Slovakia readies its Roma for the euro currency

By KAREL JANICEK
Associated Press
2008-11-09 09:00 AM

Dancers and singers in colorful Gypsy costumes stormed the stage, drawing loud ovations and raucous laughter.

"Cheers to the euro!" the players called to the crowd assembled in this central Slovakia town.

The "Eurofestival" is a traveling show designed to help Slovakia's largely uneducated Roma, or Gypsies, make sense of the common European currency. On Jan. 1, 2009, Slovakia becomes the 16th European Union member state to adopt the euro, and the Slovak Central Bank has commissioned the Romathan theater company to take the mystery out of the new coins and bank notes.

Spokeswoman Jana Kovacova says the bank realized it needed a simple, entertaining approach to explain the switch from the Slovak koruna, or crown, to its most socially excluded minority group.

The show in the Romani language is part of a 7 million koruna (230,500 euros; $314,250) information campaign that also includes a CD with songs about the new currency and television and radio shows. The campaign is predominantly designed for the 150,000 poorest Roma who occupy about 600 shabby, segregated settlements that lack even basics such as running water or sewage systems, said Ivan Hriczko, who works for a government office dealing with Roma affairs.

"We know our clients, and that they don't have a positive attitude to printed information," Hriczko said. "Romathan explains to those people in a simple way what will happen on 'D-Day' and helps them cope with the novelty."

The play starts with an onstage announcement of the agreed-upon exchange rate _ 30.1260 koruna to the euro _ and a character who proclaims: "It won't be bad."

Gabriela Strkacova, a 59-year-old Gypsy, isn't so sure.

"We'll have just a few bank notes. How shall I pay with them?" she asked. "I'd like to keep our Slovak money! I'll have to always ask my husband what to do."

Euro notes and coins first came into circulation in 12 countries in 2002. Slovenia adopted them in 2007, and the euro zone widened to 15 nations this past January when Cyprus and Malta joined.

Slovakia went through a difficult transition after shaking off decades of communist rule in 1989. It endured several years of isolation under autocratic Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar in the 1990s, then made rapid economic progress with free-market reforms under former Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda.

Now, although buffeted by the global financial crisis, it still boasts one of Europe's fastest-growing economies _ one that could expand by 7.7 percent this year and is forecast to grow by 6.5 percent in 2009. Premier Robert Fico has called the euro's arrival "the continuation of a success story that began with the entry into the European Union" in 2004.

But success eludes most Roma. Unemployment in Gypsy settlements runs 90 percent or even higher.

"We are poorly educated and can't get a job," said Gustav Baca, the Roma mayor of the northern town of Strane pod Tatrami. "That's the biggest problem for us."

Of his town's 1,222 Roma, 99 percent are unemployed. In Hnusta, hundreds came to watch the Eurofestival _ even though it was staged at 11 a.m. on a work day.

Jozef Mezei, chairman of the Academy for (Roma) Education in the capital Bratislava, said the campaign was a good step. But he said it needed more funding and greater involvement from Roma activists, and simply didn't work in southern Slovakia where Roma speak only Hungarian.

Others say it merely pays lip service to Gypsies' real problems.

The campaign "doesn't address the fundamental questions of being Roma at the margins of society in Slovakia," said Larry Olomoofe, senior human rights trainer at the European Roma Rights Center in Budapest, Hungary. "Housing, education, employment and health care: These are the four fundamental areas that the government needs to concentrate (on) ... There's a lack of will to address these fundamental problems."

As the switchover nears, there are concerns _ just as there were in Western European nations _ that grocers and others will take advantage of the confusion and engage in price-gouging.

Jano Gabriel, who lives in the Romani neighborhood of Saca in the eastern city of Kosice, said he's having trouble making ends meet as it is. Gabriel's only income is 3,500 koruna (115 euros; $157) a month in state social benefits.

"I have to pay the rent, gas, electricity and there's almost nothing left for food," he said. With the euro, he frets: "It's going to be worse. We'll just be beggars."

Although European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet warned recently against inflationary pressures in Slovakia, government officials have played down the impact of the switch to the euro, saying they expect prices to rise by just 0.3 percent.

For young Roma like Dana Cisarova, 15, the new currency, like the Eurofestival itself, is just a load of song and dance.

"We don't want the euro," she said. "My mom can't count. They'll all cheat on her."

Merriam native Julie Denesha photographs Gypsy life in Slovakia

By ALICE THORSON
The Kansas City Star

Within days of beginning work as a staff photographer at the Prague Post in the Czech Republic, Julie Denesha was warned by her colleagues: “You have to watch out for the Gypsies.”

“They’re criminals; they don’t want to work,” was the common refrain.

These stereotypes and the general feeling of resentment against the Roma, as many Gypsies call themselves, set off Denesha’s internal alarm.

“It was the same stuff you hear about any minority group,” the Merriam native said, surrounded by 45 photographs from her “Gypsies of Slovakia” exhibit, now at the Landon Gallery on Southwest Boulevard.

Slovakia’s half-million Roma are the country’s second largest minority after Hungarians.

Denesha’s images offer an intimate picture of Roma life.

Women prepare meals, children play, men weave baskets and chop wood in decrepit apartment buildings and dilapidated rural shacks without benefit of basic city services such as running water and garbage pickup.

“We all walk around with these ideas about other people,” Denesha (pronounced den-i-SHAY) said. “The truth is far more interesting.”

By 2003, when she began her Roma series, Denesha had covered the war in Kosovo and done extensive reporting on Central and Eastern Europe for The New York Times, The Guardian, Time, Newsweek and other publications. She also had gained some familiarity with Roma culture from freelance assignments.

Every couple of years a publication would send her to a Roma settlement for half a day to do a story on the life and conditions of these “outsiders,” who trace their origins to northwestern India and are darker skinned than ethnic Slovaks. Many were killed in Nazi concentration camps.

“I always felt I was missing something,” Denesha said.

She decided that the only way to get at the “truth” was to live among the Roma.

With a grant from the Puffin Foundation, she lived with Roma families for four months in 2003, when Slovakia was poised to join the European Union.

The goal, she said, was “to disappear into the rhythms of life and see the people rather than the poverty.”

Denesha held out hope that the requirements of EU membership would translate into better treatment and conditions for the Roma, but in 2007, when she returned for six more months with funding from a Fulbright and a Milena Jesenska Fellowship, she found little had changed.

Although her images do not ignore the hardships and squalor of the settlements, their focus is the close-knit Roma family.

“The family builds the home together,” Denesha said.

Typically a daughter-in-law moves in and learns from her husband’s mother.

What surprised her, Denesha said, was how much the woman’s role in the household is valued and respected in Roma culture.

An image of a little boy watching as his grandmother, mother and aunt prepare a meal captures a common domestic routine.

“They’re very interested in sharing recipes,” Denesha said. “They’d cook from scratch these amazing things.”

Another image shows a man chopping wood in the village of Rakusy, where wood-burning stoves are the only source of heat in the settlement’s log cabins.

In her months with the Roma, Denesha was keenly attuned to moments of joy. One striking image shows teenagers dancing on an apartment balcony strung with laundry. Another captures little boys swarming over an abandoned car that their parents would take apart and sell for metal.

One of the most captivating shots shows two little girls walking down a forest path with a bucket of kindling. The kerchiefs on their heads are actually “pants with zip-off legs that they made into cool hats,” Denesha said.

Outside the settlements, life is difficult for Roma children. They speak Roma at home but must learn to speak Slovak in the Slovak schools they attend. When the language barrier causes them to fall behind, they are placed in special schools for slow learners, where most of the children are Roma.

Denesha’s Roma images also provide a fascinating glimpse of life after communism in Eastern and Central Europe.

“I’m fascinated with the old communist empire,” she said. “I came of age in the 1980s when Russia was the Evil Empire. I’m always skeptical of what people say is bad.”

The story of Nicholas and Alexandra (Russia’s last imperial family, murdered by the Bolsheviks), fired Denesha’s imagination when she read it in junior high.

Her fascination with Russia continued at the University of Kansas, where she graduated in 1993 with degrees in journalism and Russian language and literature.

After graduation she worked as a staff photographer for The Kansas City Star for two years before moving to Prague.

With the collapse of the Communist regime and the dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the mid-’90s were a time of economic turmoil and widespread unemployment. The Roma were hit particularly hard, Denesha said.

Tough economic times heightened resentment of the Roma people. In the 1990s they frequently were targets of violence.

Denesha documented the bloody aftermath of one attack that took place in 2000 in a suburb of Zilina. A mother intervened — and subsequently died from her injuries — when two intruders broke into her home and began beating her daughters with baseball bats.

“There’s so much misunderstanding that they’re not really seeing each other,” she said of the relationship between ethnic Slovaks and the Roma. “I wanted to create a window.”

In each village Denesha would meet with the Gypsy mayor, or vajda, before she began taking photographs.

“I can do this project,” she would say.

“I can’t promise change, but this is my hope.”

ON EXHIBIT

The show: “Gypsies of Slovakia”: Documentary Photography by Julie Denesha

Where: Landon Gallery/Sabrina Staires Studio, 329 Southwest Blvd.

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday- Friday and by appoint- ment. The exhibit has been extended through Nov. 2.

How much: Free

For more information: 816-474-4771 or www.juliedenesha.com