Romanian Gypsies Read online

  Romanian Gypsies

  Nine True Stories About What It’s Like To Be a Gypsy in Romania

  by Catalin Gruia

  Copyright © 2014 by Catalin Gruia

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by an electronic or mechanical means, including informations storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  www.catalingruia.com

  37-Minutes Publishing

  First Printing, July 2013

  Translated by Andreea Geambasu

  Cover design by Tudor Smalenic

  Photo Cover by Bogdan Croitoru

  Proof reading: by Anca Barbulescu

  ALSO BY CATALIN GRUIA

  Romania Explained To My Friends Abroad

  Why We Love Vienna

  Thailand with a Baby Stroller

  Contents

  About the Author

  Foreword

  About This Book

  9 True Stories

  The Unemployed Man

  The Schoolgirl

  The Sick Lady

  Il Consigliere

  The Young Mother

  The Pub Owner

  The Old Lady

  “The Italian Woman”

  The Teacher

  Final Picture

  Sidebar 1: Rich Roma, Poor Roma

  Sidebar 2: Gypsy Clans

  Timeline: On the Bed of Procust

  Postface: One million Zorbas

  The End

  ALSO BY CATALIN GRUIA

  About the Author

  Catalin Gruia is a veteran journalist who has written and reported for the Romanian edition of National Geographic for over 10 years. He is currently Editor in Chief of National Geographic Traveler and Deputy Editor in Chief of National Geographic Romania.

  International awards

  · First prize (Geographica section) at the International Seminar of National Geographic International Editions, Washington, 2004

  · Johann Strauss Golden Medal, Vienna, 2010;

  · Kinarri Trophy, Friends of Thailand Awards, Bangkok, 2013;

  Foreword

  Wherever you are in Romania, – in any city or village –, if you take a 30-minute walk in any direction, you’ll find a community of poor Gypsies.

  Apart from a minority that got rich exploiting barely-legal economic opportunities, for more than two thirds of some one million Romanian Gypsies, the tumultuous years following the fall of communism meant a transition towards hopeless poverty, delinquency, and violence.

  They were among the first laid off during the 1990s restructuring process and many did not manage to get rehired. About 70% of the Gypsies live on a Minimum Income Guarantee (financial aid from the State) and occasional activities. 80% of them have no profession.

  Like Mocirla (“The Swamp”), almost every poor Gypsy community is affected by the same “shortages” when it comes to jobs, income, education, access to medical services, identity cards, property titles, and miserable, dirty, overcrowded houses.

  This is a story about what it’s like to be a Gypsy (Roma) in Romania. A story told by the Gypsies themselves.

  Over 16 hours of interviews were edited for concision and clarity. Certain regionalisms, flagrant language and grammar mistakes were straightened out, here and there.

  About This Book

  Here we are: two city boys from the Capital lost in Bacau’s countryside train station in a downpour, waiting and waiting and waiting. "Call her", photographer Bogdan Croitoru finally tells me. The phone rings again and again and again…

  Not a chance. Not only did the lady with whom we've been in contact – and who was supposed to introduce us to the Gypsy community in Mocirla, Buhusi – wasn’t waiting for us at the station as agreed, but she also had her phone turned off.

  Eventually, we bought some rubber boots and raincoats (it was raining so heavily that the water had risen in the streets), and began wandering around the city. I don't remember how we got to a school where there was some sort of a craft exhibition by Roma children from various schools in the area.

  There we met Gabi, the Roma language teacher at the school in Mocirla. We told her who we were and what we wanted to do and, unbelievably – the previous series of misfortunes proved to be a wonderful opportunity – Gabi took us to her house and so we were able (when we had no hope left) to enter and be accepted by the community we wanted to study. The great opportunity of this story was that things didn't work out as planned.

  I wanted to tell the story of what is it like to be a Roma (Gypsy) in Romania. But to tell the Gypsies’ story you have to become one. And in Romania this is easier said than done.

  When a Romanian calls you “Gypsy”, his lips distort in a contemptuous grimace: he wants to say you’re a thief, you’re lazy and dirty… Most Romanians are tolerant of foreigners, but the Gypsies are considered inferior, someone you don’t want to be around. A recent study shows that 75% of Romanians don’t want to live near a Gypsy community.

  Here are five important trends that emerged after Ceausescu’s fall in 1989, when the Gypsy issue emerged in a whole new perspective in the Romanian society:

  • Rise of an active ethnic and political movement among the Roma,

  • Enrichment of a small segment of the Roma population through the use of “almost” legal economic opportunities,

  • The growing impoverishment of the majority of Gypsies without any hope of correction,

  • Growing delinquency and violence,

  • Outburst of conflict between groups of Romanians and Roma people.

  Gypsies were often the first to be laid-off from jobs in the early 1990s, and have been among those most persistently blocked from re-entering the labour force. Labour market exclusion perpetuates the poverty cycle and lowers living standards.

  Many Roma have limited future opportunities to climb out of poverty due to low development conditions and long-standing discrimination - including lack of education, poor health and limited opportunities for participating in social and political life.

  The Gypsies are a very heterogeneous population. There are Roma people in 262 towns and 2.686 townships, in 40 Romanian counties. How can you choose a representative Gypsy community as a model? Yet all the Gypsy communities are affected by the same problems - lack of jobs, income, education, access to medical services, IDs, property rights, overcrowded residential areas, etc.

  I was convinced that, in a small Gypsy community chosen on scientific sociological criteria, all the issues affecting the larger Gypsy community could be found. For example, from the small village school one can infer the story of the Gypsy education. The rich of the village can stand for that minority of Gypsies who gathered incredible wealth in the troubled years after Ceausescu’s fall. The one arrested by the village Police can speak about Gypsy delinquency. And so on.

  I ended up choosing Mocirla (the Swamp), on the outskirts of Romanian town Buhusi, on completely subjective grounds. There are hundreds of cases in Romania in which Gypsies are isolated and isolate themselves. What drew me here was a name that stroked me in a sociological report: one of Mocirla’s unofficial leaders was named Catalin Gruia. My name! I took it as a sign that I had to go there. I had to meet „Bursucu” (“The Badger”) – the Gypsy Catalin Gruia – and we did not like each other at all. He was on the side of those Mocirlans who were wary of the fact that my name was also Gruia…

  I forgot to tell you that I was shocked to discover that half of Mocirla is named Gruia. And if at first I thought this matching of names would be an advantage – I quickly became everyone’s “cousin” – during the last few days, it backfired. People at the bar were starting to say that
we weren’t really journalists – photographer Bogdan Croitoru and me – but “spies” from Bucharest and that we want to overthrow Nae Butuc, the community’s unofficial leader. (Gabi had a smoldering conflict with the informal leaders of the community, who called us to the tavern to find out what was up with us...)

  All this happened as some Mocirlans would have liked to find a young Gypsy king with connections in Bucharest to solve their problems. All the prerequisites are in place for such a man to come along, raised in the community or returning from Italy, able to unite them all and transform a bunch of firewood thieves into a real organized mafia.

  Fast forward. Almost 6 years have passed...

  Stressed out and whiny as I am, I couldn't fully appreciate the time spent in Mocirla. But today, I often remember the beautiful moments spent there: the days I would wake up at 5 a.m. to wash up using dew from the black locust flowers on the street (after several days of not having any means to wash, you take desperate measures), or being shown around the community by Tatiana, the about 12 years old blonde Gypsy girl, whose songs and zest for life were utterly contagious; Bogdan’s generosity, who was bitten raw and was allergic to the fleas on the mats, had sacrificed himself by sleeping on the floor, leaving me, the delicate one, the bed; Steaua's last game of the season, discussed with our host's little sister - beautiful, well-behaved and obliging like a Japanese girl from the Samurai era.

  Nine True Stories

  How was Limbos (“Tongue-y”) to know that that night would be different? He came down from the hill, talked a bit with some friends by the road, walked into a Cristi Teslaru boutique, the only one in the neighborhood, and stole a pack of underwear. He gave away eight of the pairs to people on the street, like a modern-day Robin Hood, and brought two pairs home to his wife. All this fun cost him two years in prison. Upon his return to Mocirla, he stole a chicken (snapping the neck of another irritating bird and leaving it in the coop) and went back to jail for another year.

  At 24, Limbos, whose real name is Ciprian Gruia, spent four years in prison and three years in school, two of which he completed in prison. He’s a strange young man with quiet, slick, black eyes, a gentle voice that gets caught in his thin mustache, a sandy-blonde curl hanging in the middle of his forehead, a lot of enemies, and restless hands and feet. He had three little children. Now he has one. He found the last one lying dead in bed next to him and buried him.

  To the rest of the world, Mocirla is infamous as a thieve nest. To Limbos, it’s home. Outsiders who see Mocirla’s nearly 200 run-down houses, spread out randomly like a sick swarm of bees on a hill on the outskirts of Buhusi, watching them from their cars while driving to Roman, raise their eyebrows and speed up. Townspeople are afraid to climb up here: most Gypsies have empty bellies, sly gazes, sharp tongues, and quick hands. Every time it rains – and it often does – the mud reaches the knees, and the three roads that climb up from Orbic Street towards the Gypsies, with a 55-degree slope inaccessible to cars, literally turn into mud slides.

  None of the nearly 1,000 Roma living on the hill has a job. A few hundred left for Italy and are sending money back home. Those left behind live off stealing, welfare, state child support, and occasional suspicious jobs. Most of the men have been to jail.

  This school year, 220 of the 260 children enrolled in the Buhusi Arts and Crafts school in the Orbic neighborhood are from the Roma community. During the farming season, the majority leave school to work in the fields with their parents. When they come to school, they get bored quickly and leave, unable to be kept in class by any means. Once they reach 16, many abandon school as they’re getting married or starting to work.

  Until a few years ago, Mocirlans worked in the felt factory in Buhusi. After the factory’s restructuring, they were left to get by however they could. They are all waiting for a Messiah with a different face (a second Ceausescu to resuscitate the country, or at least a patron with a lot of money to revive the factory, or an Andreea Marin to bring them on her philanthropic talk show “Surprises, Surprises” and give them what they need). Mocirla cannot be understood from the outside. You have to go inside. You have to meet the people who live here.

  1

  The Unemployed Man

  Vasile Gruia, 56 years old, with 9 kids, a wise man among the Gypsies, talkative, charming, a 10th grade graduate, a former painter in a factory for 31 years. He didn’t teach his children Romani because he’s convinced it won’t help them with anything. He lives on welfare and odd day jobs.

  Man, before, in the communist days, if they found out you didn’t have a job, they’d force one on you! They’d give you a job. You’d have something to live on. But now, nobody asks you, “Man, where do you get your money from? How do you live? What do you do?”

  Now people just begin stealing, or do whatever they can. I wouldn’t steal, even though I’m tempted by need. Not me, ‘cause I don’t do that, ‘cause I make it on the little I have, but there are families with seven, eight little kids, and when they start crying from hunger, their parent or grandparent or brother will say, “Come on, man, let’s do something, anything, but let’s cash in!” And they’ll steal something and get seven, eight, ten years in prison.

  Here...start at this end of Mocirla and go all the way to the other side, and stop at every house and ask if anyone has a job. No one. What are they supposed to live on? They start stealing ‘cause they don’t have anything else to do.

  There’s some forest nearby. There are some who have horses. They’ll go to the forest and steal a cartful of wood. If it wasn’t for them, this whole area you see, and there are another two or three villages – Silistea, Romani, Lipoveni – if it wasn’t for them, bringing carts of wood to sell here and there, ‘cause they sell it cheaper, I don’t even know how these people would heat their houses.

  Even here, we whine and complain, but there are villages, even farther away from the cities...you should see them. They shake at the sight of a coin. It’s hard in this country, really hard!

  Don’t you see how people with an education, the brighter ones, all leave Romania? To America, to Italy, to Australia. Everywhere. They leave and that’s where they end up. ‘Cause they didn’t know how to value them over here. A doctor here gets five million lei (150$). And shouldn’t he ask you for money when you go to him? Of course he should, ‘cause a doctor can’t get by on five million (150$) a month. A policeman gets seven, eight million (240$) and he has to deal with all those crazies. He can get killed at any time, ‘cause there are dangerous people.

  They’ll come out in front of you, and you, as a criminal, say to yourself, “well, better his mom be the one crying, and not mine,” and you kill him. Or he kills you. Here in Mocirla policemen shot people. And what happened to them? Who knows? Three people were shot. It was fatal, not “oh, I was defending myself.” He shot straight at them. What happened, man? If it’s a law for me that means it’s a law for everyone. ‘Cause like they say, the law is everyone’s mother...

  I was a painter in a factory. And I worked in the factory for 31 years. Can you imagine? Thirty-one years in the same job. Since the day I started until unemployment. They gave us those compensation salaries: they didn’t take into account your ability to work, they didn’t take into account your qualifications. It only mattered if you were one of the boss’ guys. Now I don’t even have a pension ‘cause I’m not old enough. I have to wait to turn 62. I have that tiny welfare, and, to be honest, without any shame, I’ll go here and there and work by the day. There are lots of people that no one will hire. Out of fear. They’ll say, “This guy will see what I have in my yard and come and steal it.” So they’ll only take people they know have never had any problems with the police.

  So, you get it. Nothing can get done here. If only there was some company to give them work. If not, it’s going to go on like this until the shit hits the fan. The police can’t do anything to them, the government can’t do anything to them, no one. They’d rather go to jail than hear their hungry kids cry
ing at home.

  Look at me: at my age, I tried to work on construction sites. In Bacau and Buhusi, I went to all the construction sites possible. I’ve been out of a job for two years. No one will take me. I’m over 50. I can’t even find any work „under the counter”. And with the minimum state welfare...why do they even give me those two million? They make me sit around for almost twenty days, and don’t give me anything to produce, something that I can benefit from producing, so I can get my minimum wage?

  There’s a guy on the field who clocks you in. But if you go and see the job these boys do there, you’ll die laughing. They take a paper from over here, put it over there, hang out over there, and then they send them home and write down four hours.

  Give me something to do, man!

  2

  The Schoolgirl

  Let’s say her name is Geanina. She climbs a hill, through the mud, and sings soulfully: “Man, life slips away and all that’s waiting for us is a cold grave/Once you’re gone, you’re forgotten by everyoooooooone!” This girl is the devil herself. “She has green eyes, she’s blonde, she loves life, she goes around with boys 10, 15 years older than her,” says one of her classmates, Cora, who got married when she was 13.

  Geanina, an only child, is 14, she’s in the sixth grade, and this was probably her last year of school. She’s going to get married soon, but only “with a Gypsy like me, so I have something to talk to him about.” Here, if a girl reaches ninth grade and isn’t married, people yell “old maid!” at her. She has had 10 boyfriends. She dumped the last one because she saw him with another girl.

  „I didn’t leave him because he’s poor. I left him because he doesn’t know how to respect me. If he respects me, I’ll respect him too. When I got to school, I saw him with another girl. You choose: me or her. And he chose her. But I’m not mad. I’m not his boss. The kid does what he wants. These days I don’t go to school much because dad and mom go off and work by the day, and I stay home so no one steals our stuff. Actually, you know, I don’t go to school anymore because the boys kidnap you. They kidnap girls around here. If a boy sees a girl he likes, him and his friends kidnap her, they take her somewhere, he sleeps with her, and it’s done, the girl is married.