Saaremaa, Estonia: A conversation with Terje (b. 1970)
I met with Terje via video link in March of 2021.
Terje works for an NGO based in Estonia called the LEADER Union. The mission of the NGO is to be “a social partner in the legislative process, competent in developing its members and the guardian of LEADER principles in the development of rural areas.”
Terje describes herself as hard-working, family-oriented, and cheerful (although at times a bit anxious). She also describes herself as diplomatic, a skill that proves to be quite useful in her line of work.
I like spending time with my family. I spend almost all of my free time with them. I have my own house and my own garden. I grow my own potatoes, strawberries, tomatoes, cucumbers, and more. I like to go to the sauna with my family. This is a very relaxing activity.
We have a dog, so we like to walk for long distances with the dog. Travelling is our hobby. We used to travel with our car across Europe: going to Italy, Venice. We like to travel by plane, also. I have tickets to Tenerife that I am hoping to use in April, if this is possible.
I like reading books and magazines about women’s life. We also enjoy Alpine skiing in southern Estonia. We went skiing in Italy, also. Here in Saaremaa we can’t do that, but when possible we like to go and drive to go skiing in southern Estonia.
I was born in Paide, a little town in the center of Estonia. I lived with my parents in a little apartment on the fourth floor. I went to kindergarten there. During the holidays, I lived in the village with my grandparents. I remember it being a really sunny time, because there were many things to do. They had many agricultural animals there: goats, cows, and sheep. In the summertime, I remember we had to make hay for the animals.
All of the children were together. It was a really interesting time. We used, for example, horses to bring together hay. I think that my childhood was very happy, because I had my parents, my grandparents, and also other relatives who were in the village.
Paide is a very little town. All of my memories of there are good and sunny. I was six years old when we moved — it was the Soviet time, and there was a big and famous collective farm near Paide. There were a lot of jobs and better salaries, so my father decided to go to work at the collective farm. He worked to supply and find parts for agricultural machineries. My mother was a teacher. She started teaching at the basic school there. The village name was Väätsa. It was maybe 10 kilometers from Paide, where I was born.
Then, I started to go to the basic school there, at the same school where my mother was a teacher. My father’s dream was to own a little house in the countryside. My parents built our house up themselves. I was seven years old when we moved into our own house. It was also an interesting time — this building time, when I was six or seven years old. I slept on the floor as my parents built the house.
When I was seven years old, then my little sister was born. My grandmother from the village also moved to live with us, because my grandfather was already dead. We were a big family in one house.
My grandmother was at home all the time. I remember that when my school day ended, I would go home and see my grandmother waiting for me. There was warm food ready. In Estonia, we eat a lot of potatoes — because during the Soviet times, we didn’t have a lot of goods in the shops. We had to grow our food ourselves: potatoes, carrots, pigs. It was common at the time for people to grow their food themselves. Milk, also; people could keep cows and milk cows. It was common for families to keep their own cows until the early 2000s.
The basic school was a very interesting time. In the winters, we would ski a lot and do different activities after school. In the summertime, we had one month in which we would go to the collective farm to clean up the plots of carrots and cabbages. It was work. Every day for four hours, with our classmates, we did the work. After lunch we had different activities: a lot of swimming, bicycling, tours, and different activities. We were outside for the entire day.
I studied at the music school, also. I played piano for seven years. After school I would take a bus and go into Paide. There is a piano at my mother’s home, now. When I visit I try to play it.
I started secondary school in Paide — because there were only eight years available in my home school. But for years nine to eleven, I studied at Paide secondary school. It was also an interesting time, because we were very young. Our class and my classmates were very friendly. We did a lot of things together. For example, we had class weddings. Like a normal wedding, but as a game. It shows that our class was very friendly and joined together.
When I graduated secondary school in 1988, I went to Tartu to learn at the Estonian Agricultural Academy¹. I didn’t know what I wanted to become: a teacher, or a doctor, or something else. Remember that it was the Soviet times. The manager of the collective farm said to me that they needed young professionals. He suggested that I learn animal husbandry. They paid some money for me during these years, so that once I graduated I could start working as a manager of animal husbandry on the farm.
I studied there for five years. I graduated as a professional of animal husbandry. But at this time, the collective farms were already almost finished. The Soviet times were over, and the collective farms were becoming privatized. So, the idea that I would work on the collective farm could not come true.
In our course, there were maybe 70 students who became animal husbandry professionals. We did not have any work, because those farms did not exist anymore.
I studied for two years to get a master’s degree in agriculture. So in total I studied for seven years at the university. It was such a long time. Now, a baccalaureate degree takes three years and a master’s degree takes two years.
In total, I was in Tartu from 1988 to 2010. I very much liked Tartu. It was a very nice time and a very nice town. Half of my heart is there. There are many young people, and the town hall and river and everything are very beautiful.
In the year 2000, I started working at the Estonian Agricultural Registers and Information Board. It was very important work, because we were joining the EU at this time. Nowadays, this institution is the big institution for Estonian agricultural support. The institution is under the agricultural ministry. There I worked at the animal register, which means that we prepared all of the registering processes of agricultural registers and the passports for animals.
For example, cows and sheep have unique ear numbers. If they moved farms or even between different countries, they would need to be accompanied with a passport where all of their movements are registered. The first reason why the EU needed this registry was for avoiding animal diseases. All of the movement must be recorded, to know where any ill animals were and where any contacts were made.
The EU put in many strict rules. To join the EU, we had to prepare all of these requirements. We used experts from other EU countries: for example, Germany and Ireland. Our Estonian animal passport is mostly the same as that of Ireland.
In 2004, Estonia joined the EU. After 2005, at the same institution I also joined the EU environmental support for the farmers. In 2006, I met my husband. Then in 2010 I moved to Saaremaa.
I live here with my husband. We are both entrepreneurs now. We have 6 trucks, and run a transportation company. It’s mostly my husband who deals with this, but I help him with the bookkeeping and so forth.
I also work with an NGO here in Kuressaare. It’s called the Leader Action Groups. In Estonia, we have 26 such Leader Action Groups. In Saaremaa, we joined three of the islands together in one action group. The goal of the action group is to develop the rural areas here and gain EU support for rural areas in our territory. We can’t support the activities here in Kuressaare, because it is a town. We can only support the rural areas. This Leader method means that all the activities must be encouraged in a bottom-up method. We make a development strategy for our territory. We collect the people and ask what they want to develop, then write down our strategy. The strategy also includes support measures and what they need. Then, the entrepreneurs or village communities have the possibility to apply their money toward activities in the rural areas.
There are many different needs in the rural communities. We can support machineries and buildings they need, or construction. We can give them courses for teaching some new skills. For the village communities, we can also support their renovation for community buildings or funding for study trips, or new skills.
We support whatever they need to make their lives better, and bring happiness to their communities.
We are between the seven-year period set forth by the European Union between the reassessments. Now we should prepare our new development strategy, in case there was something done in those seven years. So now we have to ask the people and the programs for what they need in the next seven-year period, write down the new strategies and measures, and then start again. We need to do this every seven years to obtain the EU money.
A lot of changes have happened because of the pandemic. We can’t do normal meetings to ask people what they want. In the normal times, we did a lot of study tours in Estonia and abroad — but now we can’t go. There are no study tours. Normally I’m working from home. This is very difficult, because usually I work in one room with my colleagues. We can discuss our problems. Now I’m alone with my mind and my own problems. This is really difficult.
Now, we have a lot of work to do with preparing for this new funding period. I can still talk with my colleagues, but only via the Internet. It is not the same.
A lot of things have changed, but I don’t know how yet. I think that the way we live needs to change, especially compared to two years ago.
The most difficult thing about my job is that we also have to consider the EU rules, and the rules that come from our agricultural ministry. Sometimes these are things that are not very reasonable. We have to think to ourselves, what is good for the rural areas? Not making such strict rules.
There is a lot of paperwork, and a lot of the European rules apply to all of Europe. But we are living on an island, and there are different conditions here. We must consider the local conditions. Right now our government is giving us top-to-bottom ideas, but the people need to give the government bottom-up ideas.
There’s a lot of communication between people, and the Leader Groups in Estonia. In normal times, we had a lot of study trips to visit different countrysides across Europe. It was very interesting. Communication is the most interesting thing. But now all of that is stopped because of the coronavirus.
Footnotes
¹ The university underwent a restructuring in 2005, and is now known as the Estonian University of Life Sciences (Eesti Maaülikool)
This is part of a conversation series centered around the country of Estonia. Click here to read the introduction.
