The Roma: A People Apart

The number of Roma is growing in Slovakia, where tackling poverty means overcoming centuries of ethnic discrimination

Story by Jaman Matthews | World Ark Associate Editor
Photography by Dave Anderson

View a photo slideshow of this story

Beata Bodor watches over her three youngest children in the yard of the family's new house in Drahnov, Slovakia. The Bodors are members of Roma ethnic group, mistakenly called Gypsies, Europe's largest ethnic minority.

Drahnov, Slovakia—A train rumbles past, carrying coal to a nearby power plant. Forty yards away, on a parallel track, another train speeds by in the other direction. Between the two tracks sits a house slowly giving way to the constant rattling and trembling of the trains. The concrete front stoop is caved in, and chunks of plaster litter the ground. The roof is pocked by missing tiles. Tatters of lace are all that fend off the cold that pushes through the empty transom above the front door and whistles through gaps in windowsills.

This is the new home of Bartholomej Bodor, his wife, Beata, and their six children, ranging in age from 3 to 17. Each morning, the family all wakes up in the same room, except for the oldest daughter who has her own sleeping space—a small bed at the far end of the small kitchen. The sky-blue walls of the bedroom bear the scars and scratches of previous tenants and years of neglect before the Bodors. Three thin pieces of fabric pinned to the wall pass as decorations. A small stove struggles to warm the whole house. There is no running water here, so each day they must carry buckets from a relative’s house. It is immeasurably better than their last house.

The Bodors’ new place clings to the edge of Drahnov, Slovakia, a village of about 1,250 on the Uh River, less than 30 miles north of the Hungarian border and only 10 miles from the Ukrainian border. Like many rural Slovakian villages, Drahnov has few jobs. Most villagers, including Bodor, were guaranteed paid work under the communist government, but after the revolution of 1989, the factories and collective farms shut down. In 2001, only 156 working-age Drahnovians were employed, while exactly twice that number, 312, were unemployed. But as the number of jobs has plummeted, the number of residents has climbed, due primarily to the rise in the birthrate. In 2006, births in the town outnumbered deaths 31 to 9. The blame for this increase in births—viewed as a burden in this struggling region—is laid at the feet of a single group: the Roma.

The Roma: A People Apart

A History of the Roma

There is a story they tell in Slovakia, where white storks build their massive nests of sticks and twigs high on the rooftops. The stork, it is said, drops swaddled babies down the chimneys of expectant families. The second version of this tale is less well-known. It involves the rare black storks, which are said to bring Roma babies. With the Roma population expanding so quickly, some joke that it makes no sense for the black storks to be so rare. This modern reworking of the popular folktale hints not only at racial division, but also at an underlying uneasiness about the growing number of the darker-skinned Roma.

The Roma are a distinct ethnic group—like Jews or Kurds or Bedouins—meaning they have a shared genealogy. They are sometimes mistakenly referred to as Gypsies.The term Roma, the endonymic or self-given name of the people, is preferable. Not only is the term Gypsy considered disparaging by many Roma, it is also an imprecise term, since it has come to mean anyone who is constantly on the move. While the Roma traditionally move around a lot, it is their shared history, not their mobility, which defines them.

Many rural villages in Slovakia are segregated, with the Roma population living in substandard conditions in settlements on the outskirts of town. Houses and outbuildings here are cobbled together from whatever materials can be found—flattened metal containers, scraps of wood, cloth and tar paper.

The Roma lack a written history, and their origin was long a mystery. When they first arrived in Europe, many people supposed the Roma were Egyptian. The word “Gypsy” is derived from that assumption. But by the 18th century, most scholars speculated that the Roma originated in northern India. They based this theory on the generally darker skin colors of most Roma and the similarities between Romany, the official Roma language, and other languages that can be traced back to the Indian subcontinent. The Roma, it is believed, left India sometime around A.D. 1000, crossing western Asia and entering eastern and central Europe around the 14th century. Recent genetic evidence upholds this theory about Roma origins.

Roma are now the largest ethnic minority in Europe, and in Slovakia may make up as much as 10 percent of the population. Exact figures are slippery, ranging between the official census number of 100,000 and the more realistic 500,000. The reason for this disparity is telling: Due to historical efforts to assimilate them or for fear of discrimination, many Slovakian Roma listed their ethnicity as Slovak or Hungarian on official census documents. Assimilation efforts largely failed, and in many towns and villages the Roma are segregated into ghetto-like settlements. Wherever this kind of racism and discrimination exist, hunger and poverty exist there, too.

Walking Between Two Worlds

Bartholomej Bodor—Barthi to his friends— walks each day from his new home between the tracks on the northeast edge of Drahnov to his old home in the Roma settlement on the southeast corner. He walks through the village proper and past the mayor’s office. Farther along the main road, the well-tended grapevines and wrought-iron gates of the wealthier village houses disappear, as do the roof tiles and house paint. Here, houses crouch along only one side of the rough road. They resemble the houses in the rest of the village in the same way a rusted-out car body resembles the showroom original. These houses hide behind fences draped with rugs, and yards overgrown with nettles. So many plastic bottles clog a wetland across the road that it looks like a fish kill, with bloated, misshapen creatures floating on the surface. This is what is known around the village as the settlement. The Roma have their own word for it: tabor, the Romany word meaning camp. This word recalls a time when the Roma moved freely. But the settlement is a place of stagnation and restraints, not movement or freedom.

Bodor continues down the road and turns in by a house that seems to be plastered with mud, the roof in its final stages of rust before it becomes transparent. He walks past the sheds and outbuildings that stretch behind the house, past children playing with an unclothed doll. Past a patchwork fence of plywood, chain-link, scrap metal sheets and translucent fiberglass panels. Trash seems to grow here, to bubble up from underground and seep out into heaps. Stagnant water pools in a hand-dug ditch, bits of cloth have been ground into the mud until only their texture is discernible. The palette is limited: muddy browns, weatherworn grays, rusty reds.

The families who live here in the settlement pack themselves tightly into their makeshift hovels, sharing the common spaces with goats, pigs, dogs and one spindly fruit tree struggling to push forth new leaves for another season.

Toward the back of the settlement is the small, clean, mud-masonry shed where Bodor keeps the goats he received as part of a Heifer International project, which works with this community to build sustainable livelihoods. The barn is clean, with a faint odor of ammonia and animal body heat. It sits adjacent to Bodor’s old house, a woodand- mud shell enclosing not more than 400 square feet of space where the family of eight lived until last year.

Bodor turns back to the goat shed and opens the gate. The goats spill out, leaving the squalor behind, and head into the grassy field that spreads like an overgrown football pitch behind the settlement. His dreadlocked black dog at his heels, Bodor follows the goats and takes his post as solitary goatherd.

The Roma: A People Apart

A History of Assimilation

Erika Estokova, in a purple suit and thin-rimmed glasses, looks thoroughly out of place standing with the goats in the field behind the settlement. Though she is not Roma, Estokova is the leader for Heifer International’s goat breeding project in the Drahnov Region project. She is also the coordinator for the village’s Roma education project, a municipal position appointed by the mayor.

After visiting with Bodor, Estokova invites us back to her home, a pristine white house on Drahnov’s main road. Marta Kulikova, Heifer Slovakia’s country director and our translator, joins us, and together they explain the history of the struggle for Roma inclusion in this region.

Bartholomej Bodor has grown his original goats from Heifer into a healthy herd.

Groups who do not respect borders or stay put can be threatening to governments or rulers: this is at the heart of what municipalities across Europe call the “Roma problem.” For centuries, one government after another attempted to control and confine, to split up and segregate the Roma. Their method of choice was assimilation—government-enforced conformity of a minority group to the majority. Kulikova explains assimilation this way: “This other group”—in this case, the Roma—“must take on your habits, behave like you.”

In the mid-18th century, the Queen of Hungary (and mother of Marie Antoinette) Maria Theresa enacted a policy of Roma assimilation, which included sending Roma children to far-flung villages around the Hapsburg Empire to be absorbed into the local culture. Maria Theresa was known as a social reformer, and her treatment of the Roma was seen at the time as a more humane solution than the extreme discrimination the Roma faced—slavery, branding, even legalized murder. But the intent was still to squelch a foreign and suspect culture. These displaced Roma were called “New Magyar,” or new Hungarians, in a further attempt to destroy their cultural and ethnic identity.

Attempts at corralling and controlling the Roma continued in the 20th century when Nazis exterminated as many as 500,000 Roma in what in Romany is called porajmos, or “devouring.” After World War II, Slovakia, as part of Czechoslovakia, fell under communist control. The Communists, too, attempted to assimilate the Roma by lumping them in with the proletariat, assuming control of Roma-owned land and tightly restricting their movement. Estokova, who works daily with this still-segregated population, concludes, “Assimilation was not really successful here.”

The present government is trying a different approach: integration. “Integration is when you are keeping your habits and your customs, only living among other people,” explains Kulikova. The national government, with additional funding from the European Union, set up a system of field social workers to ease Roma integration efforts. But in a bureaucratic twist, funding for these social worker positions recently lapsed, and now 600 social workers are unemployed while thousands of Roma go underserved. This is only the latest in a long history of the government failing the Roma people. As Kulikova explains, “All politicians love the Roma before an election—hugging, hugging. But they have short attention spans.”

The Roma’s Growing Numbers

Tibor Josofsky became mayor of Drahnov six years ago, presiding over a time of unprecedented population growth in the village. From 2001 to 2006, the village’s population jumped by almost 200 to 1,243 during a time when many were leaving rural Slovakia for jobs in the city. Most of the rise in Drahnov’s population came from the increase in the birthrate, and most of these births were Roma, the mayor says. Roma now make up 70 percent of the village’s population.

The whole discussion around birthrates and family planning is a minefield for the Slovakian government because of past wrongs still festering. The Nazi and Communist regimes forced sterilization on some Roma. In the Communist era, women were paid to be sterilized or threatened with the withdrawal of social benefits. The Slovakian government recently came under attack again for the continuing sterilization of Roma women. Just last year, a court ruled that three Roma women were illegally sterilized between 1999 and 2002.

“The problem is with unemployment and social payments,” Josofsky says. Jobs are rare, and those that do exist are not filled by Roma, either due to a lack of skills or outright discrimination in hiring. As a result, more Roma apply for social payments to survive, which in turn plays into old stereotypes and inflames old prejudices. The mayor explains that non-Roma villagers are increasingly dissatisfied that the Roma and not they themselves seem to always be the recipients of social payments.

The Roma: A People Apart

A Friend and Teacher

Some of the non-Roma here say that the Roma have no word in their language that means
“future.” It’s not true, but it is indicative of a common belief that the Roma live only in the present, never planning for the future.

But Bodor looks always to the future. He dreams of a healthy herd, of breeding goats and selling the offspring. He plans and builds toward this goal alongside a friend who shares the same dream. Jan Balog, known affectionately as Janci, is a short, round man with a broad smiling face whose land borders the same field where Bodor pastures his goats. On this day he wears teal denim pants and a matching jacket. He leads us outside to show us his goats, and he and Bodor walk to the edge of the field, pointing alternately at each herd, absorbed in conversation.

“We are cooperating closely,” Balog says. “We exchange information from the veterinarian, or what we learned at trainings.” Just a few years ago, Balog lived in the city in a block of apartments built by the communist government. Now, with tutelage from Bodor, he has goats, two cows and a pig. Balog’s husbandry skills are such that he has been entrusted with the Heifer project’s breeding buck. Balog explains his success this way: “I love animals, and therefore I take care of them.”

Balog leads us inside his remodeled house, stopping so we can remove our shoes. His daughter brings a plate of his first batch of goat cheese for us to sample. Just this morning, Balog shared the recipe with Bodor, and the two hope to begin making and selling cheese.

Curious what the neighbors thought of these two friends and innovators, I asked how others in the settlement regarded his success. Balog dismissed the question with a slight shrug, a flip of his hand and his boyish smile. “Some people are jealous. They do not think it is good when you have something.”

Staying Put

Back from a day in the settlement, Bodor stands in the evening light outside his new house, holding his youngest son, 3-year-old Sebastian. He kisses the boy softly on the cheek and forehead and whispers in his ear. At Bodor’s feet, the hens and their chicks scour the ground. In the settlement, people were stealing chickens, he said. Here, their chickens range freely with their chicks without the threat of theft. “Here it is quiet,” Bodor says. “It is better here.”

He points to the land behind the house and bounded by the railroad tracks that he hopes one day to own. With his finger, he traces an imaginary fence he would like to build
so he could move his goats here.

The family gathers inside, all perched on the edge of one bed, Bodor at the center. They talk about their prospects for the future. Now that Slovakia is in the European Union (it was admitted in 2004), Slovakians are free to travel to other countries in search of work,
usually low-wage factory jobs. Bodor, unlike many of his Roma and non-Roma peers, chose to stay here in Drahnov, despite the lack of work.

Bodor says he will not even consider leaving for the promise of work elsewhere. “First of all, I have goats from the project. I would like to breed goats. I want a farm.” And after a pause, he leans forward and says, “I have children. I do not want to leave my children and wife. I need to take care of the children.”