Prešov, Slovakia

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Prešov, Slovakia

Words by: Bence X. Szechenyi

I always knew a little about the Roma people because my family is from Eastern Europe, and I grew up taking frequent trips to the region. The Roma are an ethnic group present throughout Europe that have lived on the continent for nearly a thousand years. They are thought to be the descendants of migrants from northern India who settled in Europe around the 14th century. I knew that Roma people have been historically oppressed by mainstream European society, persecuted in the medieval ages, victims of genocide during the holocaust, and still the targets of racism today.

I began doing research on the conditions of Roma communities in my spare time because I realized I was ignorant about this group and their history. In my investigations I found a troubling pattern of press coverage on the topic. Every few years a flurry of articles would come out about Roma communities, specifically in Slovakia, and the “medieval” conditions that many are forced to live under. The articles outline the segregation Roma people face, and the poverty cycle that many are trapped in. I found a New York Times article from 2000, which is painfully similar to an Al Jazeera article from 2017, which outlines the same inequalities as a Reuters article from 2021.

The repetitiveness of these articles shows that Roma people and the oppression they faced can be easily ignored by people in power, kept adjacent and separated from the political priorities of the nation. These articles, and the many like them, seemed to do very little to stir up people or inspire politicians to act significantly. Change isn’t instant, any activist knows how long you must call attention to a problem, especially complex problems like systematic oppression, before people act. This is another example of that effect, and it bothered me. Roma people and the systemic issues they face are too often sidelined, even after receiving press coverage.

There is a war happening now in Eastern Europe, and this is a difficult winter for the region. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has flooded neighboring countries like Slovakia with refugees, and forced the sanctioning of Russian oil, which many European countries were reliant on. Subsequently fuel prices have skyrocketed and the soaring cost of living has plunged many into insecurity. Now, the continent is facing a recession.

Roma people live all over Ukraine, but I haven’t read or seen anything about how Roma people have been affected by the conflict. I read about instances of racism on the border, but nothing about the experiences of Roma people. Perhaps the unfairness that Roma people faced has been once again sidelined, not garnering attention, even if it received press coverage. Often it is the communities that were already marginalized that are most vulnerable to economic downturns and instability, and as the mistreatment of Roma is often ignored, I thought it was important to investigate how Roma communities are making it through these especially trying times.

I was guided in my field research by my friend Dr. Viktor Teru, a Hungarian speaking Roma man who wears many hats. He works for several non-profits dedicated to promoting education and raising vital funds for Roma children. Currently, he also holds the position of advisor to the President of Slovakia, Zuzana Čaputová, and is a member of the advisory committee for the Office of the Plenipotentiary of the Government of the Slovak Republic for Roma Communities. He is also the founder of Roma for Humanity, which is an organization seeking to aid Ukrainian refugees, both Roma and non-Roma. Viktor began his career as a social worker in Roma communities, and has directed his career towards the continued service of these communities.

When I reached out to Viktor with my pitch for this article, he sprang into action, organizing interviews and arranging for me to visit multiple Roma localities. He would also serve as my Slovak translator, making my research possible.

I arrived in Eastern Slovakia, a region with a large Roma population, and stayed in the center of a small city called Prešov. The city itself was quiet and quaint on the snowy day I arrived; neat two-story pastel-colored buildings lined the main street that culminated in a large church.

Viktor picked me up at my hotel the next morning at 9 AM. We got in his car and peeled out of the snowy parking lot towards our first Roma locality. To my surprise it was not a far drive, just a short way outside of town. It was located up a hill behind a sparkling, newly constructed store. One building constitutes the settlement. It is long, four stories, that looked to have once been painted bright colors, green, yellow, and red, but has long since been stripped of its paint. Now it exhibits its color in patches, and most of the building is the dull grey of exposed cinder blocks.

I was struck by the way the building seemed to lean. It gave the impression of not being fit together quite right. It reminded me of a piece of Ikea furniture with the screws not tightened, it seemed crooked, leaning and sagging. None of its lines were straight, the row of windows uneven and the exposed walkways askew. It was strikingly disheveled. I expressed my surprise at the state of the building. Viktor just said “yes,” to every remark I made.

There were two men standing a little way away from the building in high visibility vests. These were the MOPS, Viktor told me, a government program from the office of Plenipotentiary. They served as security for the settlement. “I don’t like this project, to tell you the truth,” said Viktor as soon as we saw them, “they don’t help.”

We headed towards the community center just across from the settlement. It was a low and squat building with peeling green paint. On our way towards it, Viktor explained their role with me. The community centers are one of the primary initiatives to help Roma communities, good in intention, often poor in execution, explained Viktor. Viktor told me that many social workers are either white Slovaks “with long fancy fingernails,” who won’t enter the community, or Roma people who are often dealing with poverty themselves, “unmotivated and unable to make a difference.”

The social workers live under difficult conditions; Viktor explained to me later. They are paid around five hundred Euros a month. Barely anything, even in Slovakia. One of the social workers, a Roma man, approached Viktor after our interview and asked if he knew about any job opportunities. He is struggling to get by, same as the people in the community that he is tasked to help. “Of course he has no motivation,” Viktor said.

We entered the office and were greeted by two older women, social workers, in their fifties or so. One of them dawned her jacket and we set out again for a tour of the settlement. The first thing she said was that the locality had 176 apartments with around 1100 residents. The apartments are either one, two, or three rooms total. That would be an average of 6.25 people per apartment. Even if you’re one of the lucky ones, with a three-room apartment, that would still mean two people are sleeping in every room of the apartment.

Fifty percent of people live without electricity, the social worker told me. Some use illegal gas generators, but that is expensive and largely out of reach now that gas prices have increased because of the war. These buildings are not insolated, Viktor told me. The woman said that this is government fraud. “It’s the bricks and nothing else.” I saw no chimneys, no sign of heating. The weather was freezing and the people in the apartments had only cinderblock walls for protection.

Residents passed us as we entered the courtyard of the building. Off to work, the social worker told me. A government initiative, spearheaded by a Roma man, who my guides seemed to regard as a traitor of sorts, had mandated work to receive the social benefits of roughly eight euros per day. Programs like this exist in other countries in the region too and have faced substantial criticism. The optics are bad, the jobs that need to be filled are often things like picking up trash on the street, creating the impression that Roma are subservient or an underclass of people. All that for money that just barely allows them to continue living in these inhumane conditions.

Viktor and the other social workers were very concerned with the cleanliness, or lack thereof, of the community. It’s true, there was a good amount of trash on the ground, accumulating in piles in some places, but to me this hardly seemed like the biggest problem. The conditions are bad, the building is in poor shape. I considered the trash to be symptomatic of the “public bathroom effect,” the idea that if a public bathroom is horribly dirty, you won’t worry about missing the trash with your paper towel. Viktor and the others didn’t see it that way, “just because you are poor does not mean you have to be dirty,” Viktor told me in Hungarian. That’s true enough, but it hardly seemed like the priority to me. I would learn that cleanliness is a barometer for Viktor, used to evaluate the relative success of the social workers and MOPS.

My focus wasn’t the litter, it was the children running around freely. I visited on Friday morning, around 9:30. Kids should have been at school, but the truancy, didn’t come up during our tour. The kids were ignored by everybody. I watched as they ran along the walkways of the building, hiding behind hanging laundry as a woman yelled down at them from one of the higher floors. The image of these children skipping in between piles of garbage will stick with me for a long time to come. It felt like I was watching the multi-generational entrapment into poverty happen live. I have always firmly believed that quality education and well-funded schools are the foundations of social mobility, so to see these kids not at school made me think that the young residents of this building would not have any opportunity. It was even worse to see them ignored by the social workers who are meant to help. No one was giving them a chance.

Later, after I asked, the social workers told me about the government’s failures in providing Roma people with fair access to education and all the flaws in the educational system that led to the widespread disregard of schooling. They explained to me how the government reversed course on their 2018 initiative to provide free school lunches for children. Now, Viktor said, Roma parents must pay about 40 Euros per month, per child, for school lunches. This is out of budget for many families who scape by on social income. Since it’s more than what it would cost to eat at home, many families don’t consider it financially viable to send their kids to public school.

I was also told that every municipality in Slovakia determines their school districts, and this is often used to segregate Roma communities and create schools that have almost entirely Roma student bodies. As we know from history, segregation tends to lead to worse conditions in the facilities allocated to the oppressed minority and this is no different for Roma people. Viktor, with the help of NGOs and others, managed to petition the government in Prešov to eliminate the existing school districts, a major win. Not every municipality has someone like Viktor and so educational segregation is common throughout the country, as I was told by social workers. Even in Prešov where Viktor and his peers managed to put an end to the redlining, this is a recent fix. Education inequality has been endemic across generations, I was told, and this has led to a deep distrust among some Roma people that cannot be reversed easily.

When we exited the courtyard to the other side of the building we were greeted by increased litter. A chair was discarded, flipped upside down in the middle of the pavement. “Not all Roma live like this,” Viktor hastened to point out, just roughly 30% of the population refuses to “assimilate.” In his experience working as a social worker, many Roma are desperate to get out of these types of settlements and many have been able to get a better standard of living. Municipality housing programs exists, offering the ability to buy a home if both parents in a family have a proper income. This requires more than what they might earn from the mandated work for social benefits.

There is a horrifying tendency to associate these rundown localities with Roma people or culture. I’ve heard from numerous people in Eastern Europe that they think Roma people cause the degradation of conditions, that somehow Roma culture creates the circumstances and not vice versa. Viktor made sure I understood that this was not the case. I met many Roma people who worked hard to escape these inhumane conditions. They certainly didn’t see poverty as their culture, as some ignorant people will suppose. Viktor told me that the “30% who refuse to assimilate” grew up in even worse conditions then this settlement. He said, “they grew up underground,” and I think he almost meant it literally. In this settlement they continued living as they had before, not taking advantage of “luxuries” like dumpsters, because they were not used to the system. So, as far as I can understand, what I saw was not the refusal to assimilate, but rather the consequences of extreme oppression and subsequent poverty.

I asked about Roma people’s access to real work, about how hard it is for people to get the income necessary to move away from these types of communities. It is challenging, the social workers told me frankly. The community center provides the residents of the community with help constructing C.V.s to submit to jobs. They try to help residents prepare for job interviews, making sure they have clean clothes, and know the necessary skills, like converting centimeters into millimeters. They even will stage practice interviews, so they know what to expect. I asked if there is any discrimination, and they told me that if Roma applicants are called in for an interview, they are likely to be discriminated against. It is more difficult for Roma to get employment in Slovakia, even if they are prepared. Those who can get jobs mostly work in manufacturing, they told me. I watched a young man lean out of his second story window, taking a screwdriver to a makeshift-looking satellite dish as others in the apartment looked on. “A genius,” said Viktor, following my gaze.

We stood for a while at the back corner of the building. Viktor was providing more evidence for how poorly the building serves as shelter, pointing out the lack of insulation, the gaps between some of the cinder blocks, and how the government didn’t care to fix it. As we spoke, I noticed a little boy, in a green and blue snow suit with a red hat, was tentatively coming down the stairs. He slowly and hesitantly made his way towards us, climbing up the muddy slope to the road we stood on. As he approached us, he removed his hat. The social workers kept walking, Viktor and I did as well, continuing our conversation about the irresponsible construction. I turned to take a photo; the little boy looked after us.

In retrospect, this moment breaks my heart completely. Why didn’t I say anything to the boy? We just walked away and didn’t even acknowledge his presence. We ignored him. I wonder if that’s how all the authority figures in his life treat him. Maybe that’s how everyone treats him. What anger and resentment had I unknowingly sown in this boy? Maybe I’m being dramatic, reading too much into a simple moment, but the picture I took shows a disappointment on his face that I didn’t notice at the time. He’s holding his hat in his hand, maybe he had a question. He was alone and unsupervised, maybe he needed help. I could have smiled at him, given him a wave, anything. I was focused on high-level problems that I cannot solve. Maybe I could have lifted his spirits.

Ignoring this kid was an example of the dysfunction I saw in the community's support, but it was far from the only example. I interviewed one of the members of the MOPS, who Viktor couldn’t stand. A white Slovak guy, he wore a black baseball cap and had a gold ring on each of his fingers. I asked him how he had ended up working for MOPS. He told me that he had been unemployed and gotten a call from the job center that this position was available. The man stressed his importance to the locality saying that without his presence everything would be worse. “They respect me,” he kept repeating. Viktor was visibly frustrated by this catch phrase. Viktor asked if they respected him, why was the locality still so dirty and run down, the protection of property is the MOPS primary job. The man told us that he calls the police to issue fines to the people who litter. This is needless antagonization, as Viktor explained to me later, because most residents are not able to pay off the fines anyways. The MOPS man also said he enlists the children to clean up the trash and rewards them for it with treats. He showed us his stash of coffee in cartons he uses to motivate the children. He gives kids coffee to pick up trash and saw nothing wrong with it. Another example of complete dysfunction.

This locality, and the next one we visited in the center of town which was nicer in appearance but similar in terms of its problems, left me feeling pessimistic. Many issues were pointed out to me, large systematic failures, but very few solutions. That was until I interviewed a friend of Viktor’s, a Roma person who holds a place in the national government. They asked to be left anonymous in my reporting to protect their position. They outlined a vision for the future. Right now, efforts are too disjointed, they said, there are the social workers, the MOPS, multiple community centers, NGOs, health workers, all trying to solve problems. All the money mostly comes from the same place, the European Union, and so all the efforts should be managed by one department. According to them, currently, a single Roma person has files across multiple departments and multiple community centers. This makes it confusing where someone should turn for help, and difficult for the social workers to gain access to all the information they need to assist them. It is a completely inefficient and largely ineffective system, they claimed. A unified effort that is multifaceted, rather than haphazard and disjointed endeavors, would be more effective at combatting the intersectional issues faced by many members of Roma communities.

Since you have such a clear plan, I wondered aloud, what is keeping you from making it happen? Both Viktor and his friend laughed. They struggled between themselves to come up with an answer before Viktor just burst out with “because it’s not sexy.” What he meant, as he would explain, was that solutions to help Roma people didn’t help politicians get votes, it didn’t garner the support of the majority, and it simply wasn’t a political priority.

“The truth is it has always been difficult to fundraise and get support for Roma communities. And it’s even harder now with the war,” Viktor said. The war, I was told, has pushed the challenges Roma face even lower on the list of government priorities, and so an already neglected group has become even more so. The war even effects Roma job prospects, a social worker told me. They claimed that companies were given incentives, encouraged to hire refugees. A good initiative for people in need which has unintentionally contributed to the unemployment of Roma people. The social worker, who is Roma, said that his own son was fired from his manufacturing job and replaced with a refugee. While I cannot confirm that this was the exact truth of the matter, it follows logically that the arrival of white refugees desperately in need of work would make it harder for Roma in a job market they are already discriminated against.

Slovakia has welcomed millions of refugees demonstrating admirable solidarity with their neighbors, providing social benefits and incentives to companies to provide employment to these people who are in need. It’s a shame that this type of solidarity has never been shown to their own Roma citizens who have been trapped in a poverty cycle for generations.

I asked Viktor about the experiences of Roma refugees from the Ukraine. His organization, Roma for Humanity, facilitates the resettling of refugees, both Roma and non-Roma. One story is documented in this wonderful video they made. He told me stories of Roma refugees being forced to wait in separate lines at the border, while white refugees passed easily. Some Roma people, he said, didn’t have any travel documents when the war started, and thus have had a hard time leaving or getting support in the countries they fled to. I asked if any Ukrainian Roma refugees had joined Roma communities like the ones we visited. No, he told me definitively, there were better options available for them in other EU countries like Germany. He told me anecdotes of Roma families even having a hard time finding work and adjusting to life in German cities and heading back to the Ukraine, despite the risk. Regardless of this eventual disillusionment, the refugees had the opportunity to bypass the poverty that many members of Roma communities in Slovakia are facing. While some people in the locality that I visited manage to move to other countries, and “come back with Armani sunglasses,” as Viktor put it, most are entrenched in the cycle of poverty. It struck me that, in a twisted way, being a refugee may have been an opportunity at social mobility for some living in localities such as the one I visited.

In Slovakia, this institutional racism is entrenched and ignored, Viktor explained. The oppression of Roma people is brushed off as not a problem or blamed on the Roma themselves in a sinister contortion of logic. The government downplays the importance of the issue quite literally by underestimating the size of the Roma population in census data, Viktor explained. For seven-hundred years white Slovakians have segregated Roma communities. It is explicit oppression. Community support efforts are so disjointed that they are largely symbolic. Real support, like assuring that children are educated, and families have access to decent living conditions, is stalled. The suggestions of the people who know best, Roma people, like Viktor and his friend, who have fought their way into positions of power, are acknowledged and then ignored. “We are hungry, and they promise dinner will be ready in five minutes, but they haven’t even gone grocery shopping,” Viktor said exasperated.

Throughout my field research, I kept thinking of that moment when the boy approached us. This has been one of the hardest articles to write because of that moment. I have learned about how many odds are stacked against Roma people, how difficult it is to achieve any social mobility or escape the destitute conditions that children grow up in. Almost no one cares, or even seems to know about this problem in the west. Articles come out every couple of years about the “medieval living conditions” of the Roma in Slovakia, but it seems nothing changes on the ground. Here’s another article to continue the tradition. I just hope that little boy won’t raise his kids in that building with no electricity, six to a room.