for the rest of their lives. We work with a very effective life coaching, asking questions like where you want to be in a year. It’s like making a project for life. Everyone has a right to decent life, to meaningful activities.” While driving back home from Casa Ioana, under a heavy rain, Ian starts talking about the moment when he’ll have to step back and actually hand over the whole responsibility to somebody else. It’s not going to be easy, as Casa Ioana has really been his true life project. But he would like to spend some more time with his wife Cristina who has been working in Brussels for the last 13 years. And he already identified the person who would succeed him. But for this evening, he’ll go to his favorite restaurant near his home, open a book and just spend a few hours there, surrounded by people.