The Jakarta Post
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results'God, give us rain' – Romanian monastery prays for end to drought
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
Set as preferred source
Rain prayers: Priests attend a religious service performed for rain to end the drought near Draganesti-Vlasca, Teleorman county, Romania, on July 4. (Reuters/Octav Ganea/Inquam Photos)
I
ulia Coleasa, an 81-year-old who relies on her small plot for food, traveled 15 kilometers in searing heat to a monastery in southern Romania on Sunday to join a service praying for rain.
Temperatures have spiked above 40 degrees Celsius in the country this week and the drought has left hundreds of Romanian villages with rationed water. Crops are being decimated in the country, which is an exporter of grains.
Romania's Orthodox Church has asked clerics to perform traditional rain prayers. At the Pantocrator monastery in the southern Romanian county of Giurgiu, Culeasa joined roughly 100 people in prayer.
She said the weather had never been this bad.
"I haven't seen drought like this until now," she said.
"We have children, we have cattle. We make an effort to plant tomatoes in the garden and they dry out and we have nothing to eat. God, give us rain, don't abandon us."
More than 40 percent of Romania's population of 20 million live in the countryside and many rely on subsistence agriculture on small plots of land. The country has massive investment needs in infrastructure, including roads, running water and irrigation.
More from The Weekender
Is AI really making us better workers?
AI can make our work faster and more polished. But by eliminating the struggle, mistakes and imperfections, it may also be eliminating some of the ways we learn and become better workers.
Travels in the land of Gen Z
To become a professor to Gen Z today is to take a disorienting journey to an exotic land. First of two parts.
More trains, more stations, but Greater Jakarta still isn’t connected
Jakarta now has more trains and stations. But getting to them from Depok, Bogor, Tangerang or Bekasi still means an ojek or a car ride.
