Shanty Towns and Poverty

Huge numbers of Roma leave each year around May, going to work on the farms of Italy, Spain, France, and Germany- their migration is one of the factors that forces kids out of school. Families pack into small cars for the three day haul, and stay in the countries as long as there as the harvests are happening or other work can be found. But these migrations are just an indicator of the economic turbulence that these families face. Constin, and thousands of kids like him, dropped out before they ever left the country.

One gets a sense of the financial pressure by visiting the slums that are scattered across nearly every population center in Romania. In Calafat, a city of about 16,000, it took the form a shanty town that was just five blocks from the center of the city. There, the paved roads turned to dirt. Trash lined the side of the street, under enormous and rusting elevated pipes whose purpose seemed long ago forgotten. The houses were more like shacks with shoddy roofs; they may have blocked the rain, but it did not look like they did much against Romania’s cold winters. Huge piles of scrap wood, stacked against the houses, confirmed that suspicion. Even though it was the middle of the day on a weekday, entire families stood outside in groups, talking, and kids played simple games in the streets. When they scattered for a passing vehicle, it was a horse drawn cart as often as a car.

The poor communities were not isolated to suburban shanty towns, either. In Bucharest, a block away from an apartment a friend lent us for the weekend, there was a small building that housed more than 200 Roma. It was battered, with broken window frames and peeling paint that exposed old and cracking concrete. An alleyway led to a small dirt courtyard, the arena for a condensed version of Calafat’s social life. As we walked by, we often saw children filling up enormous plastic jugs at the public water tap, which was the supply for much of the building.

Liviu Caldereu, a 28 year old Romani who dropped out of school in 8^th grade, tells the story of how poverty forced him out of school. He grew up in the slums of Craiova; both his parents were day workers. There was not always enough to eat. “Sometimes my father brought home smaller pieces of bread, sometimes bigger ones.” He had to find work to supplement his family income, to stay dry and bring more to the table. High school was not a luxury he could afford.

The transition to the collegio is a hard barrier for many like Liviu, because the costs of education rise just as they are old enough to start bringing in income. In Liviu’s neighborhood, there was no high school, meaning that students have to travel many kilometers to the center each day. The bus rides add up, as do all the hidden costs of attending school- uniforms, books, shoes, and fees for gym class. Finally, the last immediate incentive is removed—students only need to reach the 8^th grade to apply for a driver’s license.

Nowhere was the poverty more visible than when we were invited to a wedding in Calafat. The ceremony took place in the street, without a feast or open bar. It seemed as if all the investment had gone into the 6 piece band and huge speaker system, which blasted live tunes so loud nobody could talk. Most of the community was there, with the women dancing in a circle in the middle, and the men sitting on the outside and drinking home-made wine mixed with soda water. The older women danced gaily, pulling us into the circle, but the deep wrinkles around their eyes and missing teeth told tales of hardship. Little children darted in between the dancers, playing tag. Under a tree behind the men drinking wine, a small boy with bright orange sandals and a sleeveless shirt played a game with pebbles with his friends.

Later that night, when we went to a carnival in the city center, the boy with the orange sandals was going from table to table and begging for food. There were others too, that I recognized from the wedding. They took everything, down to half eaten biscuits, even though fresh ones might have been purchased for less than a nickel each. Some of the parents were there as well. They took the food and occasional coin from the children, then sent them back out for more.

 

Two Cultures, One Land

The wedding, with its exotic flair and 16 year old couple, was also a show of just how different Roma culture really was. Gheorghe Sarau, a professor of Romani language at the University of Bucharest (who is roma) explained. “Roma kids develop earlier. They are educated to be more independent and make their way much earlier in life.”

Roma are a people immensely proud of their culture and identity. Their strong tradition of music and dance—spanning from Flamenco in Spain to fast paced folk in the east—is world famous, and has influenced almost genre of popular music across the world. In Romania, it’s a point of appreciation even for the non-roma, who pack the house for concerts of musicians like Damian Draghici and Taraf de Haiduks. Within Romania, the handywork graces kitchens across the country. One can find the romani peddling their crafts of beautiful pottery, copper kitchen ware, and embroidery in the centers of small towns, relics of their past as nomadic clans.

But their pride is most rooted in their sense of community. Their neighborhoods are so tightknit as to be isolated. Marriages are arranged, almost always to somebody in the community, sometimes to a distant relative so that the dowry money can stay in the family. The family comes before all. The youth regularly makes personal sacrifices, staying with the community and forgoing opportunity elsewhere, to stay and help their families. We asked constin why he didn’t just stay in Spain and build a life for himself. He answered “I am from here, my blood here. I must always return.” Cezara David, a project manager at one of the leading Roma support NGOs, Romani Criss, put the sentiment best during our discussion about integration of the Roma. “We don’t use the word integration. We don’t want to be integrated. We use the word ‘inclusion,’ which means you can keep your identity in society. That’s really important to us.”

The deep rooted cultural differences have also sprung from a long history of gypsy persecution. While the exact origin of the Roma people is uncertain, many scholars think that they migrated from Northern India about 700 years ago. Europe was not especially kind to them upon their arrival. The Holy Roman Empire, France, and England all had edicts banning them from the land, often on pain of death. In Romania, they were enslaved until 1856. During the holocaust, the US holocaust memorial museum estimates that nearly a quarter of Europe’s Roma were killed by the Nazis, or up to 220,000.

In short, the racial divide is deeply entrenched. I had the pleasure of hitchhiking outside of Calafat, next to a group of three white, Romanian boys. They were clean cut and friendly, asking me incessant questions about whether or not I’d met movie stars in Los Angeles. As we talked, we stood on the side of the road with our thumbs out. If the boys saw that an approaching driver was a gypsy, they would put their thumbs down and made a point to alert me. “Not that one!” they yelled at me. “Tsiganes!”

Indeed, the tense relationship is so deeply entrenched that it enters the common language. “Don’t be a gypsy” is a common way to motivate a friend who is being cheap or lazy. Once, I stopped outside the house of an elderly lady in Baleni to ask for a glass for water. She brought it happily, after giving me kisses on the cheek, with all the kindliness of a caring grandmother. As she handed it over, she chuckled “When the gypsy gets hungry, he drinks water,” referring to their poverty. Then she burst into laughter. Andrea and Mikhail Popescu, our ethnic Romanian couchsurfing hosts from Bucharest that asked to have their names changed, showed the tense relationship between the two peoples best. “Gypsies care less about education and work and more about family and material things. They like money the easy way.” When asked about how some of the problems could be solved, they said “If much more civilized countries can’t deal with this, how can we? It’s not like we’re guilty.”

The racial tension does not disappear at the threshold of the classroom.