'I found out what money worries really mean'
Pregnant and anxious about the future, Tessa Dunlop turned to her Romanian mother-in-law for advice. What she heard put her own troubles in perspective
Finding some perspective in these chilly financial times should be easy for me; I spent much of my young adult life in one of the poorest countries in Europe - Romania.
It began as a gap year; I worked in a large psychiatric hospital for children and returned the following summer to teach English at Iasi University. It was the early 1990s, the country was broken and the population was in shock. Under Nicolae Ceausescu, they had been crushed by the cruellest of communist regimes and readjustment was proving painful.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/sep/22/1