Roma

I thought I'd comment again on the Roma population. I've made a few posts to this effect and I find it overall to be a very difficult situation.

Things you are likely to see are the gypsies sending out their cutest little girls alone through the city to stand next to food stands and bus ticket windows holding a cup and asking in a cute little voice "give me a coin!"

I've also seen young boys, 12, 11, 10 years old pulling out a cigarette and lighting it up, exhaling pools of smoke like a middle aged card shark.

There seems to be so little family support or concept of 'raising' a family- gypsy men strut around town, decked out in pin stripe leisure pants, a different pin stripe pattern jacket, and flashy button down shirts; cowboy hats and pointed-toe loafers, never working, never in a hurry to go anywhere. At the piata in Cluj where the McDonalds is located, a constant parade of neon colored flowered prints flies in and out of the doors. McDonalds, a very upscale sort of place to see and be seen, is the favorite place for the vain Roma to go in in hoards, buy one or two drinks, and linger for hours, much to the chagrin of the guard with a billie club hired to keep the place gypsy-free.

At monuments or street corners, gypsy children will be playing about carelessly, but upon hearing my English, immediately adopt a pained expression and moan plaintively "give me money, give me food, please miss, give me money, please, dear god, help us."

Women trudge through trains, opening each compartment and begin the begging wail so typical of the gypsies "please, please, would you give money, for medicine, for food..." repeating it on and on while they hold tiny, skinny babies.

It's pathetic, it's sad, and it sometimes makes me re-evaluate what kind of a person I am while I ignore these scores of underfed kids and dirty women again and again.

However, the Romanians feel no shame about their dislike. They simply hate the gypsies. They will tell you flat out that gypsies are not humans anyway.

They do live completely outside society. Most of them are not employed in any formal way, don't go to school, don't live anywhere permantly. The other day, I was driving on a rural road through the mountains of Maramures and saw an open riverbed hosting a stereotypical gypsy camp, with wagons, tents, colorfully dressed women and children running all over the place. They live in tarp and plyboard shacks in empty fields outside of cities, or crammed into an apartment all together.

There are cultural, societal, financial, historical, and just purely racist reasons that they are not assimilated into society. However, the way they are treated so badly and not even thought about by the Romanians themselves is troublesome. The Romanians are fairly racist about other races too, mocking Chinese tourists (Hey, Jackie Chan!) and African students (look! it's 50 cent), and perhaps you could explain this by their total lack of exposure to other races and cultures. However, the gypsies have lived in Romania for 500 years and nothing has changed or improved.