Integrating the Roma
RODICA LUNCA remembers the first time she cooked by barbecue at her suburban home. “My neighbour called the woo woo,” she smiles, spinning a finger in the air to indicate a siren. “I mean the fire brigade.”
Her meaning was already clear, but she takes no chances. Words are important in her line of work and she is careful to get them right.
Rodica is Roma and works as a cultural mediator between members of the Roma community in Ireland and the various institutions of the State they encounter in day-to-day life.
Health services, education authorities and welfare officials can all appear confusing and intimidating to an immigrant with no English and no experience of similar structures back home while a distrustful Roma can appear uncooperative to a public servant just trying to do their job.
Much more than simply an interpreter, Rodica’s task is to translate not only the words her clients speak but the context in which they are spoken.
It would be hard to argue her skills are not required. Of all the migrants who have settled in Ireland over the past decade, the Roma remain among the worst understood and least accepted.
The recent drama surrounding the newly arrived Roma who set up camp on the M50 roundabout typifies the problem. Some Irish pitied them, pointing out their vulnerability while others lambasted them, labelling them welfare tourists, but few could claim to understand what was going on.
Rodica, who is 33 and a mother of four, is not an apologist for her community and says that she too finds some of the ways of the Roma people hard to accept. But that is only natural to her because, while the Roma may be classed as one distinct ethnic group, there are different countries of origin, dialects, faiths, traditions and lifestyles.
Rodica comes from the town of Onesti in eastern Romania where Roma children tend to complete their education although they seldom get more than menial jobs when they graduate. Timosoara, a city of 330,000 in the west of the country, is by contrast teeming with successful Roma business people. At the other end of the spectrum there are towns all over Romania where the Roma live on the margins of society without schooling, jobs and, in some cases, even an official identity.
“In my part of Romania, it’s very shameful to beg, but in some parts of Romania, you grow up begging,” Rodica says of a less popular trait associated with the Roma in Ireland.
Others don’t have such honest jobs, she admits. “Some Roma steal. For most of us, it’s shameful, but some Roma are brought up from the child to steal.”
It is worth noting that prison records do not suggest the Roma are disproportionately responsible for crime. On an average day this year, there were just eight Romanians, who may or may not be Roma, detained in Irish jails and nobody from the other main countries where Roma originate.
Despite the high visibility of the Roma in Ireland, they are one of the smaller migrant groups. Estimates put their numbers at just 3,000 although accurate statistics are almost impossible to find as the last census asked for country of birth which, for a Roma, will typically mean Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary or Slovakia so they were not counted as a distinct group. Even if there had been a separate box to tick, many Roma would not have completed the form. Many cannot read or write in their own language, never mind Romanian or English, and, even among those who can, there is a distrust of officialdom that comes from years of discrimination in their home countries.
That’s where Rodica comes in. She works chiefly with Roma attending Dublin hospitals, especially the Rotunda maternity hospital and Temple Street Children’s Hospital, where she acts as a mediator between patients and staff during what can be a hugely stressful experience for both sides.
When her husband Vasile was in hospital, word spread quickly and at one stage almost 50 friends and acquaintances had gathered to see him.
“The nurse said, ‘Jesus Christ, so many people, what’s going on?’ Every person told her, ‘I am his brother, I am his sister’. She said ‘no’, he can’t have so many family. But in our church, we say we are brother and sister. It’s not a lie.”
Rodica knows now that the last thing an overworked medic in an overcrowded hospital needs to see is 50 curious individuals hovering around a patient and she has had to engage in some crowd control herself.
Translating Irish ways to her fellow Roma is as much a part of her job as explaining the Roma to the Irish and she considers the birth of one little Roma baby a fortnight ago a triumph of both skills.
The child’s mother, already a mother of 10, was diagnosed with diabetes during her pregnancy and was both inconsolable and incomprehensible. “She was crying and crying and the doctor don’t know why. She told me: ‘Oh Rodica, I am going to die pregnant’. She don’t know she can take medicine and be OK.”
Reassured that her condition wasn’t terminal, the woman was prescribed insulin to be taken in different doses depending on the time of day, but she repeatedly mixed them up or failed to take them at all. As she couldn’t read, Rodica put coloured stickers on each container of medication for her to mark the times of the day they should be taken, but there was yet another problem in store. “The doctor said she had very high blood pressure and she must stay in hospital but she can’t say yes — she has to ask her husband to let her stay.”
One thing Roma have in common is the patriarchal system. Roma women cover their heads with scarves in the presence of men and defer to the authority of their father or husband.
“Roma women stay at home and have children and cook and clean,” Rodica, smiling at the knowledge that she has broken the mould.
“In October I was in Slovakia at a conference [to do with the Equal Community Initiative, the European programme that funds the cultural mediator project] and before that I was in Spain. It was a very good experience for me, but my husband was nervous. I was gone a short time — just three days — but everyone asked my husband: ‘Where is your wife? Did you leave her go?’ When I came back to my church, everybody asked me: ‘Where did you go? Why did you leave your husband?’”
The church is important to the Roma although it also marks a point of difference within the community. Rodica belongs to the Pentecostal Church, a conservative faith which forbids alcohol, tobacco, divorce and sex before marriage. The larger Orthodox Church allows drinking and smoking and, while sex outside marriage and divorce are discouraged, the same level of taboo does not apply.
Even more than religion, however, tradition shapes Roma values. Girls marry young (criminally young by Irish standards) and families are large, 10, 11 or more children the norm.
“For Roma in Romania it’s a shameful thing to have a daughter 15 or 16 years old still at home. It’s very important that a girl is a virgin so she must marry very quickly. Many Roma girls marry at 13 and at 14 they have a child. I know lots who have four or five children at 20.”
That practice has continued among some Roma families in Ireland although increasingly they realise the trouble they face from the law and social services. Because some first-time mothers are so very young, they remain very much under the influence of their own families and their in-laws and Rodica has found much need for her mediation skills around the delicate issue of childhood vaccinations.
Most Roma children are not vaccinated in Romania so the concept is peculiar and all it takes is for one baby to wail convulsively or suffer a fever after a needle prick and every other mother in the community will determine to boycott the procedure.
Child-bearing is revealing of Roma culture in other ways. While Irish women are increasingly becoming mothers for the first time in their late 30s, a Roma woman pregnant at the age of 40 is considered too old and a source of great shame, particularly if she is already a grandmother, which she is almost guaranteed to be.
Shame is a powerful force in Roma society. It also prevents discussion of domestic violence, which is sadly a feature of too many Roma marriages. Rodica hopes to set up a support group for women to enable them come together, share problems, learn English and empower themselves.
It begs the question how Rodica manages to be accepted by her community when so much of her lifestyle challenges its norms. It helps that she knows what her clients are going through because she has been there too. She arrived in Ireland in 2001 and spent the first nine months in an asylum seekers’ hostel in Borrisoleigh, Co Tipperary. She knew no English and nothing about the Irish way of life.
When one of her own children needed hospital treatment, she automatically slipped €20 into the stunned doctor’s pocket, assuming it was necessary to bribe to get any attention as was her experience back home.
She explains very simply why she and her husband Vasile decided to uproot the family and take their chances on the unknown.
“For a better life,” she says.
Although she left school trained as a laboratory chemist, the only work she could get was as a waitress, a job she had to give up when she married at 19 because it wasn’t appropriate work for a married woman.
Vasile laboured in construction and both wanted more for their children.
A cleaning job or labouring on a building site is as much as most Roma of her age group aspire to but they expect better for the next generation.
She is not the only one excited by the prospects awaiting the first generation of Roma children reared in Ireland.
“I asked a friend of mine in the church — she has a daughter who is 16 years old — how her daughter is not married. She said, ‘Thank God she is not married. Here it is the law and the law is good’.”
But they don’t want to stop being Roma, even if it means occasionally alarming the neighbours.
Rodica smiles at the notion that what is sociable in her community can be perceived as antisocial to the Irish.
“Roma like to be with lots and lots of people together. If a friend of mine comes for a visit, in half an hour my house is full because everyone will say ‘where are you, I am coming too’. My neighbours ask me ‘Rodica, there are too many cars here. Are you having a party again? I say there is no party, I don’t drink, I don’t smoke. We are here to talk. My neighbours say ‘Rodica, you talk too much!’.
“We like to barbecue, we like to have coffee outside, we like to go in the park. You see the green place and sit down and in half a hour there are 60 people there. And the Irish people, they look all the time.
“Things are changing. People here try to live like the Irish, because of the rules and the law. But we are still Roma.”
SET up two years ago, the Roma Cultural Mediation Project has so far trained eight mediators from within the Roma community.
The six women and two men work in a variety of settings, concentrating on health, social and educational services, but also moving into probation services. A key difference between the mediators and language translators is the fact that, once a mediator is assigned a client, he or she will attend every appointment and meeting with the client until their dealings with the service is complete, and remain available to both sides to ensure progress is made and good relations maintained.
Funding for the project comes from the European Union’s Equal Community Initiative which was established primarily to tackle discrimination and inequality in the labour market. The Roma project fits into that brief, as one of its aims is to ensure equal access to education and training services so that Roma people can find or create opportunities for themselves in the workforce.
Most Roma living in Ireland have asylum status because of discrimination in their home countries. Since the tightening up of immigration laws, however, Roma are subject to the same entry requirements as other citizens of their home country.
The Roma Cultural Mediation Project is run mainly by Access Ireland, which works towards the social integration of refugees and is also supported by the Health Service Executive, the City of Dublin VEC, Dublin City University and the Roma Support Group.
Details can be found at www.equal-ci.ie
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
