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.

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.