L&B Journals

Ben Fuery & Lucy Pinnell / Glodeni, Romania

The terms Romani and Romanian are often confused around the world, but what separates them is not two letters but an entire set of traditions, languages, a culture and a way of life.

The Romani are a stateless people, who migrated from the Northwest regions of India around 1,500 years ago. They migrated gradually around the world, arriving in continental Europe around 1,000 years ago, beginning settlements such as the one we now found ourselves in while retaining their own autonomy, language, trade and culture. Thus the fact that Romania now has the fourth largest population of Roma in the world, and the similarities between the two terms, are purely coincidental.

We stuck out like sore thumbs as we joined the queue inside the shop. The entire crowd stole furtive glances at us and the women nodded and murmured “shuka” pointing to my hair. I would later learn that this word meant “beautiful” in Romani.

We were here to meet our host, a prominent figure in the community, and learn what it was to be a Roma gypsy living in modern day Romania. We entered the village and were immediately struck by the bustle and hustle of life here. Kids ran wild in the muddy streets, listening to music on their phones or chasing dogs with sticks. Women carried bottles of water to and from the well, music blared from the doorways of households as people gathered to chat and dance outside. 

The entire village was alive with activity; the sense of community was tangible in the air as neighbours darted in and out of each other’s homes. Elderly folks sat on stools in their yards weaving reeds into baskets to sell at market, and horse and carts clattered noisily through the streets.

We were invited into our host’s home for coffee and breakfast followed by dancing, before he dragged his big portable speaker out into the street to continue the impromptu party, blaring gypsy music as he led us around to meet the villagers.

We passed colourfully painted houses with wooden fences and women washing clothes in big buckets outside. No two buildings looked the same; there were houses made of chipboard or brick, with roofs of wood or tile or tin, big elaborate buildings and houses that were just being built. Washing was hung up to dry in every yard, rugs slung across fences in the sun and fat bundles of reeds sat ready to be woven into baskets. 

Every street was a hive of activity, a whirlwind of unorganised chaos; people were dancing, cleaning, hanging up washing, lighting fires, chopping wood, selling baskets, constructing wooden carts. We didn’t know where to look next. The air was alive with the buzzing of chainsaws like a swarm of worker bees, boys helping men gather wood for winter, young girls playing in the streets while strong headscarf-cladded matrons cast a watchful eye.

To children here, life was one long game with no structure or routine of school. They shouted, “Photo! Photo!” as we passed, and once we’d snapped a shot they would run and huddle eagerly around the camera to see. The boys would ask us for Coca Cola or sweets and the little girls would touch my colourful hair and squeal with delight.

We met our host’s 14 year old nephew on his way home from school and got talking to him about his hopes for the future. He stated matter of factly that at 16 he would drop out of school and pick up the trade of basket weaving.

Back in England, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a normal question to ask a child. But there is no question of work here, only living and partying with brief stints of work abroad. We learned that most young people here drop out before they finish high school, and many do not attend primary school. They often find themselves shunned by their Romanian peers, or else they simply drop out to begin earning money for their family. But there is no work for them here in Romania aside from weaving baskets to sell at market; most travel abroad to places like France, Germany and the UK to work in agriculture and bring their earnings home.

The Roma face a prejudice that is interwoven into every fibre of their lives from birth to school to finding work, denying them the same opportunities as their Romanian peers. There are also the pressures imposed on them from their own society, the expectation that women will drop out of school and marry early, that men will provide for their families. Our host Tibi was an exception to the rule, being the only person in the entire village of 1,200 people to attend university. Up to 40% of children in the village dropped out before completing school, and the Roma faced a shocking unemployment rate of 70% across the country.

In the upper levels of the village the elderly folks sat outside their homes weaving baskets or looking after their grandchildren. Most were happy to have their photos taken. But when our host wandered off to make a private phone call we were approached by the blue headscarf-wearing grandmother whose portrait we’d just taken. She did not speak any English, nor we Romani, but she motioned desperately at her grand children and herself, gesturing that she had no money to eat, beseeching us with tears in her eyes.

It was at that moment it hit home just how difficult life actually was for people here. Any notions we’d had about life for Romani people had been rewritten in that instant. The idea that a woman well past retirement age could still be struggling to feed her grandchildren, that every room of her home would have been painstakingly bought and constructed one brick at a time, was heart-wrenching. And we, coming to their village, bearing our cameras and our unripped clothes, must’ve looked like millionaires to them. It did not matter how many months we’d saved up to afford them; it was irrelevant when there was no weekly pay check, no certainty of food or firewood for survival for these people. And we had not one single Lei to offer the kindly old lady with the headscarf, only a bag of sweets we’d purchased for the kids which she happily accepted instead. The feeling of guilt weighed heavy on our shoulders as we walked back to Tibi’s home.

After lunch we walked across the street to meet 86 year old Mihai, the eldest basket weaver in the village, who welcomed us inside his humble home. The bare plastered walls were painted a muted dusty pink, hung with a few old photographs and a faded, yellowing diploma, and against these walls were propped plump bundles of reeds. The room was sparsely furnished with a wardrobe, a sofa and a fridge, strewn with a few hats and an intricately woven pair of shoes.

Mihai sat on a red plastic chair in the centre of the room and immediately began  working reeds into a circular base he’d already begun with the speed and skill of a man who’d been weaving his entire life. And he had, in fact- since he was 10 years old, weaving baskets and other wares to sell at market and eke a meagre living. Now an old man, his family made the long journey in his place to markets as far away as Brașov and Târgu Mureș.

The craft of basket making stems back to the Roma’s Indian roots, a trade they carried with them as they migrated across Asia, Byzantium, the Balkans and Europe, finally landing as far away as the British Isles.  The craft was born of the industriousness of the Roma, who found value in items overlooked by others and then capitalised on this value for maximum gain, taking reeds that grew prolifically across Europe and turning them into functional, saleable items. Basket weaving is one of the oldest Romani crafts that is still practised today, and only further emphasises the contrast of their hunter-gatherer roots against the European’s agrarian lifestyle.

We watched how the man’s weathered hands with their paper thin skin and protruding veins worked masterfully to cut the reeds and weave them into shape, using a special type of board and a sharp metallic tool to slice each reed into three thin pieces at a time.

Mihai began to recount tales of Romania’s not so distant past, a time when the country was ruled by crazed dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, a man who inflicted such deep scars across the Romanian people and landscape that they still remain to this day. 

Where many Romanians suffered under his leadership, the Roma instead benefited. Communism afforded them an income, a sense of equality, in exchange for their freedoms. Every Roma villager had daily shifts working in factories at night that provided them with a regular and equal income to every other citizen, although it left very little time for socialising and nobody was allowed to go out drinking. After the collapse of communism, life began to deteriorate for minorities, culminating in the employment disparity we see today. 

Having completed one basket and moved onto the next, Mihai decided he would continue his work outside in the fresh air. Tibi had returned with his huge speaker blaring music at ear-crackling volume, and one of Mihai’s neighbours had appeared in his yard and began a crazy dance, waving his arms in the air and shuffling his feet while the old man looked on and smiled with a youthful twinkle in his eye.

We thanked him for his time and followed Tibi back to his home for a wild, pálinka-fuelled evening of dancing.

The next morning, feeling fragile from the night before, we embarked on another walk around the village while we waited for the day’s arrangements to be made. The weather was more favourable today, and the sunshine had dried the muddy streets up into a mix of dust and litter-filled potholes. The community was once again humming with life, the sounds of children squealing and random outbursts of music filling the streets.

We ventured higher this time, into the furthest recesses of the village, where a cluster of houses lay detached from the main commune. Here we were shocked to see the sudden contrast between the lower and upper levels of the village, and the disparity between the village and Glodeni commune itself. No one is wealthy here, for most life is a daily struggle, but for these villagers life appeared to be almost unbearable. The houses were made of a mishmash of salvaged materials- chipboard, breeze blocks, some of them no more than sticks and mud. The roofs were a mosaic of tiles, tarps and tin; many of the houses did not have complete walls or proper roofs. Many merely resembled abandoned buildings or barns, with huge holes in the timber roofs protected by nothing but frayed pieces of tarpaulin. Their walls did not reach their roofs, leaving huge gaps between; it seemed impossible that any of them could retain heat or protect their residents against rain or snow.

It was unimaginable that these homes could be in Europe, as if we’d been transported to a slum somewhere halfway across the globe, but here we were, standing on EU soil, witness to such intolerable levels of poverty. Their lives seemed as unstable as the structure of their homes, and it appeared that very little, if any of the EEA grants earmarked for Glodeni had reached the people here.

One family, a young couple and their child, were crafting themselves a cart for their horse to pull. Two mismatched motorbike wheels supported a wooden base to which the couple were nailing planks of wood while their kid chopped wood with an axe. Grubby-faced children ran wild among the chickens and geese; parents were scrubbing clothes by hand or cooking on fires outdoors. 

Another family we approached was sitting on the ground outside their caravan with a small hut attached, their child chewing on a pink wafer. A skinny dog with ribs protruding lay on the ground in front of them. Out of all the families here, these seemed perhaps some of the most hard done by. They had not even the semblance of a house, just a tired old caravan in which to house three generations. The eldest man we’d seen about on his horse and cart in the village, always on the move, always hustling to feed his family. They had no running water, no electricity, no stability in their lives, but they held a look of resoluteness upon their faces.

Suddenly music erupted from one of the nearby homes and a boy came dancing out of the door over to his mother who was carrying a sack of clothes over her back. This small, random act somehow seemed a symbol of hope, of the spirit of hardships endured and a sense of togetherness born of adversity.

After all, living on the fringes, marginalised by Romanian society, who else had the Roma to turn to but themselves?

Overwhelmed by a mix of emotions and a deep rooted sense of culture shock, we returned to our host’s home for one final evening. He prepared for us a traditional meal of goulash cooked on the fire, and we asked him about his work as a Roma representative within the European Commission. For reasons unknown he refused to comment or divulge any information on the work he does, dodging our questions and choosing not to return our email.

Whatever the case, it had become clear to us that there was a deep disparity not only between the Roma and the Romanians, but also within the Romani society itself, possibly born of the Caste system they carried with them from India all those years ago.

Money, despite being an immediate answer, could only provide a short term solution for the people here. Looking to the future it seemed to us that the only means to break this detrimental cycle they found themselves trapped in were education, job prospects, and a movement to address the continual prejudice and stigmatisation of the Romani people.

We left the village with heavy hearts, busy minds and a confusing mix of emotions. We’d seen two sides to life here, experienced incredible hospitality and warmth, seen unbearable poverty, and gained an insight into the issues faced by the Roma from two very different perspectives. We had developed a great admiration for the resilience of the Romani, for their ingenuity and their independence, but most importantly for their unwavering compassion and communal spirit in spite of the daily plights they faced.

This project is the collective work of Ben Fuery and Lucy Pinnell. For inquiries, please email contact@lbjournals.com .