A young girl remains afloat with the help of non-formal education.
From Monday to Friday, Alina wakes up at 2:30am in a room in the hotel where she has been working as a maid for the last 11 years. She starts working at 3am, she works for eight hours, and then she heads to Parade Day Centre. As soon as she gets there, just after 11:30, she goes to the gym, she changes and then starts warming up. With the help of Cristi, the entertainer, Alina starts the balancing exercise and it takes her just three moves to stand on his shoulders. Her head almost reaches the square plated ceiling of the pink and purple room, which she is afraid of hitting.
Alina Constantin is a 31 years old girl who was abandoned by her parents when she was only three weeks old, because they could not take care of her anymore. She has tried to rekindle the relationship with her parents and her four brothers, but it did not work out due to the breakage of the family bond, but also because they live very crammed in a one room apartment.
After 18 years, during which she lived and studied at Lizuca Placement Centre, Alina became part of the circus team Parade. Within the team she does balancing and juggling alongside Alex, Mario, Cristi, Robert, Betty, Ricky and the entertainers Tania and Cristi. They are being trained by the choreographers Marian and Flori. When she walks across the gym with set and hurried steps, she looks for known faces she could salute, she continues to walk boyishly to the place where people change and surf the internet. She puts on either the grey sweat suit or the red one, she puts her hand through her short cut hair and before starting the training she does an elegant ballet figure.
Alina does not hide that she is Romani, even though there have been times when her honesty turned against her. Once, she has been accused that she has stolen a pair of glasses from a hotel room where she was cleaning. She is not sure if the dark hair and the skin colour influenced her superiors to accuse her. She believes that the daily discrimination which she has to put up with, is not based on ethnicity, but because she has spent more than half of her life in a placement centre and poverty. This, she says, empowers people from her workplace. They know she cannot afford to lose her nine hundred RON per month salary and the room where she sleeps, even though it means that she continues to work as “Isaura slave”.
The room where Alina sleeps was given by the hotel where she works and even if she shares it with two other colleagues, it is still better than living with her own family. “I do not actually have a home”, says Alina looking at the floor under the desk where she is sitting with her elbows on her knees.
From a social level, all members of Parade team are united through childhoods spent either in orphanages, canals, placement centres or in families who could neither offer them an education, nor the certainty of tomorrow, nor an environment safe from the perils of the street.
Alex, for example, is 24 and has lived together with his parents in a social flat in Ferentari, until he was fed up being made to beg and left to live in the streets. He has only finished fifth grade and the Prada team found him when he was 15. At the day centre he can take four balls or coloured pins in his hands, bruised and pierced after 12 years of drug use. During his training hours the signs of his dependency disappear. When he started juggling, the only thing which stops him from being even better is the ceiling which does not allow him to have more than five balls up in the air.
Not being used to a strict schedule, the discipline and the school authority, they are helped by the time they spend here to concentrate their attention on what they like for as long as they want to. Nowadays, the team has around 10-12 permanent members. Even so, the risk is that their education is the least preferred activity. Their favourite is the artistic program, explains the centre’s psycho-pedagogue Mirela Haita.
From the 10-12 people who come regularly at the centre, Ricky and Mario have been selected by one of the biggest juggling schools in Europe, for going on tour. Ricky made a deal with Mirela to come more often for the mathematics, Romanian and foreign languages classes, before his departure in May, but Mario has already left for Spain with his father to work.
Here at Parade, the house with red walls, where the gate is always open and where the music is always floating out to the street, where young mums with their babies, people who sleep on the street or in houses near collapse and children whose parents work from morning till evening, come and eat, wash, do their homework and spend some time away from the bustle of the street. They come for the safety offered by a roof above their heads and the non-formal education which the centre offers in the basement of the building.
In order to get to the basement, you need to go down some steep spiral stairs. Follow the sound of the music chosen by Tania and put on loud volume by Cristi, Mario or Robert. Mrs Flori, their coach and choreographer, tells them to bring the rope from the office of the gym. She holds one end and Tania holds the other. They start rotating it simultaneously in the rhythm of Florin Salam’s version of Bregovic’s ‘Hopa Cupa’ song. Depending on how they sit next to the rope, individual or in a team of two, they try to jump, do somersaults or even juggle while they are jumping.
On a Friday in February, several days before a show the team was going to perform, everybody was tired. The rope would tangle in rotations, the ones who would try to jump over would catch it with their heel or their fingers. Flori could not make herself heard anymore through the rhythm of a new melody from Ionut Cercel’s “Here comes the godfather, the rich man”. In the middle of the two hour rehearsal, he took his clothes and his bag from a chair and went home.
Successively, Mario, Ricky, Cristi and Robert have put the clubs down too and were getting ready to leave the room. “Let’s rehearse the ending several times”, Alina shouted as she winked tenderly. She promised them a 2l bottle of Pepsi Twist is they successfully complete the exercise. Motivated by the drink, they rehearsed three times and got it right twice. Alina left to get money from the centre coordinator, since she had no money in her pockets. “They are my children”, says Alina, the eldest in the team.
Alina’s job and accommodation offered her the necessary independence. Prada does not consider her a beneficiary, but a helper and a volunteer that can continue the work with those who pass the gate of the red house, says psychologist Claudia Petre.
Alina draws with a red pen on the wooden table and says that the work she does in the purple room, with the team with whom she trains every day, is the only thing which neutralises the negative energy she accumulates over the weekend. All she wants to do at the weekend is to forget the difficult life she is living.
This article can be also read here: https://anamcostache.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/echilibristica-pentru-uitare/.
