|
Bulgaria: The Roma Build Respect
|
|
|
 At 19, Katya Arsenova is not that much older, and, in some cases, is a few years younger than the people she is helping to organize. She believes she has one primary skill to offer: the ability to define and achieve a goal. She honed this skill during a one-year training program organized by Pakiv, a civic organization dedicated to developing Roma civil society through its young leaders. | |
“There has been a different set of rules.”
--Nikolay Kirilov |  | | The end of communism in Eastern and Central Europe has seen the more than 7 million Roma people in the region plunge further into poverty as factory and collective farm jobs have vanished. But through civic organizations like Pakiv, and with an increasing emphasis on seeking local political office, the Roma are trying to help themselves by learning how to work within the system to stand up for their rights. Nikolay Kirilov, who runs Pakiv, believes the Roma have suffered institutional discrimination. “The state always stopped at the boundary of Roma neighborhoods. There has been a different set of rules,” he says. |
 | “You prove by your actions that you are equal.”
--Svetlin Raykov | | In the Bulgarian city of Lom, the Roma population lives out of sight of the main community in a little valley on the outskirts of town. Their settlement is without paved roads, telephones, schools, or health facilities. But Svetlin Raykov is trying to change that. He is one of the Roma leaders who recognizes that if his people’s problems are to be solved, much work will have to be done on the political stage. Raykov, 30, has become one of Lom’s deputy mayors. “You prove by your actions that you are equal,” he says. |
“The people who took on the sheep were also taking on responsibility to develop themselves.”
--Eugene Angelov |  | | A community group in Biala Slatina has been helping unemployed farm workers establish their own incomes by giving them loans. With $7,276 out of a World Bank grant, the group provided 15 households with five or six sheep, two months’ feed, and insurance if the animals died. One successful applicant, Vasil Sandov Hristov, 37, hadn’t had a proper job since 1990. But he now has an income from making cheese and raising lambs. His children are all at school.“The people who took on the sheep were also taking on responsibility to develop themselves,” says local headmaster Eugene Angelov. |
 | Katya Arsenova helps organize other Roma teenagers through the skills she developed in Pakiv’s training program. | | In a low-ceilinged church hall next to a soup kitchen in Lom, Bulgaria, Katya Arsenova, works with a group of Roma teenagers to halt the spread of illegal drugs. At 19, Arsenova is a few years younger than some of the people she is helping to organize. But she believes she has one primary skill to offer them—the ability to define and achieve a goal. It’s a skill she developed during a one-year training program supported by an organization dedicated to developing the Roma people. “Investing in one person can make a big social change,” says Nikolay Kirilov, the executive director of Pakiv, the group behind the program. |
Updated May, 2004 |
|
|
RSS