What is our purpose in working with Roma children?
The members of Sakáta, Professional Forum for Education, together with an amazing and passionate teacher named Vili, are developing an action with Roma children in the school 75 primary school “Todor Kableshkov” is located in the neighborhood of Fakulteta in Sofia (Bulgaria). Fakulteta is a neighborhood on the outskirts of Sofia, and it has a population of 25000 – 30000 Roma people.
The idea to create an action with the Roma community is to understand better the culture and the situation of the Roma people in Bulgaria. It is also really important for us to not treat the kids or people in general as an object of study, but create actions where everyone is treated as people with knowledge, and a rich culture, and deserves to be listened as everyone.
As a contextualization, it is not clear the history of the Roma people around the world, but some scientific documents explain that the Roma community was established in the current North of India, in a city called Kannauj, where they needed to run away because the Afgan Sultan Mahmoud burned and destroyed the city. Then, they went to Gazni, in the current Pakistan. And from there, they had to flee many times in order to not be killed. If you want to know more about the history of the Roma community and to understand more about how they arrived in the Balkans and how they spread around the world, we recommend a document written by César Carrillo Trueba, called “A Thousand Years of Life on the Margins – The diaspora of the Roma people”.
For their history, the Roma community, in different countries is really diverse and each one has their own idiosyncrasy. Having this background, our mission through the project that is have been developing in the 75 primary school “Todor Kableshkov” is to discover the culture, and traditions of the Roma people in Bulgaria.
When we planned what to do and behind which principles to carry out the action in the school, we had clear that we did not want to teach anything to them, showing what is good and what they have to change. Our purpose was to listen, understand Roma people, build connections, and create a relationship among us in order to learn from each other, avoiding paternalistic ways of acting as an NGO.
From our point of view and experience with discriminated social groups, marginalized communities, are tired to listen from “white people” about what they need to do.
Changing the perspective, we wanted to understand them and learn more about their values and principles as a culture.
The Andalusian lawyer and activist Pastora Filigrana, in her book “El pueblo gitano contra el Sistema-Mundo” (“The Roma People against the World-System”), has taught us that attempts have been made to exterminate the Roma people. They have suffered multiple genocides throughout their history, because they did not support capitalist values and always wanted to be outside the system, creating their own ways of living.
The common values of Roma people in the different countries are:
-They are nomads.
-The fact that they are/were nomads made them not want to have private properties.
-Collectivity – Roma people still have a really strong sense of community, against the individualism of prevailing capitalism.
It is not appropriate to generalize, and these three points may only be met in some cases, since, as we have said, the Roma community has a long history, and a lot of diversity depending on the country in which they live. But these 3 factors that the writer Pastora Filigrana highlights as points to learn from, value, and take into consideration as aspects that characterize Roma people.
Starting from this knowledge, was very important for us, not bringing to the students, ideas on behalf of “development”, but teaching the students “how to be more included as part of the hegemonic system”. By contrast, we wanted to absorb their ways of seeing life and learn how to create a cultural exchange where we both could learn from each other.
As a strategy to fulfill our mission, we thought about food, as one of the important elements that define cultures, as well as, can be a kind and friendly way to make connections through food. That is the reason why, Sakáta, Professional forum for education members, and the teacher Vili, materialize all of these concepts and ideas by implementing activities in the school focus on creating a cookbook of Roma Bulgarian food, which will be written in Bulgarian and in Romani, to show to the world the Roma cuisine and indeed the Roma culture.
In the process of researching Roma food with the kids, we discovered that it is not possible to find pictures or recipes of Roma food in Google. That is why, we decided that we are not only going to create a cookbook about Roma food, but we are going to update in Wikipedia all the recipes collected, so Roma Bulgarian people can find their culture/their food, as happened with the other cuisines, people will have access to this information to learn from Roma Bulgarian traditions.
During this process, we can acknowledge that the members of both organizations have been the most beneficiated for the project, due to the warm and cozy attitude from the students and since the first moment, making us feel more than welcome.
Literature resources where we found some information and the ones mentioned in the document:
-Mihail Gheorgiev (2000). “Fighting for Fakulteta: Advocating Roma housing rights in Bulgaria”. European Roma Right Center. http://www.errc.org/roma-rights-journal/fighting-for-fakulteta-advocating-roma-housing-rights-in-bulgaria
-César Carrillo Trueba (2018). “Mil años de vida en los márgenes. La diaspora del pueblo gitano”. Revista de la universidad de México. https://www.revistadelauniversidad.mx/articles/fb0f4473-da0e-44d8-a377-06858515584f/mil-anos-de-vida-en-los-margenes
-Pastora Filigrana (2020). “El pueblo gitano contra el sistema mundo. Reflexiones desde una militancia feminista y anticapitalista”. Inter Pares.