Meet a woman who has never been afraid to make life changing decisions.

In her small kitchen, Leslie Hawke turns on the oven to heat up the dishes for the guests who are about to arrive in an hour. They will talk about the Halloween Charity Ball, a fundraising event organized this October by Ovidiu Ro, the NGO Leslie co-founded.  It smells like coffee and Indian food, and  a few rays of light sneak into the kitchen from the tiny balcony filled with plants.

Wearing jeans and a blue shirt, she has her hair bound in a bun and looks very confident. “People need incentives to do anything. I find it hard to believe that anybody doesn’t understand that. It’s like gravity. It’s just a law of the world,” she explains.

This belief underpins the programs Leslie helped created since she moved to Romania in 2000, including the most ambitious one “Every child in kindergarten.” A 50-lei food coupon is offered as incentive to poor families every month to send their children to kindergarten.

The decision
Leslie was 37 when her son, the actor Ethan Hawke, left home when he was18 to pursue his acting career. She had a whole life in front of her, but it took a while to figure out what she was going to do. By then she had worked her way up into a publishing company in New York and raised her son,  but she had never felt that what she was doing made any difference into the world.  “I wanted to do something useful, valuable in the world, but I had a kid early, I got divorced early, I had to support my kid, so I couldn't go into the Peace Corps, or take job in an NGO, where they pay little money, because I wanted to give him a middle class childhood.”

When she was 48, she decided to join the Peace Corps, that assigned her to an NGO in Bacau, a city in the Eastern part of Romania. She wasn’t scared of leaving her life in New York, because she has always felt that she knows how to get out of situations if she doesn't like them. “I’ve been married three times. The first two marriages I don’t consider them failures, but they had a shelf life and they expired. They dissolved. I didn't feel like I had to stay married forever. I am very impulsive.”

The fact of having a baby at 18, almost 19, was also very impulsive, Leslie explains. “I didn’t accidentally get pregnant. I wanted to have a kid. I had a really hard childhood and I think a lot of times people who have difficulties one way of dealing with them is...you kind of want to re-do it yourself. You want to have a kid and do it better.”

“It was a crazy thing, but just like joining the Peace Corps, it worked out. The most bizarre things I’ve made have worked out for me. I have been really lucky.”

The 20 years
About half an hour before the guests arrive for the dinner, Maria Gheorghiu, the other co-founder of the Ovidiu Ro organisation, shows up. She wears a blue dress and white flats, and moves around with a lot of familiarity.  She seems more extrovert than Leslie, who is rather reserved in the beginning, but it’s obvious even for an outsider that they get along so well than one glance can spare them a lot of sentences. And it’s also quite clear that they are very determined persons, who won’t yield to uncertainty.

Upon moving to Bacau in 2000, Leslie was shocked by the high numbers of kids begging on the street, and soon learned that it was a survival strategy for illiterate parents who were not qualified for any kind of job. She understood that these kids need to be integrated into the education system early on. In 2001, she met Maria Gheorghiu, who was working as a teacher, and understood that she was the person who could coordinate the children’s program. They had lunch and decided they should work together. In 2004 they founded their own NGO, back then called Ovidiu Rom.

“We set a goal, I think it was 2006. Let’s commit to do this until 2020. That’s a generation, that’s 20 years. Social programs take a generation to take root,” Leslie says. “I get so frustrated with these grants that are for 18 months. It’s just getting started. It’s ridiculous for them to think that you can start something in 18 months and then you are on your own. They don’t want to make people dependant, but they make people fail.”

She goes on explaining how the effort and time needed for a social program are not that different from the ones required to raise your kids. They are your main focus for 20 years, until they go off on their own. But when the kids go, they just fly away. “And the parents, we are always a little surprised because they adored us so much when they were little.”

“But it cycles back around,” Leslie adds. “Now Ethan is in his 40s, and he’s been saying: “you know, mom, you really should be thinking about moving back to New York. It would be nice if the little ones could go to grandma in the afternoon. And I was like..it’s music to my ears, but it’s not really an option. I couldn’t even afford a place in New York City.”

The sky
“I grew up in Texas where the sky is a big part of your life,” Leslie says. “It’s very, very flat so you can see forever.” As a 10-year old girl, she wanted to be a famous actress. She hanged out a lot at the Regional Theatre and loved being in an empty theatre. But she wasn’t a performer, she didn’t feel like one. “I get in front of an audience, in front of a camera, and I kind of freeze. The thing I noticed about Ethan from the time he was 6 years old, the more people were looking at him, the more relaxed he got. If you’re a performer, that fires you.”

In the middle of Leslie’s living room, there is a black & white picture, of a young woman and man. It seems like a 70s’ movie poster. He is looking at the camera, vaguely smiling, while she dreamily looks away. And even if they don’t stay close to each other and they don’t make funny faces, they express so well the joy and innocence of being young. “It’s me and my husband, David,” Leslie explains. And even if it’s not a real movie poster, its story seems like a movie.

The photo was taken the day when Leslie and David met and she was 17. Leslie had just married Ethan’s father, Jim, a week prior, and they went on a trip to New York, where they met two of Jim’s friends, David and Danny. The boys asked Leslie what she would like to see in the city, and she didn’t want to say The Statue of Liberty, so she said... The Brooklyn Bridge. That’s where the picture was taken.

“David and I haven’t spoken in years and years and years. He got married,  had a bunch of kids, I got married, divorced, then came to Romania and in 2011, about 30 years after the picture was taken, he wrote to me.” His last daughter went away to college and the next day he wrote her a letter. They started emailing,  then they met in London for a weekend, then he came to Bucharest for Thanksgiving. They got married on Christmas.

“There is something about being with somebody that you do have history with. But it wasn’t like we really knew each other. I met his children the day before we got married and I saw his house for the first time after we were married,” she says laughing.

As soon as the evening comes, and the sky fills with shades of pink and blue and all kinds of pastels, more and more birds gather. Leslie sits on her terrace, at the seventh floor of a building, and likes to watch how the crows come across, then how the seagulls come. When they do, it already gets dark. They are underlit, so they look white, and they are just floating. “I sit out there and have a glass of wine and maybe write emails to my husband and watch the birds’ show.” The terrace is overlooking Bucharest, old roofs of a decaying beauty, some other terraces, and the sky which goes on forever.

The OvidiuRo Halloween Ball will take place at the People's Palace in Bucharest on October 25, 2014, after a three-year break. This year, the ball will have Movie Magic as its main theme, and will raise funds to support early education in Romania.

By Diana Mesesan, features writer, diana@romania-insider.com

(photo by Diana Mesesan)