Schooling, Education and Job Placement for Roma

A Gusterita Social Project 

In February, the Sibiu Church Parish started a social project in the local Roma community, aiming at reducing the school drop out rate.

A small team began visiting the Roma village to find out which children and youths need motivating and what support would enable the children and their families to start or return to class.

Our social worker Mr Lucian Tenghea started out by evaluating all the Roma families in the Gusterita area, particularly the Macesului and Drum Nou streets.
He found a Roma community who is faced with huge material and financial problems:

• accommodations consisting of one or at most two rooms with precarious sanitary conditions
• insufficient food of poor quality
• lack of infrastructure and drinking water supplies in most accommodations
• most families living off social help and child benefit
• only four people have a regular job (reason for lack of employment is mainly due to non-schooling)
• children with behavioural problems, and problems of theft and begging
• children who were evaluated as mentally retarded resulting largely from lack of stimulation within the family due to the parents on their part not having been schooled
• parents who state that their children are marginalised in school and insulted for being unkempt and poorly dressed.

18 children with particular problems were identified. These are:

• children who dropped out of school
• children who never went to school
• children who are in school but who skip school to the point of dropping out.

Mr Tenghea identified the families' needs which as usual range from food, clothes and shelter to educational and medical support as well as counselling.
A lot of time and involvement will be required from different professionals (educators, medics, social workers, private persons) and institutions to change the existing behavioural patterns (for kids between 12 and 18) to create a base for acceptable behaviour (in children from 6 on upwards) and most of all to try and change the parents' mentality concerning customs, attitudes and behaviour.

Ecological Gardening Seminar

The "Green Church" started a series of ecological gardening seminars with Karl Hann, ecological expert from Carț who will guide us in setting up our school garden.
The seminar was attended by Mr Gross, chairman of the church board, the Farcasiu family, the gardening team of Șelimbar deacon team, the colleagues and volunteers of Gusterita as well as five university professors and twenty agriculture students of the Lucian-Blaga University, Sibiu.

Why should the soil not be ploughed? What is the purpose of weeds in a garden? How can we obtain humus-rich soil? Which plants complement each other? All these questions met with surprising agreement and with basic skepticism at the same time.

Agreement was reached on the following points: the series of seminars will continue with practial work in the garden. The university will undertake to test the soils in the various parts of the property while the students will share in planting trees for "green filters" and the orchard. They are joined by the Agency for Environment and Romsilva. The students will develop and realise a concept for garbage recycling and removal for the entire property. 

Preparations for the Gusterita School Garden

A sunny day helped everyone to come out of their hibernation. The parish field is being cleaned of corn stubs and will be turned into a school garden teaching ecological gardening.

16 volunteers from Gusterita and Sibiu gathered quickly and shared in the work on Saturday afternoon, 22 February. As you can see, the work was finished soon, even the little ones worked hard to help. 
Afterwards, there was tea in the school kitchen. The children had lots of fun using the new mobile playground, sponsored by ifa Stuttgart, Germany.

Clown Workshop in Gusterita

From 3 February to 7 February, the parish house and the old school hosted a clown workshop for the children of the German-speaking primary classes. The kids learned clowning basics and enthusiastically did a show for their parents and grandparents on the final day.
They had lots of fun and felt very inspired about learning in a playful way. Taking a bow, moving on stage, taking care of their costumes, learning to move, feel and talk like a clown challenged their coordination and motor skills.
After the show the new mobile playground was inaugurated with the clowning kids being the first ones to use it. The mobile playground was sponsored by the Institute for Foreign Relations (ifa) in Stuttgar, Germany.
The all-day holiday program is offered as an extra-curricular activity in German to create educational opportunities for children to playfully develop new life skills.

Neighborhood Meal

Starting the New Year 2014 the Gusterita Church hosted a neighborhood meal on the school sports ground.

As it is planned to develop an ecological garden from spring onwards, it was advised to make a first contact with the Roma population in Gusterita. The church grounds are frequently being entered and used in an unpleasant way. To ensure a peaceful co-existence with the Roma community we served a hot one-pot meal.

In spring a project will be started aiming at reducing the drop out rates of school children.

The Sibiu confirmands helped to serve the meals and went for a round of soccer with the local Roma kids.

ARAPAMESU, a local American NGO shared in the organisation of the event. They keep good relations with the Roma community and help more than 40 children with their homework, and humanitarian aid.

Not all families attended the meal - for reasons of embarrassment, we found out. Therefore a team took a huge pot of stew door-to-door. They shared their shocking experience with us.  None of us had known the situation there.