In 2012, the town hall in Piatra Neamt gathered the Romani living in the main social housing blocks in town and moved them to Valeni. Meanwhile, beyond the Bistrita river, the old village inhabitants and the new comers had to learn how to live together.
The simplest way to get to Valeni is to take the old, white minibus, which goes through Piata Mare, in Piatra Neamt. “The bus departs from here at every hour, at 10 past and twenty to, every hour”, says a lady with big and fluffy hair kept at the back of her head in a coloured elastic band. She is wearing warm and heavy clothes since winter is approaching fast. She lived in Valeni all her life, and when she hears what I am and what I want to do, she starts swearing. “May the fire burn the mayor”, she says, and then she advises me, “as my own daughter”, not to go there, because there are “thieves, criminals, ex-prisoners”. She tells me that the village order, where she grew up and lived all her life, changed two years ago when the mayor moved the Romani next to the villagers.
In July 2012, around 500 Romani who were living in Muncii street, were told they were going to be evacuated. One month later, they were already in Valeni. The ill thought about moving started in 2001 when, the media was writing that the then mayor, Ion Rotaru, wants to build a “special neighbourhood” for all Romani in Piatra Neamt. In 2001, several families that were living in the streets moved into the empty rooms of a block in Darmanesti neighbourhood. In 2007, the town hall received funds for the renovation of the block, and those who were living there together with others who were squatting in a block in Aleea Ulmilor, were taken to Muncii street, next to a water treatment station. They lived cramped in small flat of around 15sqm., sharing the water pump at the entrance to the community and the communal toilets in the garden. The thought that they might end up homeless again started two years later, when the rental contracts expired. The electricity was cut off in the winter of 2012, and the rumours that they will be evacuated intensified during summer. During the same period, numerous Romani families that were occupying illegally the nationalised houses in town, were relocated too, together with other young Romanian families, in an area next to Valeni village, known as Valeni 1. 50 small villas were build, each having four studios, where 200 families are living. The people’s fear of living in Muncii street turned out to be true in July 2012. They were told that the land they were living on was sold, and a market was going to be built instead. Now, at the end of Valeni village, on a large industrial estate, between the river Bistrita and the forest, almost one hundred families live in some low buildings, built like containers, which, seen from above, look like the letter H. Here, one kilometre away from the last bus stop, at the end of a country road, full of deep potholes and with mountains of rubbish on both sides, is Valeni2 neighbourhood.
“They knew they were staying illegal, but «after so many years I thought we had a right to be there. But can you go against them?»
I try to enter the neighbourhood with beige villas from the penultimate bus stop. It is marked by a long bench and an empty, white, advertising panel were two young girls wearing roller blades are standing. They ask me “how do you do?”. They tell me that they are best friends, “but we are not sisters” and that they go to the same school in town, not in the village, because in the village there are “only dirty and full of hepatitis gipsies”. Their parents do not forbid them to play with them, since “we are half gipsies, too, I am not ashamed”, confesses the freckled girl with all her hair up in a ponytail. Additionally, her father is ursar and gets along well with all the Romani from here, “even the ones in Valeni 2”. One time when he took the minibus in town, someone stole the nine lei he was carrying in his front pocket of his red shirt. “Not this one”, tells me showing the red blouse she is wearing over her black leggings. The blouse is stained and elongated around the pockets. She is wiping an imaginary stain from her pocket. “I don’t think it was them”, say her friend who is half Romani, too. “I play with gipsies”, she tells me and adds that she has once slept here in the barracks, in Valeni 2. “Really?” the other one asks her. “Precisely!”
At the white school perched up on the hill 70% of children are Romani. Amongst them there is Casiana Boz, the daughter of Zargiu family, a twelve year old girl, who is in the fifth grade. Only she together with her sister Esmeralda are called Boz, their father’s surname. They were born while their parents were still not lawfully married. When they did get married, Crina Zargiu, the girls’ mother decided that the family should take her surname. “He wanted to change his name, because it sounds differently”, explains the girl. In the Romani community from Valeni, the names Boz or Bozu are very common, so Mr Teodor preferred to take his less known wife’s surname of Zargiu. He would have liked to change the girl’s names, but this requires time and money, and “anyway they will change it when they get married”.
Casiana would like to become a cook, just like her uncle who is a chef. She started going to school with great pleasure, just like her mum, Crina Zargiu who is 33. Until two years ago, she was studying at School No 6 in Piatra Neamt, on Maretei street. The little girl with brown hair and dark eyes said it was better there. It was “just like the schools in town”, more houses, more teachers and more children to play with. Here Casiana plays almost only with her cousin. What about the Romanian children? “Only sometimes”. Why?, I ask. “I don’t know, they say we are mean”, tells me shrugging her shoulders. Additionally, students were not studying at the same time at the previous school, as they do here. When Casiana transferred into the third grade, she studied together with the first graders. It was very noisy, she tells me, but they were getting help from Miss Georgiana, the teaching assistant and Filip Marin, the primary school teacher. To keep the children quiet, especially the young ones, the teacher brought a TV to school, “but we were watching it too, because the cartoons were nice, such as The Little Match Girl”, remembers Georgiana.
Georgiana Juncu is the mediator that deals with Romani children. She visits the homes of the children who miss school and talks to their parents about the importance of school. She explains that, usually, at the classes which study at the same time, the subjects overlap; one class studies one subject, while the other class studies another. Days like those, when colleagues who ruin the peacefulness of the class are missing, as it happened a few days ago, are those that Casiana loves best. Additionally, it has been a happy day for the girl, because she had a class with her favourite teacher, who teaches Romanian. She likes her because “she is kind and does not scream at us”, and she got 7, “which is a good grade for the fifth grade”, says the mother.
The Zargius are among the families who lived in a nationalised house in town, somewhere around the main square. Mrs Crina had lived there for more than 28 years. She lived together with her parents, a sister, her husband Teodor and their five children Esmeralda, 10, Serafina who has just started school, two girls who are twins and Armani. They were sharing the house with another family. They were living in a kitchen and two bedrooms. She had Armani, who is 20 months old, after they moved to Valeni. She says that she knew they were staying illegal, but “after all those years I thought we had a right to live there, too. But can you go against them?”
Casiana plays almost only with her cousin. What about Romanian children? «Only sometimes». Why?, I ask. «I don’t know, they say we are mean», she tells me shrugging.
The could not do anything. They were assigned the studio on the first floor in the last villa in Valeni 1. The studio downstairs was offered to her father, who is helping everyone in the village out with mounting handles on axes. She tells me proudly that her father has been a wood worker all his life; he even made the shingles for all the roofs for the villas in Poiana Brasov. Now, they try to manage with the 700 lei that her husband brings in, the 210 which represents the children benefits and 22 ticket meals. Her husband has been working for the rubbish collection company for the past five years. Mrs Crina gave birth every second year, so she could not work; she would like to go out and look for the a job once the children are older.
Crina Zargiu has studied eight grades at the local school, and she would have gone to high school too, if it wasn’t for her health problems. She had some terrible migraines who stopped her from continuing her studies, even though she liked school and she won some awards. She is the youngest among her brothers, “but my parents kept us in school, my two older brothers studied ten grades, the third brother seven and I studied eight”. She tried to teach her children, too, that school is important. Serafina, seven, dressed up entirely in pink and with white butterflies in her pony tails went straight to school. She would have sent the twins to kindergarten too, if she had the money. Esmeralda, the 10 years old girl, of whom the teacher say she is shy and reserved, cannot be convinced of the importance of school.
She registered her for school when she was seven, but Esmeralda never wanted to go more than once a week, until she stopped going altogether and she had to repeat the year. She had a conflict with some other girls who pushed her in the wall at school by mistake, and she was not able to convince her to go back to school anymore. She repeated the first grade, and she managed to learn the letters and connect words. All for nothing. The mother is not able to convince her to go to school, neither with a gently encouragement nor with punishments. “Once, Miss Georgiana was coming after me almost for a week and was taken me to her classroom. Serafina was crying, her tooth was hurting, remembers Casiana. She was lying just to go home”, remembers Casiana. Her mother now thinks she cannot force her. Additionally, Esmeralda has been a sensitive and spoilt girl since she was little because she suffers from crying spasm and faints every time she cries. “I cannot kill her if she does not want to go, anyway, she learns from me and her sisters”, tells me the mother. In the morning, when she is getting the others girls ready for school and sees Esmeralda faking to be asleep, she does not push her to go to school.
Crina Zargiu says that she knows most Romani in the village since she was a little girl. Although she was aware of the conflicts between the Romanians and the Romani, she never experienced any problems. One day, a neighbour told her that “she is surprised that we are gipsies, since she was getting along with us so well”.
The family pays 71 lei per month for the studio which has a room, a bathroom, a kitchen and a small hallway. The room is getting smaller for the family, as the children grow older. “I, together with my husband, my son, and one of the twins sleep in one bed, and the rest of the girls in the other”, shows me the woman. The room has two beds, on which numerous soft toys are arranged, one long wardrobe with a mirror on one door and a coffee table with a TV set. Two adult together with six children and a small brown dog Baiatu’ live in the room. On front wall of the room there is a painting of Armani when he was one year old. On the other wall, there is a painting with the Romani flag on which Casiana has written “casiana + armani = love”. Mrs Georgiana showed Casiana on the internet a picture with a red flag with the wheel in the centre, “as at the fountain”, with sixteen spokes. “At the same moment, the teacher and Miss Georgiana told us to write in our language on the board”. Casiana has written her name and the word “socares”. The girl doesn’t know the Romani language, her mother did not think it was needed to teach them: “Let them speak Romanian, to do well in school. My child will pick up Romani quickly if he or she wants to”.
There are not so many dropouts as in the previous years, says Georgiana Juncu who deals with the parents who do not send their children to school. Many times though, she admits, that she gets false contact details given by the children “just to get rid of me”. For more than a year since she has been working at school, she has started to understand how and when she needs to talk to her parents about their children situation. The best time is last afternoon, as until then many “are begging and take the children with them”. The presence of the children at school has increased since they have started to receive a sandwich, even if there are still children who stay at school until ten o’clock when the food is served and they leave afterwards.
Georgiana Juncu admits that it is not easy for the children to be open to her, even though she is the only one in school who goes constantly to the Romani community from Valeni. “They would rather talk about what happens to their classmates, rather than their own problems. I have never heard them complaining. They are proud people, even if they are in the current situation”.
At the school in Valeni, the classrooms are full mostly of Romani children; there are a few numbers of Romanian children, since most of them learn in town. “If you see how they are dressed up, one cannot tell the difference between Romani and Romanian children. The children play with each other, they do not keep track of who is who”, tells Georgiana Juncu. The parents make a difference, explains Constantin Ciubotaru, an old and bearded mathematics teacher who is pleased with the children in school, especially the older ones. It is much better here than at School No 6 in Piatra Neamt, where he taught years ago: “There, there were parents who did not want gipsy children in the same class with their children, and this is where all problems were stemming from.”
When the Romani came to the village, there were lots of fights and scandals, between the locals and the new comers. The locals were complaining that things were stolen from their yard, while the others were complaining they were called “unwashed and lice ridden gipsies”. Now, the Maths teachers feels that people have started to get used to each other presence. The Romani from Valeni 2 tell me the same thing. “At the beginning they were making scandal, but now they leave us alone, since we live behind them, at the back of the village”, tells me Dusia Ursu, who lives in a room in Valeni 2. The fights with forks and axes were replaced by pokes and ugly looks especially when they are all together in the white minibus, the only one which passes through the village. “They tell us we are many people, that we stink”, tells me a short man, which comes closer to me being driven by the curiosity of the newcomer in the community. “What can we do Miss, some wash, some don’t. There are poor people here, who do not even have water”, says the man. Ninety six families live in the community in Valeni 2. Even is some are abroad, there are still a few hundred souls, since every family has four to five children. The fights in the white minibus take place especially in the morning, when children go to school and it is busy. This happens mainly when it is not raining. The unpaved road that takes 15 minutes to walk from Valeni 2 to the minibus station often prevents the parents to send their children when it is raining and the road is muddy. “When they get to school fool of mud, they are being told off. They told us to keep a pair of boots in their rucksacks and give them a spare pair to wear to school. But where can we take a spare pair from?”, asks me a tall woman, with a long skirt, after she puts an arm on her hip. People tell me that they made many enquiries at the town hall for a school bus, but nobody seems to listen to them. Prolonging the existent route is not possible either since the bus is owned by a private company who is not interested in driving until there. They would not be able to either. Before last year’s flooding, a tube was filling the big ditch of the unpaved road which leads to Valeni 2, but the water had uncovered it and, since then, the crater has been left open. Until not long ago, Maria Bengui, one of the social workers from the town hall was helping them out. Since she has retired, people have not been by the town hall. They say, they have never seen the mayor. “Last time they came a few days ago to mount these electricity poles since it is election campaign”, tells me Mrs Dusia showing the three poles that are found on one side of the road which enters the community. They did not bring electricity though.
Nevertheless, the news from the town hall keep coming constantly for the past months. Since summer, the monthly rent of 42 lei first doubled, then trebled and increased even more, and the white envelopes fill Dusia Ursus’s small hallway. “They represent subpoenas from the town hall and evacuation orders, since people do not go to court. The postman gives them to me to deliver them, but what can I do with them if people do not want to collect them?”
Behind Dusia’s house, a man stays over a white bowl, full of water, where he cleans some beans. In front of him, a little boy in a wheelchair, pulls on a husk, and seems to have forgotten of the empty bottle of milk, next to the front wheel. Hearing that I was enquiring about their situation, the child’s mother comes out in the courtyard, listens for a period, while she lights a cigarette, then goes back to her apartment.
“I’ve stolen them, Miss!, tells me the father when I walk past him. “Those beans, cause what else could I feed the youngest one with”, tells me slowly and sadly, without lifting his eyes from the bowl.
Further, at the exit of Valeni 2, lies the foundation of Valeni 3. Here, in a little while, it is rumoured that the Romani evacuated from Speranta neighbourhood in town, will be brought here.
This article can be read here https://alexafilip.wordpress.com/2015/01/19/straturile-valenilor-2/
