Roxana Dascalu- a personal tribute

Roxana Dascalu was a major force and much-loved personality in the first Reuters bureau in Bucharest, which I established in early 1990 in the wake of the Romanian Revolution.

She was a standout among the local Reuters employees who I trained in various postings during my career.

I heard the news of her death in Chalabre, France, on February 25, from two tearful Romanian friends. I must confess, I wept with them.

Obits quickly spread across the Romanian media, a mark of how popular Roxana became through her work as a journalist and later as a political activist.

I spoke to her by phone and video many times in the months before her death. She was in full character, a fighter to the end. That same fireball I had always known and admired.

In post-revolutionary Bucharest in 1990 when I first met Roxana, the atmosphere was electric.

People had not known freedom for decades. And now, here it was. The dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was finally gone. You could feel that mood of being off the leash among all the local people who staffed our office over the following couple of years. There was a great sense of fun and camaraderie. And Roxana was the queen of the party.

She was enthusiastic, a brilliant linguist, fast translator, extremely well-read, a smart information gatherer, door opener and drinking buddy. At times she was hard to keep up with.

She was the brightest and fastest of the Romanian staff to learn the Reuters way of writing. She had great sources and was always quick to dig out the news and beat the competition.

I remember that we once crawled together through the sewers of Bucharest to interview homeless orphans for a story. She took me to farmers’ homes among her extended kin to teach me about Romanian rural life.

We joked about the fact we were both born in the Chinese Year of the Monkey (1956). We called ourselves the “two monkeys”. Roxana shared my tendency to drink one too many, a habit that she carried to her final exit. She went off in style, with plenty of wine in her hospice room.

She was under my wing for more than four years until I left Romania to take up a fellowship at Harvard. I knew that I was leaving behind a star. We remained in touch all these years, and she consulted me when she was writing her book Chronicles of the East several years ago. “Reuters changed my life”, she wrote.

After 10 years with Reuters from 1990 she became one of the casualties in a shameless downsizing of the bureau but migrated easily into the PR industry and later became an independent consultant and civic affairs activist with a mission to protect Romania’s fledgling democracy and EU orientation. She was still advising Romanian civic groups until the end of her life.

A year ago, after Romania was swept by a pro-Russian and extremist political wave, spearheaded by far-right presidential contender Calin Georgescu, Roxana sprang to life and rallied people to push back to reclaim the pro-European Romania.

Two months ago, she held an online gathering of 50 Romanian friends and associates, which she called a “celebration of love”. She knew the end was near from the cancer she had fought for years, and she wanted “to be remembered for the good times we all had together”, not as a sick old woman. She wanted the gathering to be one of “Auld Lang Syne” and “a Cup of Love”, Roxana told me.

I had arranged a Valentine’s Day online event for her with many ex-Reuters colleagues around the world, but before it could happen, she collapsed, and 10 days later she was taken from us.

Wherever she has gone, I hope she is now at rest. I will miss her. We all will miss her. But I do wonder if, like the character Monkey in the Chinese fable Journey to the West, she is now “making trouble in heaven”. 

She leaves behind a step-daughter, Andrea Tanasescu, the daughter of her second husband Radu who pre-deceased Roxana.
 

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