Graduate Student Uses Her Romanian Heritage to Engage Others

At first glance, Ioana Zivku is another graduate student working towards the completion of her degree. However, the journey leading to her arrival at LU as a first-generation Romanian American raised in the tight-knit community of the Romanian Baptist Church is far from ordinary.

As she grew up, Zivku’s home in Hollywood, Florida was constantly bustling with close family friends. Traditional pickled foods were readily available, and Romanian hymns echoed through every room. 

Both of Zivku’s parents came from Romania, but it was her mother’s family who fled their home when she was just 16-years-old to escape former Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu’s crippling Communist regime.

“They had to line up every morning really early to get their rations for the day and a lot of the time, when they got there the shelves were already empty,” Zivku said. 

Zivku’s grandparents waited months to get their visas, hoping to find refuge in a country where they would have food, freedom, and endless opportunity.

“That stereotypical story that we hear of ‘We had to walk through snowstorms to get to school every morning because we needed our education,’ that was literally what my mom came from. So to come to a city like Chicago that was bustling and established, and the opportunity to make a name for yourself and to become profitable was really exciting,” Zivku said.

Upon their arrival in Chicago, Illinois in 1983, Zivku’s grandparents were met with a great deal of sympathy from Americans who had heard in passing of the horrors taking place in Romania. 

“I think that at that time people were a little bit more aware of the dangers of Communism, even younger people. I think that’s what made the Romanian community feel so comfortable with settling in and being so prevalent and I guess proud,” Zivku said. 

Zivku’s mother made it a point to marinate her in Romanian culture by homeschooling her for the majority of her life and encouraging her to become heavily involved in their local Romanian Church. While the Romanian community they became a part of in Florida was not completely closed off to outsiders, it was incredibly tight knit.

“I genuinely don’t think I had a single American friend until high school and even then, it wasn’t intentional. It was only because my Romanian friends from church would bring their friends from their public schools to our church,”
Zivku said.

For a majority of Zivku’s early life, she lived parallel to her American peers. She did not intersect with them until she left the safety net of her Romanian community to
attend college.

“Really, my first year of community college in Florida was when I entered the American world,” Zivku said.

Zivku’s decision to attend Liberty University for the remainder of her education came as a surprise to her church, for she was only the second member of the church to attend college out of state. She longed to attend LU in part because her mom attended the university many years prior.

When she first arrived at Liberty, Zivku wanted to resurrect the flourishing Romanian culture her mother worked tirelessly to cultivate on campus roughly two decades prior. However, this dream never fully came into fruition as Zivku discovered there was little Romanian culture left at Liberty, and it was up to her to incorporate Romanian culture into her life in Lynchburg. 

“The Romanian culture at Liberty was really just what I made it to be. I think rather than becoming closely involved with other Romanians, I was able to introduce my non-Romanian friends to my culture and what growing up was like,” Zivku said. 

She prioritized sharing her family’s story with those around her to plant pieces of their origin wherever she went.

“Truly being someone’s friend is being interested in who they were before you met them. Being able to ask questions about someone’s past to really understand them is really important to me,” Zivku said.

While Zivku is able to find pieces of her culture to keep her company in a very American setting, she does wish she had connected to more Romanians in her earlier years on campus.

As she prepares to graduate, Zivku wants nothing more than to show a homesick Romanian student that there is a way to meet Romanians here, whether it is through a Romanian family at the local farmer’s market, the International Students Center, or the huge annual gathering in Hickory, North Carolina held by the traditional Romanian music group Desculti.

Zivku remembers her childhood fondly and remains grateful to her parents for their Romanian pride and willingness to teach her about the land they love dearly.    

“To my parents, the biggest thing I would say is thanks to them, especially to my mom for having the courage to withstand what she experienced in Romania and being willing to carry the good and treasured parts of her culture on to me,” Zivku said. 

Nadia Vires is a Feature Reporter. Follow her on Twitter at @nadiavires.