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.
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.
