“The Roma are unreliable.”

This stereotype, a rock-solid belief nestled deep in mainstream society’s perception of the Roma, underpins so many other beliefs: That the Roma are “good for nothing”, “lazy”, “unable to build”, to create, to take care of themselves or their children, to “participate in society” or “contribute” in a meaningful way. That there is “no point in helping them when they can’t even help themselves”.

The thing about this stereotype is that it is rooted in actual behavior. From our mainstream lens, according to our understanding of “reliability”, yes: many, many Roma are “unreliable”. And they have one thing in common (other than being Romani). But we’ll get to that in a bit.

They find a job — usually an undocumented construction gig or some other temporary thing. They give their phone number and tell the employer they can reach them there any time. They are ready to start tomorrow, today even. They are eager. Then you call, and the phone is off. It might be back on next week, it might never be on again. They might show up to work, they might not.

When they have a phone again, they will continue using it to hustle. They will respond to job ads, or advertise themselves on social media (even if it’s with “I’m available to donate blood” posts in designated groups). They’ll list their phone number with a “You can reach me here”. When you call, the phone will be off again.

You make plans together. “Let’s have coffee tomorrow”. “I’m coming over for dinner”. Or the plans can be not just to catch up, they might be to do something important. Go through eviction documents, visit the municipality, file urgent paperwork.

They will ask someone for help, set a time to meet, and not show up. Hence the “no point in helping them when they can’t help themselves” narrative.

In the summer of 2021, Martina spent most of her time accompanying people from Pepi’s tribe to municipalities and lawyer offices and helping with paperwork. It was always an unspoken standard that whatever time we agreed on, they’d arrive late. Very often, they wouldn’t show up at all. The only way to reach the person Martina was waiting for was almost never by phone, but by spotting someone else from the tribe in the vicinity and asking around. Sometimes, through word of mouth, the person would be tracked down. Other times, we’d look for ways to reschedule.

Last year, we had a very important online meeting in the evening that both of us had to attend: a meeting with Pixar and other members of the Cultural Board we are part of, to discuss a movie we are consulting on. So we asked Yoanna, one of the younger women in the tribe, to come over with her kids and watch our daughter. She had already done it once a few months prior for a previous Pixar meeting we had. Pepi confirmed and re-confirmed this second babysitting plan with Yoanna’s husband every single day for the two weeks leading up to our meeting. At the time, they worked together in street cleaning and while riding the truck to the depot Pepi would explain how important the meeting was and what it was about, and how we will have food and treats and games prepared for Yoanna and the kids. Yoanna’s husband, who is also Pepi’s nephew, swore up and down that we can count on them, and since Pepi and him are very close, he was proud that he’d able to help out his uncle.

The day of the meeting? You guessed it, nobody showed up.

One hour before the start of the Pixar video call, when Yoanna was supposed to have arrived already, we started our attempts to reach her. The phone she shares with her husband was off. Pepi tried calling the husband’s parents and brother. Phones were off. We had our meeting with our toddler climbing on us and drawing on our faces, but thankfully, everyone else on there took it with humor and kindness.

So, did Yoanna let us down? Did her husband let us down?

The easiest thing, in fact even the most natural thing, would be to think: yes, they did let us down. They didn’t even give us any warning that nobody’s coming. That same day, Pepi and the nephew were at work together, and the nephew said Yoanna and the kids were looking forward to tonight.

It would be easy to stretch out that line of thought further even. Did they lie? Did the nephew lie every day for two weeks when he promised Pepi that we can count on them?

It is very common for people in Romani communities such as Pepi’s to give big promises, make plans, look you in the eye and make you feel that this thing is happening. And then they flicker out. The thing doesn’t happen.

Do they lie? Are they flakey? Chronically unreliable?

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What is really going on under the surface

We were not mad at Yoanna. We were greatly inconvenienced, sure, but we knew we were not abandoned and were not lied to. We knew the reason we got stood up had nothing to do with how much Yoanna wanted to help us out or look after our daughter for a bit. We knew the intention was there.

So, what happened?

While we were trying to get hold of Yoanna or her husband, we called several close and distant relatives who were showing as online on Messenger. Pepi would ask them if they’ve seen Yoanna, if they knew whether she left or if she’s still there (in the building they are all living in). Eventually, after our Pixar meeting, one cousin called back and had the nephew’s father with him.

Turns out, Yoanna and her husband ran into a random guy who needed help throwing out furniture and other stuff from his apartment, and he offered them cash to take care of it. This is one of many side-gigs for Roma living in poverty, because it is quick cash (for back-breaking work) but most of all, it means you can keep the things that are being thrown out. Very often, the furniture, or whatever is tossed to the trash — washing machine, fridge, bags of clothes, bags of “useless, old” items — is not damaged at all, or damaged only a little bit. So the Roma keep it, or repair it, or resell it, or deconstruct it and sell it for scrap. For Yoanna and her husband, who live in a small room in a crisis center, share one bed with their two toddlers, and use his parents’ laundry machine, this could have meant a new bed, or a fridge, or new clothes, or anything really.

We asked Yoanna to babysit because she loves our daughter, our daughter loves her, she visits frequently with her kids and they all love playing together.

We needed help for an important meeting. And Yoanna was ready to help. But Yoanna lives in constant survival mode. Her husband lives in constant survival mode. They have two small children. So when an opportunity to make some money and maybe find something valuable came up, of course they took it. When you compare the two situations, which one was more important? More urgent?

They weren’t able to return to the crisis center in time to send any warning to us. Their phone was pawned earlier that day because they had no money for food.

Which is why many Roma have a phone one day and no phone the next. The phone is a disposable thing, very useful of course, but not more useful than food on the table. When they need cash, the phone is the first thing they pawn. Later, when they get cash through any one of the many ways they hustle, they take the phone out. And soon, they pawn it again. Often the SIM card inside gets lost and since it’s usually a pre-paid voucher, they just get a new one next time they have cash. So phone numbers change all the time.

Out of the countless examples we could have given, we used our story with the Pixar meeting to illustrate an urgent situation that most people in mainstream society could empathize with, because it’s closer to their reality. (And by “empathize”, we mean empathize with us.)

But try to picture it this way: We had an emergency, a blip in an otherwise stable existence, that ultimately proved to be nothing more than an inconvenience and had no negative consequences.

Yoanna and her husband live in a constant state of emergency. The person they ran into gave them a temporary reprieve from their emergency by opening the door to some cash and material items.

Regardless of whether Yoanna showed up that day or not, our daughter would still be fed, warm, safe, and so would we. That’s the norm for us and our daughter.

For Yoanna and her family, no single day is a guaranteed like this. Every day, they have to hustle to secure the basics.

So the desire, the intention: it was there. The promises were real. There were no lies. But one family needed two hours for a Zoom call, and the other family had just pawned their one phone to feed their children.

It’s two different realities. Two different galaxies.

Here, the question about “reliability” goes right out the window. Because while Yoanna was not “reliable”, in the conventional sense, for us, she was reliable in showing up to secure basic survival for her family.

The wobble of poverty

In August 2021, Martina visited the home base of ATD Fourth World, a movement that works with people and communities in poverty. It was in a beautiful village in Northern France, where Van Gogh had painted his heart out many years prior. It was through the ATD team in Bulgaria that Martina met Pepi’s Romani tribe to begin with.

There were many paintings, sculptures, books, pieces of art that depicted the realities of poverty. But one really stuck for Martina. By this point, she had experienced so many missed meetings and phones that go dead, that it felt both true and cathartic to see this reality depicted outside of the Romani context. It was exactly where it belonged. In the poverty context.

The sign under the sculpture says, in French:

This is how it feels. “When you barely touch it, it trembles.” And, “in poverty, a person cannot be stable”. Even if they want to be, even if they try to be, with their whole heart.

But we would add, there is a hidden strength and a hidden stability in this outer wobble.

Every time a person in poverty misses a call, an appointment, a promise, it is because they had to show up somewhere else. Somewhere more urgent. Isn’t this strength? Isn’t this the most radical kind of stability?

The Roma living in poverty flicker in and out of view—for us. Outsiders who live stable lives. When you walk through the curtain of poverty, you see them in full view. And they are not in collapse. They never stop showing up.

This is the third and final part of our series “Poverty Culture: Poverty behaviors misread as Romani character”.

Part 1 and 2 are here:

Next week, we will publish a translated Romani song.

If enjoyed the poverty culture theme, you can read more of our previous articles that touch explore it here:

And here, you can find our book When the truth does not sound true: Exploring common anti-Roma stereotypes.

Our paid subscribers can download it for free as a PDF below.

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“Brazen Gypsies Run a Vile Scheme With the Lives of Sick Bulgarians” reads the title of a 2019 article in a random media site. Other more established sites and media outlets use softer language but communicate the same kind of outrage. Namely, how dare they? How dare they ask for money when you are running in panic over a sick loved one?

Here in Bulgaria, when someone needs surgery, regardless of whether planned or emergency surgery, blood needs to be donated and registered under their name so that the hospital can maintain its blood bank quotas. Blood is scarce here. There is no culture of donating blood and our healthcare system has no money to import from abroad. So when someone is in for surgery, their relatives are on an urgent mission to find blood donors and, usually, they come up short. “During socialism,” one of the articles says, “it was almost like a national sport to donate every few months.” But now, nobody steps forward.

Except for the “brazen Gypsies.”

When you go to the center for transfusion, all articles say, you see them out front, walking around. They approach you and ask if you need blood.

So far, so good.

But then, you learn, they don’t just wait around all day and offer blood out of the goodness of their heart.

The blood has a price, in cold cash.

Is it a mafia?

“The blood mafia,” as some articles call it, does have several mafia elements. The actual blood donors are Roma living in poverty. They get paid between 25 and 50 EUR for a donation, when the “clients” are charged between 150 and 300 EUR, or even up to 500 EUR for rare blood types. The difference goes to the groups running this scheme and scouting for buyers.

But it is not pure profit. Big sums go to bribing the police to look the other way. This, though, is not reported in any of the articles. The reason we know it is because Pepi has been one of those people donating blood for 25 EUR, as have many, many other people in his community. And the groups running the whole “gig” are from a neighboring tribe.

Of course, they discourage individuals from offering their blood. It has to go through them. When we say “discourage”, this can mean many things. One article about a remote Northern location in Bulgaria says that a similar Roma group beats up other Roma who donate blood for cash outside of their channels. “Breaking both legs is the least they do,” the article says. We don’t know how true that is. Here, in Sofia, you get threats for banishment. “If you try this,” they say, “we will never contact you again and hook you up with clients.”

With social media, this threat doesn’t carry as much weight anymore because many people here use large designated Facebook groups to ask for blood donors, and a lot of Roma respond to these posts, cutting out the middle man.

And of course, they don’t ask for 25 EUR. They ask for 250 EUR.

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Is it extortion?

“Blood traders extort people in need,” cries the title of another article.

Let’s meditate on this word for a bit. Extortion.

Here is what the Merriam-Webster dictionary has to say about it.

Do the Roma obtain the money by force? No.

Do they obtain it with intimidation? No again.

With undue or illegal power? Again, no. Unless we consider having blood to be power, and even then, it would not be undue or illegal.

What about gaining with ingenuity and compelling argument?

Well, bingo.

Their argument is compelling.

The blood banks are low. The healthcare system is malfunctioning. For decades, the governments in power have had no budget or strategy about blood needed for surgeries.

And when people need blood, when they start calling friends and family, when they reach out on social media, nobody steps up.

“But they [the Roma] are not the only ones who offer blood in exchange for payment,” says an anonymous nurse in the extortion article. “Very often the blood is repaid with cash or some other service, even between relatives”.

So your own kin might ask you for money. But the author of the article, even after this quote, focuses on the Roma being the extorters.

The government fails you. Your community fails you. Your family fails you.

But a Roma living in poverty is expected to rise above it all? Make it alright? Be charitable to middle-class strangers in a racist culture, when their own children are starving at home? Literally bleed, in order to balance out a broken system and a broken society?

The Roma offer. They don’t pressure. They recognize that most people probably have nowhere else to look but they did not create the society that developed this lack.

Who gets to decide what a human body is worth, and under what conditions refusing to give it away for free becomes a crime of character?

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“Better to bleed than to steal”

For the person looking for blood donors, the situation is obviously about survival. So when a Roma person asks for money, they appear as a predator preying on the vulnerable.

“My mother needs urgent surgery, and you’re asking for money?”

It feels like extortion, regardless of whether it technically is or isn’t.

But for the Roma person, this is also about survival.

The Roma person’s mother might need medication. They may be out of food. A baby at home might need formula and diapers.

Pepi donated blood for 40 EUR in February 2022, when Martina was less than 2 months pregnant and with lapsed health insurance after having been out of a job for several months. It was a rough time for us and we had run out of cash when Martina started having severe pain. Without the health insurance, going to the doctor would require cash. So Pepi went out for a couple of hours and came back with 40 EUR, enough to cover a checkup. For Martina, new to these nuances of Romani life, this felt both dystopian and incredibly resourceful.

Pepi doesn’t know who he donated the blood for because it was through the organized group that handles the clients and keeps the bulk of the money. And the person who received the blood does not know that the person who gave it had to do it so he can take his pregnant wife to the doctor.

“I feel it’s hypocritical of people to get so upset when a Roma asks for money in exchange for blood,” Martina said to Pepi, “when there is so little regard for Romani lives in our society. They don’t value the Roma’s life and health but expect the Roma to still be generous to them with their own blood.”

“I agree,” Pepi said, “but that’s not why we ask for money. We do it because we feel forced to. Because there is no other way.”

“If we go outside the blood center [meaning, the National Blood transfusion center in Sofia] right now, or at any time, you will see a few Roma scouting people and offering blood, and the actual potential donors hanging out nearby, hungry, anxious, hoping to be able to get this over with quickly because they always need the cash for something urgent.”

The situation is urgent for the people looking for donors, but the donors themselves are usually also in some kind of emergency. This is why they are there.

“This is one of the quickest, most reliable ways to get cash when you’ve run out of all options and you need it to feed your children or for something medical,” Pepi says. “It’s cornered poor people asking for money in exchange for blood so that they’re not forced to steal a wallet.”

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Outside the blood center, people wait. Some are waiting for blood so a surgery can happen. Others are waiting for blood to turn into groceries, medicine, or a doctor’s visit.

Both are emergencies.

Yet only one side is allowed to call itself desperate. The other is called brazen.

Is it moral to sell blood?

Let’s reframe this question slightly. Is it moral for an entire society to leave no other option than for people to be forced to buy and sell blood?

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This is part 2 of our series “Poverty Culture: Poverty behaviors misread as Romani character”.

Part 1 is here:

Next up in our series:

February 18: “Why the Roma flicker in and out of view”

“You can reach me on this number.” But then the number is always off. “Let’s have coffee on Thursday.” But on Thursday, they never show. “I will take care of this and arrange that.” Then they don’t. The Roma are seen as flaky, unreliable, and unable to keep a promise. In this article, we will explore why what we see as reliability is, in a way, a luxury.

You can read more of our previous articles that touch on the poverty culture theme here:

And here, you can find our book When the truth does not sound true: Exploring common anti-Roma stereotypes.

Our paid subscribers can download it for free as a PDF below.

Read more

Pepi’s niece Dancha and her partner Trayan, more widely known by his nickname Rambo, came over one time when we were struggling to throw out our old couch. Pepi gave them a call and asked if they’re free to help us out. Within one hour, they were here. Pepi and Rambo carried the huge couch the 6 floors down and then we sat down to have a few drinks while our daughter was playing with their children.

In-between the jokes and laughter, as the sun began to set, Pepi mentioned they’re welcome to stay the night.

“Thank you, but we can’t,” Dancha said, “We need to be up early. We’ll be doing the legal marriage thing tomorrow morning.”

“Oh, really?” Pepi said, “How much?”

You’d be forgiven to assume that Dancha and Rambo would be getting married to each other. After several years living together, having two children, being very much in love, a natural step would be to “sign the papers” as we say.

But if they were going to legally marry each other, they were going to do it the Romani way. A big celebration, an orchestra with drums, everything announced weeks if not months in advance.

In fact, they did already have such a wedding in 2019. A Romani wedding: no vows, no signatures, no officiant. Not recognized by institutions, so very much “unofficial.”

So, this is why Pepi’s immediate reaction was not “What?” or “And you didn’t invite me?” or “Congrats!” He immediately knew what Dancha was saying. So he asked “How much?” How much was she going to get paid.

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“It’s a great deal.”

The scam is simple. Men from eastern countries who want to gain legitimate access to the EU get legally married to EU citizens for cash. The newlyweds meet only when they sign the marriage documents, cash changes hands, and then they disappear from each other’s lives.

In this case, it was two men from China. One of them married Dancha, with her partner Rambo acting as the best man / witness to the signature. The other one married Fidana, the long-term partner of Dancha’s brother, mother of his seven children.

They each received 5,000 BGN (2,500 EUR).

“Uncle, I have big plans for this money,” Dancha was telling Pepi. “I will take a driving course and get my driver’s license.”

2,500 EUR is a peculiar number. It can be so little and so much, depending on who looks at it. For some people, it’s pennies. For others, it’s about a month’s salary. And for people living in extreme, generational poverty? It looks life-changing. A clean slate, a new start.

To put things in context, Dancha is unemployed because she looks after the children. Only Rambo supports the family financially, by working in street cleaning and earning minimum wage. At the time when this “wedding” took place, minimum wage was 550 EUR per month. Now it has been raised to the whopping 620 EUR.

Dancha’s plans were very sensible. With a driver’s license, a whole new world opens up. She was looking at this pile of money and thinking of emancipating herself. It was a chance to gain agency in a life full of dead ends.

But what happens to plans when you’re marked by poverty?

If you’ve ever been on a harsh diet, you’ve felt the ravishing appetite the overpowers you when you’re “allowed” to eat again. If you know this feeling, then you have an inkling of how Dancha and Rambo felt when the 2,500 EUR was in their hands.

Dancha and Rambo’s home was demolished in 2017 by the municipality and ever since, they’ve been sharing a social housing room with Dancha’s mother, living in horrible conditions. No running water, power cuts, steep moldy stairs that have caused many injuries, no working toilet, nowhere to shower, walls covered in mold.

When you’re so steeped in grimness, you jump at any opportunity for joy. In Dancha and Rambo’s case, that took the shape of a big plasma TV and a big celebration, buying anyone and everyone as much as they could eat and drink. The plasma TV spent less than a week on their wall before it went to the pawnshop.

The 2,500 EUR melted away. Like ice in the sun.

Some of it was spent on the celebration. A lot on the plasma TV. Some of it was spent gambling by Dancha’s mother. Then, real expenses came knocking, so Dancha and Rambo pawned the TV and that was it.

If you find yourself judging them, hold your horses. It is very easy to see how the money could have been spent more wisely. They see it too. But if you’re starved, physically, psychologically, and you find yourself with a big pile of cash in your hands, all your plans and your rational thinking get hijacked by everything inside you that has been craving and craving forever. It takes enormous willpower to resist this hunger and do the rational thing.

And even then, there are no guarantees.

Dancha’s brother, whose partner Fidana also got married for 2,500 EUR, didn’t blow the money on immediate gratification. He used it to buy a car and a horse. This was a very sound investment. With a horse, his family could make a decent living, way above minimum wage. With a car, he and his adult sons could easily travel to construction gigs and do repair jobs. He opened two paths for his family to hustle, to make a living.

If this sounds almost too good to be true, it’s because it is. For 2,500 EUR, what are the odds that you’d score both a decent car and a healthy horse? The car broke down within a week. Meanwhile expenses piled up too quick so he had to sell the horse before ever making any money with it.

On the outside, in retrospect, from the calm of our comfort, it can seem to us that Dancha’s brother had the right instincts but rushed and rushed, without proofing, without double-checking, without planning.

But you can’t be sure you wouldn’t do the same thing in his shoes. You get this one shot, you know how quickly money melts away, you have to move, you have to turn it around and do something meaningful. So you do it as fast as you can. And then you watch it fall apart.

Fictive marriages are not the only way that Roma living in poverty are being used. They are paid cash to accept companies to be signed over in their names. Property, too. For anyone trying to disguise criminal activity, the easiest —and ironically, cheapest —thing they can do is offer cash to a Roma living in poverty. The cash never sticks. But the signatures do.

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What happens to the ghost marriage?

So now that Dancha and Fidana are married to two men from China who are currently living in Germany, what happens?

On the surface, nothing. Both women are living with their families as they had before then. On paper, they are married to other people, but it doesn’t affect their daily life, so nobody cares.

The consequences show up later, maybe years later.

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Mainstream culture is obsessed with diagnosing what went wrong with social media.

We blame algorithms and talk about dopamine loops and screen addiction, about loneliness and alienation. We warn each other that social media isn’t real life, that it distorts reality, that it turns us into performers and voyeurs.

All of this is true.

And yet, it is also incomplete.

Because social media itself is not the disease. It is the host.

Other cultures use the same platforms and arrive at radically different outcomes.

The Roma are one such example.

Across the past two pieces from our series “Unfiltered: Romani Social Media Culture”, we looked at how Romani social media boasts and bleeds—how it holds joy and pain without shame—and how Romani livestreams operate under a simple logic: “Sit with me,” not “Watch me.”

In this final piece, we will go one layer deeper and ask the uncomfortable question:

What if the problem isn’t social media at all—but the values mainstream culture brings to it?

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The influencer mindset, even when no one is influencing

You don’t have to be an influencer to think like one. Mainstream social media culture is governed by a quiet but rigid rule: visibility must be earned.

Not everything deserves to be posted.Not everyone deserves to be seen. Not every moment is “content-worthy.”

We internalize this early. We learn to evaluate our lives as if from the outside, asking:

• Is this impressive enough?

• Is this aesthetic enough?

• Is this meaningful enough to justify attention?

Even people with private accounts and ten friends often behave as if they are being watched by an invisible jury.

This is how alienation sneaks in—not because we are seen too much, but because we feel we must deserve being seen.

Romani social media culture operates under a completely different premise.

1. Why unpolished images feel better than polished ones

Romani photos often include things mainstream culture edits out: clutter, fatigue, half-sleeping people, everyday mess.

From a mainstream lens, this reads as a lack of care. But psychologically, it does something important: it removes the distance between observer and subject.

You don’t admire the image.

You enter it.

In mainstream culture, polished images create hierarchy and a fundamental disconnect. Someone is presenting; others are looking.

In Romani culture, unpolished images create proximity. The message is not “Look at this.” It is “This is where I am. Hello.”

The Roma post this way because authenticity is not something they even think about.

When you don’t experience your life as a performance, when you’re not burdened with how others perceive you, there is no need to curate your image.

2. Posting without an audience in mind

Mainstream social media is haunted by numbers. Even when we claim not to care, we do. We check likes and view counts, we compare, and above all, we internalize visibility as validation.

Among the Roma, posting is not meant to evoke a response. It is about expression.

They don’t wait for the right time to post something depending on how many people are online.

They don’t post for anyone in particular.

They don’t remove posts that “didn’t do well.”

Why not? Because, deep down, when you know that your presence is already accepted, you don’t need proof. And the Roma always know they are accepted.

For the Roma, social media is something you do because you have something to say, not because you expect applause.

3. Why silent stalking doesn’t exist

Mainstream culture has normalized a deeply asymmetrical behavior: watching without being seen.

We know intimate details about people whose presence we never acknowledge. We observe without participating. We consume without responding.

Among the Roma, this would feel unnatural.

If they take an interest in someone’s profile, this interest is expressed. They will leave a bunch of likes or hearts on the person’s posts, leave a few comments, even send a DM. Attention is visible and presence is mutual. If someone looks at your life, they let you know.

Why does this matter?

Silent observation creates a psychological imbalance. It’s a blank slate for projection of your own subconscious thoughts and insecurities but without the mechanics to work through it, namely — a dialogue, some kind of exchange, some kind of electricity or flow of life between you and the other person. With stalking, the flow is one-sided and disguised as “information gathering” while, ironically, you are avoiding to look at yourself.

Expressed attention, by contrast, creates a tiny bit of alchemy – enough to put you both on equal footing psychologically, just as you’d be if you interacted in person.

4. No double self, no split, no theater

One of the most corrosive aspects of mainstream social media culture is the split between online and offline selves.

People perform values online they don’t practice in life. They curate their image, their behavior, their imagined virtue.

Among the Roma, this split barely exists. They respond online as they would in person and they speak as they would face to face.

This attitude comes from a culture where relationships are dense, overlapping, and long-term. Hypocrisy doesn’t travel well in tight circles.

When everyone knows your mother, your cousins, your past, your mistakes—there is little incentive to fabricate a self.

5. A feed that looks like life, not achievement

Mainstream feeds are organized around exceptionality. Romani feeds are organized around continuity.

You see work, rest, movement, boredom, affection, repetition. The same person sweeping streets. The same cart. The same room. The same music.

This is, in a way, a declaration: my ordinary life is allowed to exist publicly.

Where mainstream culture asks, “Is this worth showing?” Romani culture shows “the mundane” unapologetically.

When you consider the demolished homes, the scattered lives, the struggles in the crisis center and social housing, the constant threats of eviction, and the relentless desire by surrounding powers to erase the entire tribe… then posting the mundane is an achievement. It’s a radical statement: “I exist”.

6. What it means to cry in public

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What would make you tap the “Go Live” button on social media? Something special? Something worthy of interrupting everyone else’s scroll?

In Bulgaria, going live usually signals something exceptional. A concert, a soccer game, the recent mass protests — in other words, for noteworthy things.

But the Roma? Yes, they go live when something important happens. Much more often, though, they broadcast moments that—to outsiders—feel perplexing.

The celebration live stream

As sure as the sun rises in the East, when a group of Roma sit down at a table to drink and celebrate, someone will take out a phone and hit the Go Live button. They flip to the front camera and position the phone on the table, leaning it against a bottle or a cup.

If they are sitting next to a beloved or special relative they will adjust the phone to include them in the frame. If there is dancing or something interesting happening, they will flip the camera to show it, and then position the phone back where it was.

These livestreams might last five minutes or an hour. They start, stop, and start again across the evening—casual check-ins rather than a single broadcast.

To outsiders, this raises questions. Is anyone even watching these videos? Who are they for? What is the point in them?

Let’s start out by telling you what these live-streams are not.

They are not curated. They are not scripted or shaped in any way. The Roma don’t perceive them as “content” released into the world.

They are not meant to be watched in full, though you are welcome to, if you have a few hours to spare.

They are not some kind of statement, declaration, or a “Look at me” cry.

So, what are they?

An invitation. Something along the lines of, “Sit with me for a few minutes.”

When Pepi is scrolling through Facebook and sees a live-stream on his feed, he clicks it open and now, he is there — with his niece, cousin, whoever happens to be streaming. It’s as if they are both at the table, listening to the same music, to the same chatter of relatives. Pepi usually types in some kind of joke into the comments or a “Cheers” or a “Have fun” and the person who is live-streaming sees it, thanks him, asks him how he’s doing. They chat for a few minutes. Pepi clicks out and then continues scrolling.

For both of them, this moment, as small and simple as it was, is very much treasured. This is the point of the live-streams: presence.

In our previous piece we talked about how the Roma post both the good and the bad on social media because they know their audience is comprised of relatives who care and want to hear from them.

The live-streams are an extension of this.

Among the Roma, when you see a live-stream of someone having a drink at a table it’s as if you ran into them. You might wave, you might stop to chat for a few minutes, you might join them.

This is what makes the Roma go live — not because something is happening, but because someone is there.

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The “mundane” live stream

Celebrations are not the only time when the Roma go live. You often see live streams from street cleaning, sweeping the streets, off-loading containers, or sitting inside the garbage truck on its way to the depot.

Or, you see people going live, propping up the phone, putting on some music and just going about their business at home. Cooking, cleaning, smoking a cigarette.

All of these are stills from live-streams that ran for 15–20 minutes. What is being broadcast here?

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“Who cares?”

This is one of the most common criticisms of people who overshare online. “Who cares that she’s having coffee?” or “Who cares that he’s out with his friends?”

In mainstream culture, sharing daily life is frowned upon. It’s seen as tacky, needy, even pathological — a compensation for what one supposedly lacks offline.

Meanwhile, we wring our hands about the mental-health crisis fueled by social media. We blame the endless parade of perfect lives: curated vacations, filtered faces, manufactured happiness. We conclude that social media is a hoax, a pageant of polished lies.

But here’s the truth: these critiques describe mainstream culture, not the medium.

Because other cultures use social media differently.

Like the Roma.

Who cares? I do. We do.

From the mainstream perspective, the Roma take “oversharing” to a new level. Coffee selfies. Bench selfies. Balcony selfies. Photos with cousins, brothers, in-laws. Selfies at bus stops and on buses. At work. At rest.

Moving metal for scrap.

At the restaurant.

At the crisis center.

In hospital beds.

In Roma feeds, life isn’t divided into moments worth posting. Life itself is worth posting.

Some pictures are stunning: radiant, cinematic, perfectly aligned with what a “normal” social media user would share.

Others, equally beautiful to fellow Roma, would never make it onto a mainstream timeline.

But here’s the key difference: In mainstream culture, we usually post when we want to impress. In Romani culture, we post when we want to connect.

And this is why the audience is different, too — and why the answer to “Who cares?” changes depending on who you ask.

In mainstream culture, the answer is obvious, implied even in the question itself. “No one. No one cares that you’re having coffee or enjoying a sunny autumn day.”

In Romani culture, the answer is “Everyone cares.”

To be fair, in mainstream culture, you likely do have a few people who genuinely care about your daily joys and small moments. Loved ones who like seeing you with a coffee in the sun. But the truth is, except for that small circle, most people are indifferent.

With the Roma, that circle isn’t small. It’s the whole tribe.

Social media, for the Roma, is like a village square. They don’t use it merely as a platform for grand announcements and theatrics. They use it as a tool to preserve the intimate sort of proximity that only exists in tight circles.

In the tribe, in the so-called ghetto before it was demolished, you’d run into everyone all the time. One person would be moving metal for scrap, another would be rocking a baby to sleep, another would have had a fight with their spouse and will vent to you about it, another will be excited about a new job prospect, another would have lost money gambling, and on and on it goes.

In the ghetto, everything matters, because everyone matters.

Social media is merely an extension of this.

In mainstream culture, posting can feel like shouting into a void and hoping someone hears you. Hence the criticism: “Who are they posting this for?”, with the implied answer being: “No one.”

The Roma never post into a void. They know exactly who is watching: their cousins, their siblings, their elders, their people.

And this is why they don’t share only happy moments. They share their pain, too.

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The Joy Feed: Bragging as proof of life

The Roma post a lot of pictures that, through a mainstream lens, might look like bragging. The most obvious examples are photos with shiny new things: a gold chain, a gold ring, and most commonly — a brand-new sound system.

But the vast majority of “brag posts” aren’t about objects at all. They are about what Roma consider true wealth: family. Holding a baby or toddler. A selfie with a sibling, cousin, or parent. Countless photos with a boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse. The most cherished of all: group photos showing the big clan together—unity, belonging, strength in numbers.

Even work photos, like the shot of a horse cart loaded with metal for scrap we shared above, are part of the same category. So is a quick selfie in between sweeping the streets. These pictures say: “I’m working. I’m earning. I am a person of dignity.”

But here’s the thing. These pictures are published with the purpose of showing, not showing off.

In other words, the message is not “Look at me, I am better than you.”

The message is, “Look at me, I am doing ok.”

Do you feel the difference?

Gold jewelry, for Romani communities living in poverty, does not signal superiority or wealth. It signals stability and investment. A person with a gold chain is a person who has tied up their money in gold, and by pawning it later, will be able to secure food, clothes, and necessities for their family.

A photo with family doesn’t display status. It displays support, safety, and belonging.

A work selfie doesn’t boast about productivity. It says: “I provide. I stand on my feet.”

So when the Roma scroll and see these posts, they don’t roll their eyes.

They genuinely feel: “Good. He’s doing well.”

But what happens when you are not ok? When you are in crisis, or suffering?

The Pain Feed: Posts that summon the tribe

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The title image of this article depicts Dana in the arms of her youngest brother (and co-author of this blog) Pepi Mustafov and one of her nephews, Little Pepi. In the previous two articles of our series on the topic of betrayal and forgiveness, we told you how Dana was the one who gave up Pepi in an orphanage when he was 6 months old, dooming him to a life as an orphan until he rediscovered his roots at age 16; and how Dana stoked the fire of a conflict between her adult children and her sister Nana’s adult children, which resulted in a mass fight. Little Pepi was beaten with rocks, alongside his eldest son, his sister Vela, and her husband Nicky.

Is Dana forgiven?

When you look at this picture taken years after all these events, it’s easy to say “yes”.

And that’s the point. The “yes” should be easy.

The relationship should be unshakable. Indestructible. Even when one abandons the other as a baby. Even when one attacks the other with rocks.

Even if there is no real forgiveness. Even if the threat of another conflict looms in the air.

It all comes second to one unspoken law: Above all else, the Roma stick together. If not in heart, then in appearance. Very convincing appearance.

“It’s a posture, a show of strength.”

This is how Pepi describes the title image of this article as well as all other examples we listed out in our previous articles describing Dana’s relationship with Nana’s kin after the big fight. Hugs, kisses, dancing, preparing the food, helping with each and every celebration, small or big: Dana and Nana are, on the surface, a picturesque example of a strong sisterly bond.

Martina was fooled. For the almost four years we have been together and Martina has gotten to know Pepi’s tribe, in countless gatherings, chats, jokes, weddings and birthdays, there has never been the slightest inkling of animosity between the two sisters.

But Pepi is adamant, the fight is not forgiven.

“And all this warmth, all these celebrations, all this help and cooking and support?” Martina asked.

“It’s for the people,” Pepi says. For other people’s eyes.

It’s not from love in the immediate, conventional sense. It’s a show. The two sisters, who are matriarchs in their own family systems and elders in the wider tribe, are both setting aside their pain to send a strong message.

Namely, an unsentimental “We are one.”

And the message lands loud and clear in its intended audience: outsiders as well as people in the tribe.

After the 2021 fight, the district mayor and the initiative committee which has been campaigning for years to remove the Roma from the neighborhood all jumped at the opportunity to use the fight as argument to justify their ethnic cleansing efforts. The mayor was on his way to displace 30+ Romani families and when Martina (then part of a non-profit group, not yet together with Pepi) was trying to argue with him on the steps of the municipality, he looked her in the eyes, paused, and said “Did you hear about the fight?” as if that was the ultimate check-mate.

For racist outsiders, the fight was a gold mine. The logic being, “the Roma are so savage, they pummel each other with rocks, so of course we as the civilized ones should get rid of them.”

The Roma understand this perfectly, of course. And it only reiterates their belief that outsiders meddle in their internal affairs with hostile intentions and should be kept out at all costs.

In our article about mass fights we spoke about the Roma having an entire system of distributing justice that remains strictly internal, and outsiders are never given the whole story or any meaningful detail. Even if the outsiders are well-meaning. Even if they are speaking to a mother whose child was just killed, or a widow who just lost her husband.

The racists of the Zaharna Fabrika neighborhood, where Pepi’s tribe is located, find themselves complaining about a mass fight with rocks one day, and complaining about large celebrations another day. The cognitive dissonance is powerful, and very much underestimated by the municipality, the initiative committee, and anyone else campaigning against the Roma.

“We will never get rid of them,” lamented a white middle-aged woman buying coffee one time, overheard by Martina standing in line behind her at a coffee shop in Zaharna Fabrika. “The mayor promised, but he’s useless. We will just never get rid of them.”

To a novice observer it appears that the communities in Romani ghettos don’t recognize the code of mainstream society, the customs, the social obligations. In reality, they recognize all these elements very well. They understand them very well. They also know that outsiders are looking to fracture their community. They know the ultimate goal is to scatter and erase their families.

So no matter what happens inside the tribe, what outsiders see will be overwhelmingly weddings, love, loud music, birthdays, big families with children. And in the (rare) case of a conflict brewing over the edges and escalating in a mass fight, then the love, music, and celebrations become louder.

It’s hard to point at the picture of Pepi and his nephew holding up Dana in an embrace during a birthday party and say “They are savages, they attack each other with rocks, we need to get rid of them.” Of course, racists still do it. But while the racists are playing with the classic tools of stereotyping and institutional violence, the Roma are playing on a completely different field: psychology, roots, and a radical form of unitedness.

So to outsiders, the Roma are elusive, untouchable, somehow always evading and escaping the traps set out for them. To outsiders, they are “hard to get rid of.” Demolish their homes, inflict violent police raids, take their basic documentation, block their access to education or dignified work—try anything you can think of to crush them. The next day, you will again be hearing loud music.

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The real message, however, is not for the outsiders

Non-Roma get a very tiny glimpse into the Romani life, even the loud celebrations that are meant to be seen and heard. But the unity that is on show even in cases of unforgivable hurts is constant. Outsiders see only a shimmer. The tribe and all its members are the ones who witness it every day.

In our previous articles from this series, we described how Dana is quietly preparing food for birthdays, cooking traditional meals for weddings, helping with the collection of birthday gifts, and stopping by daily to catch up with her sister Nana and her kin (even on her way back from the hospital after an injury).

On the surface, there is not a single ripple of discontent between the two sisters. On the contrary, they appear bonded and supportive of each other.

“There has been no forgiveness,” Pepi explains, “But they act this way to set the tone.”

Dana and Nana, now elders in the tribe and matriarchs of their own respective circles, are wordlessly showing to their children and grandchildren that, despite everything, they should all stay united.

They are also signaling to everyone else in the tribe that they are in control of the conflict and relationship with each other.

So is it all fake? All the warmth, help, and support? The hugs, and dancing, and laughter?

If you ask Pepi, he’ll say yes. It’s fake. It’s for show. It’s done with an agenda. To him, if it doesn’t come spontaneously from the heart, then it is not real.

But what does come spontaneously from the heart here is something else. Preserving the tribe at all cost. Preserving the wider collective despite any individual quarrel. Staying united even when there are cracks.

Forgiveness here means survival of the tribe because without the tribe, the individuals have nothing else left. For the Roma, the world outside the tribe is a moonscape. Hostile to life, without oxygen.

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“Real forgiveness is quiet.”

“What would a true forgiveness between Dana and Nana look like?” Martina asked after having witnessed nothing but sisterly love between them for four years.

“A formal visit,” Pepi said, “One of them would take her children and visit the other and her children, and ask forgiveness. Then forgiveness will be given quietly and calmly. A simple “I forgive you,” like it is done in the Vasilitza ritual. Then the children—the cousins who participated in the fight—will follow suit.”

To Pepi, the first marker that something is far from forgiven is a loud and public declaration of love.

The 2021 fight between Nana and Dana’s children remains now one of these festering wounds that are bound to inflame. Grudges, like we said in our earlier articles, are never really old in Romani culture. They ignite with the same intensity as if the insult happened yesterday, not years ago.

“So nothing is ever resolved?” Martina asked. “At any point, things might explode, new pain will get inflicted, and the cycle continues?”

“Yes,” Pepi said, “Sometimes even children or grandchildren carry out unresolved anger many years later without fully knowing why.”

Anyone familiar with Jungian psychology would be nodding their head at these words. In Jungian theory, nothing disappears until it is fully acknowledged, worked through, integrated. If you bury something in your psyche, it only becomes more and more intense until it rushes back to the surface and overpowers you.

For the Romani communities living in poverty and isolation, this is lived reality. Acknowledging, working through, and integrating interpersonal wounds is a luxury when your physical survival and that of your children is linked entirely to the tribe around you.

The love is real. But it is very complicated. Pepi’s Romani relatives hold both extremes as equally true: I love this person and I hate this person. I want to hug this person and I want to hit this person. They know that one does not exclude the other.

This gives them rare psychological depth, especially compared to mainstream culture which is comfortable in two-dimensional labels and easily digestible emotions. Not to mention the collective pressure to “stay positive.” All of that introduces its own form of neurosis, which the Roma will never suffer from because they are comfortable in the depths, not in shallow water.

However, the protective web of the tribe can also serve as a prison, a wall that surrounds everyone so energy has nowhere to go and collapses upon itself. Conflicts are very intense. It sometimes might feel that conflicts are eternal, and just lay dormant for a while, then explode into a fight, and become dormant again until the next explosion.

But more often, it feels like the tribe is so united, so indestructible, that neither tremors outside nor tremors inside can shake it.

It took a while for Martina to wrap her head around the concept of forgiveness in Pepi’s tribe. It is not black and white and it is beyond the interpersonal. It might look like anything can transpire between two people, and still, they will hold strong as a family.

Is anything, anything at all, unforgivable?

To Martina, it eventually occurred that there was only one way to answer this question.

What would make the Roma eject someone from their tribe?

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In the dead of night one time in June 2021, a group of people in our tribe attacked their cousins, living in social housing next door. There was a lot of anger behind the attack. Both groups had been collecting material for scrap and were planning to sell it together and split the profits. But it turned out that Little Pepi, his 18-year-old son, and his brother-in-law Nicky (husband to his sister Vela) were taking some of the material and selling it in secret.

The wronged cousins—men and women in equal numbers—attacked the “thieves” by barraging into their social housing rooms and hitting them with rocks. Vela was not spared, in fact she was seen as the main instigator for the theft. Her husband Nicky ended up hospitalized.

The news of this fight spread like wildfire and, within minutes, the entire tribe had descended at the scene. Police arrived soon as well.

By the morning, the surrounding white neighborhood and the mayor, who was planning to kick out 30+ Romani families from the nearby crisis center, after having demolished their houses, were keenly sharing the news of the fight as yet more proof that the Roma are savage and need to be removed.

“Did you hear about the fight?” was the mayor’s go-to response to anyone trying to challenge him on his plan to leave 30+ families on the street.

The brutal violence was seen as “typical Romani” by outsiders.

But the thing is, it was seen as brutally violent by the Roma as well. There is an entire multi-tier system of conflict resolution in Romani culture that was sidestepped in this case. The attack was spontaneous, born out of anger and betrayal, a revenge for what was seen as an infringement on livelihood in the context of extreme poverty.

“I try to go to sleep,” said Little Pepi’s wife to Martina a few weeks after the attack, “And all I see is the rock hitting my son. I will never forgive them. I will never talk to them.”

After the fight, both sides were angry. But it was also clear to both sides that a big boundary was crossed with the attack. The attackers were now squarely the ones in the wrong. So much so that this cancelled out the theft of the material and created what can be best described as social and emotional “debt”.

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When a Roma admits guilt

In our previous piece, Why the Roma forgive each other the unforgivable, we told you how after this fight, everyone involved continued attending events together, like birthdays and weddings, even if staying at a healthy distance. After some time, the two matriarchs, sisters Dana and Nana, took the lead in gradually defusing the situation. Nana, the mother of Vela and Little Pepi, invited Dana to every single event, big or small, in her household. Dana, the mother of the attackers, not only attended but took charge of all preparations.

Every birthday, either a small child’s or an adult’s. A couple of weddings, with all corresponding customs. In the years since the 2021, Dana is front and center for all of Nana’s events, cutting vegetables for the salad, stirring soup, arranging plates and serving them to guests. Then she joins the table, eats, drinks, dances, and celebrates with everyone.

The clip below is from the 2024 celebration of Nicky’s birthday—Vela’s husband, the one who was hospitalized in the attack. You see him do the customary round with a box of chocolates, offering a chocolate to every guest, and receiving a birthday gift and a kiss. He starts with Todorka (sister of Nana and Dana,) then goes to his mother in law Nana, then to his own mother, then proceeds to the rest of the guests. You see, during the entire time, Dana standing right next to him, still in the apron she put on to prepare the food, helping him collect his gifts. The original clip is about five minutes long but we’re only including the first 40 seconds here. At the end of the full clip, they both go together indoors to drop off all the gifts, with Dana carrying the bulk.

Is it pure love?

Does Dana regret the fight? Is she so loving and caring because of guilt? Does she love her sister Nana’s family like she loves her own, as she is displaying with her actions?

We got together a few months after the fight, so Martina transitioned from an outside friend and observer when the fight took place to an inside guest in the months and years after it. Knowing what happened and having seen personally Vela’s bloodied face the day after the attack, Martina was stunned to witness Dana in such a prominent position during celebrations.

Pepi quickly translated the situation the first time Martina brought it up.

“Dana is responsible for the attack. She instigated it. She kept telling her sons and daughter that they need to do something about the theft, she pushed them and fueled their anger.”

Then things escalated quickly. Now everyone, especially Dana, knows that she carries responsibility for what happened even if she was not even physically present during the attack.

Nana and her household—son and daughter, son in law and daughter in law—still hold a grudge. A debt was accrued. People were wronged in a disproportionate way. The conflict resolution customs were not followed and a massive boundary was crossed.

Dana has since been working hard to repay the debt.

But the debt still stands.

The long fuse of a Romani grudge

How does the debt get called in? Who decides?

On the outside, things might look completely resolved, forgotten, and forgiven. Martina was for sure fooled when she saw all the merry celebrations with Dana in attendance. Dana would also frequently drop by at Nana’s after work, smoke a cigarette together, chat and hang out, and then leave. A strong and natural sisterly bond. One time we went to visit Nana and heard that Dana had been attacked by a street dog and was in the hospital for stitches on her leg. While we were still there, Dana returned from the hospital and her first stop was Nana. Limping, she climbed the stairs to Nana’s social housing room, sat at the windowsill, lit up a cigarette, and told us the story of the dog attack with vividness and a dash of humor. Ten minutes later, she left.

The grudge doesn’t prevent any of this. But also, none of it absolves the grudge. The grudge stands as a debt, until the debt gets called in.

So what does payback look like?

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In 1979, thirteen-year-old Dana was saddled with her newborn brother Pepi. Like in most cases with isolated communities living in poverty, the older children help looking after the younger children while the parents work.

Pepi was the youngest out of 12 kids. Dana, stepping into her teens and age of independence, did her best to take care of the baby but felt crushed under the responsibility. She asked an aunt for help to go to an orphanage because only an adult could sign documents to give away Pepi.

That wasn’t new in the community. Families were often struggling with illness or starvation. So child protection services would sometimes take children away and also, mothers would sometimes voluntarily drop off a child at an orphanage for days, weeks, or months until they were stable enough to get the child back. Most of Pepi’s siblings had spent brief spells in the same orphanage that Dana took him to.

But Pepi was the only one who nobody came back for. It was because an aunt went with Dana, and not Pepi’s own mother or father, that something in the documents got confused and nobody was able to find him. This is how the story goes. How much is true, we can’t know, and Pepi himself doesn’t fully buy it. The orphanage in question doesn’t exist anymore and finding documents over forty decades ago, particularly for abandoned and orphaned children, is impossible.

Pepi spent 6 years there and was then transferred outside of our city—far, far away, in a small mountain village. After a few more transfers, when he was 16, he returned to Sofia and obtained his birth certificate so he could look for his parents. When he was getting close to the address of the mahala (or “Romani ghetto” as outsiders like to call it), he stopped a woman to ask for directions.

That woman, as fate would have it, was his sister Dana—the same one who gave him away as a baby.

“Who are you looking for at this address?” she asked the first and obligatory question you get when you enter the Romani domain: Who are you here for?

“I’m looking for my parents,” Pepi said, “Dimcho and Zorka.”

Things clicked very fast for Dana. She realized who is standing in front of her and threw herself at Pepi, crying and hugging him. He pushed her away, startled. “I am your sister,” Dana said and proceeded to lead incredulous Pepi into the ghetto where he met his parents, his other dozen siblings, and more nephews, nieces, and cousins than he could count.

This story is not a secret. Pepi tells it and Dana tells it—without a hint of shame, blame, or guilt.

And the reasons are several. Like we’ve shared before, the Roma don’t do shame and openly talk about truths that others in their place would try to hide. But another reason, a deep and nuanced one, is that the Roma forgive each other for things that any objective outsider would see as unforgivable.

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“She was a child”

This is Pepi’s answer if you ask him about whether he holds a grudge against his sister Dana for abandoning him. “She was a child,” he says, “she would have craved freedom, time to herself, to hang out with friends.”

These are not empty words. If you see Pepi and Dana interact you would never guess she played such a role in the biggest wound in his soul. There is an easy banter between them, warmth, humor, and the visceral sense of shared history - only part of which is the first 6 months of his life. It is now decades after he returned to the tribe, and they have lived through so much happiness and heartbreak together, that Pepi’s orphan childhood is only part of their story.

“Almost immediately after I returned in 1996, she asked me for forgiveness and I forgave her. She was a child when it happened.”

Pepi also forgave his parents. They have now both passed away, but he was still able to share a life with them for several years before they were gone.

Make no mistake, though. Forgiveness here is not a sugary, larger-than-life favor that you grant. This is not a case of “they all hugged each other and lived happily ever after.” Pepi still has lingering anger towards his parents, and has had several fallouts with Dana during the years over all kinds of reasons. And he is a mere flame in the wildfire that is his tribe, where countless, countless situations and arguments have transpired between people.

Forgiveness here is not pure light. It is acceptance—of both yourself and the other person. In other words, forgiveness here means that you understand why the other person did what they did and, at the same time, you accept your own pain. You don’t downplay or exaggerate one in favor of the other. You hold both in equal measure. And you move on together without sentimentality but with authenticity—each one seeing the other clearly and accepting things as they are.

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Spite is what’s truly unforgivable

In our Romani tribe, and most other Romani tribes, people can be accepting and understanding of many “unacceptable” things by mainstream society’s standards. If you’ve been to prison, especially for theft. If you are —or used to be—a sex worker. If you are an addict, of any kind. If you have made big mistakes—cheated on your spouse, lost your job because you got in an argument with your boss or coworker, got in a lot of debt or gambled away your entire salary. Nobody will shame you, they have always seen worse.

This is part of the function of the tribe, actually. You can fall apart to pieces there, and the fabric of the community protects you from the outside world. Then you pick yourself up and begin again.

But there are still things that the Roma will not accept. Near the top of the list is spite.

“Spite” here doesn’t mean having feelings like anger or resentment. The Roma wouldn’t judge you for having a feeling of any kind. “Spite” means acting with malice on these feelings. Nagging, pestering, provoking fights, bringing up a situation over and over again.

This is considered very low-calibre in Romani culture. A savage way to manage your affairs.

To illustrate this, if Pepi had brought up “You gave me away to an orphanage” in any of his subsequent arguments and fallouts with Dana, that would have been immediately stopped in its tracks by other relatives.

This principle applies in Romani marriages and relationships too. Forgiveness means acceptance. If your partner cheated on you and you decide to stay with them, you don’t get to bring up the infidelity all the time and punish them for it. According to the Romani code, if it’s too big of a betrayal, don’t stay. Leave, end it, and move on.

“Dripping poison” is no way to live, for the Roma.

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Was the 2021 fight forgiven?

In 2021, a big fight happened in the community over a horse-cart-sized amount of material for scrap. It was meant to be shared between a few families, but some accusations flew around that a couple of people were stealing the material and collecting the profits for themselves.

A small disclaimer: nobody grew richer or poorer from said material. And this is exactly the point. Collecting, sorting, transporting things for scrap is heavy labour and communities living in poverty rely on it for survival. There is massive scarcity in this kind of life, so when someone steals something you relied on to feed your family, the intensity of conflicts skyrockets.

Long story short, a big argument escalated into a big fight. Dana’s adult children attacked her sister Nana’s adult children. Nana’s daughter, son, son in law, and adult grandson were hit with rocks - because they were the ones allegedly stealing material. After that, the two matriarchs—who usually call the shots in the extended tribe—were in a Cold War. Nana galvanized her children to file lawsuits against Dana’s children, and Dana called on another one of her sons who was at the time working in Germany, to return—for a show of strength.

Gradually, the fire subsided and a chill descended between the two families. They were not speaking to each other. They all still attended weddings, birthdays, and other celebrations within the community, they all still participated in big and small, happy and sad events. But they were keeping their distance from one another, which was seen by the extended tribe as the dignified approach. Everyone was allowing space and time for the wounds to heal. Reigniting the wounds by seeking revenge or punishment would have been the tragic thing to do.

Two and a half years after the fight, Nana and Dana had reconciled and the ice between their adult children began melting at Nana’s 50th birthday, which Dana helped prepare and decorate the venue for. Nana’s daughter and Dana’s daughter danced together in a spontaneous reconciliation. As you can see in the clip of them dancing here, this is not a warm dance. The tension is still there, electrifying the air. To the applause of the tribe around them, they were making an effort to heal the rift.

Dana makes a point to prepare and attend all events in Nana’s family. “How amazing,” Martina said once, knowing the history of the 2021 fight, “That they have been able to move on from that.” Pepi laughed and said, “They are making a statement. They are a united front no matter what happens. But both of them are still angry about the fight.”

The statement these women are making is not just for outsiders, not just for the extended tribe, but for their own children. As matriarchs, they set the tone. And the tone is: We are family no matter what.

But the fight is not forgiven.

What is forgivable?

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Have you heard how rich people, especially generationally wealthy ones, don’t carry around cash? Well, we can tell you that generationally poor people don’t either - at least if they are Romani.

It’s liquid cash because it drips and drips… away

It’s almost a given, in our Romani community, that whatever amount of cash you have on you at any given moment, will be gone within hours.

If you have coins, they go for coffee. If you have smaller notes, they go for food and cigarettes. But not just for you. Also for whoever is around you at the moment. If you are hanging out with a Roma person who has just enough money for two coffees, they will buy one for themselves and one for you.

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“He arrived in a 300,000 BGN Mercedes. I had just finished unharnessing the horse. I was really dirty, like I am right now.” Tzvetan paused. “No, less than I am right now.”

Tzvetan was telling this story to Martina in a rushed walk to one of the Sofia court houses. He had been sent a summons letter, which was picked up by his father. In a panic, his father called Tzvetan at his work - an unregulated construction job. Still covered in dust and dirt, Tzvetan took the bus to our place so Martina can take him to the court building since he had no idea where it was and how to get there.

What was this letter about? “I pray to God it’s not about the cars,” Tzvetan kept repeating. On the 30-minute walk to the court, he told Martina the story.

“Petya was in the hospital. I was out of a job,” he explained. This was during the time his daughter Petya fell into a pot of boiling water and spent weeks in the hospital with her life in danger, undergoing multiple surgeries. And some acquaintance mentioned how he could get quick cash just in exchange for his signature. Tzvetan showed interest tentatively and the very next day, a guy rolled up in a 300,000 BGN Mercedes as he was unharnessing the horse from the cart.

“Jump in,” the man said.

“No,” Tzvetan said, “Look at me, I’m too dirty.”

“Come on, come on,” the man insisted, his hands glued to the wheel, the motor of the car still running. “Come make a quick 1,000.”

Tzvetan climbed in. The process was easy. Before he knew it, he had signed some papers and now a bunch of cars were registered to his name. So simple. 1,000 BGN for a signature.

“Don’t worry,” the man assured him. “You’ll have no problems with these cars. If you have any trouble, just call me.”

“200 here, 300 there,” Tzvetan continued his story. “Bills, debts, food, supplies for Petya, and the money was gone.”

But the cars weren’t gone. Soon, Tzvetan learned they were used for smuggling refugees.

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As this year draws to its end, we will tell you some stories - more with pictures, less with words.

The very first day of 2024 began dramatically in our tribe. The entire year was marked with joy and tragedy, with fights for survival and celebrations, with shattered hopes and plans that were pushed to fruition against all odds. Some of the Roma in our community believe that the biggest event of the year - a wedding at the end of July, is what constellated everything else that transpired. Others believe the wedding was a response to everything else that happened.

All of the pictures here are taken by either Martina or Pepi, except for one; the most important one, taken by Pepi’s sister Nana.

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Pepi’s niece Vela has a spirit of pure fire.

We’ve shared many stories about her. How she made a reporter feel uncomfortable with her sass, as she was walking into the unknown - pregnant - away from her house that had just been demolished. How she shut up a mean municipality worker who tried to shame her relative for her “too many children,” by proclaiming loudly that the Roma have a lot of sex. How, on her own wedding day, she gave Martina one of the simplest and most powerful pieces of advice as a conflict between the men was escalating: “Be a woman.”

But what encapsulates Vela’s spirit the best is her recent insistence to book a limo.

It was a fierce statement of defiance, pride, and love.

A boy turned 9 months

What was the occasion? Vela’s grandson was turning 9 months and she decided to combine this date with a traditional ritual called “pogacha” that involves breaking a special, round loaf of bread over the head of the baby - for good health and fortune.

It’s a Bulgarian tradition that the Roma here have adapted into their culture. And while in the Bulgarian tradition, this is a quiet and humble celebration with immediate family, for the Roma it’s neither quiet, nor humble. The “immediate family” of a Romani person involves the entire tribe. And if they’re celebrating someone’s health and fortune, they make sure they do it in a way that the Gods can hear them.

Vela, in particular, embodies this spirit in full. The whole reason she and Nicky got married was for social housing purposes. It was in a conversation with the municipality that Martina accompanied them to where they were told that they will not be given social housing as a family because they were not legally married. At this point, they had been together for over 15 years and had 4 children. As they were leaving the municipality office, they decided to get legally married. It was a short conversation, a no-brainer. But they didn’t just go to sign the paperwork and have it over and done with in 2 days. They threw a traditional Roma wedding, that took about 10 months to plan, organize, and save for.

So, when Vela decided to celebrate her grandson’s 9 months, she went all out.

She booked a restaurant. She printed official invitations. She booked a musician, a band, and a live orchestra to “beat the drums” for the boy.

And, she booked a limo.

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The looming eviction notice

Here is some background to illustrate the boldness of this celebration. Ever since their house in the Romani ghetto was demolished, Vela and her family have been living in a run-down social housing building that they had to personally repair from fire damage. Vela’s blind cousin would constantly fall from the second floor, due to the many holes, through her roof and into her room. One time, he broke his leg.

The house is unfit for living, and the municipality has been trying to find a way to evict the people it put there without taking any formal responsibility. Last year, it successfully evicted Vela’s aunt Todorka with her blind son and her grandchildren by trying all kinds of bureaucratic tricks. And this year, it served a final eviction notice to Vela and Nicky.

This was not the first eviction notice. We’ve all lost count which number it is. Vela and Nicky appealed several times. But now, it’s final. They have nowhere to go. Despite getting legally married, they were not given housing.

Facing homelessness at the brink of winter, they didn’t plunge into despair. They threw a massive celebration because their grandson was turning 9 months.

The boldness of the limousine

The restaurant Vela booked is in the Roma quarter. The preparations for the celebration: hair, make up, dressing up, took place in the crisis center where the majority of our tribe has been living since their homes were demolished.

The distance between the crisis center and the Romani quarter is about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles.) Vela booked a limo for 1 hour and its purpose was to drive her and her family from the crisis center to the restaurant. The cost was 150 BGN (83 USD.) They were already spending a lot on the celebration. An extra 150 BGN was a drop in the bucket.

The limo spent the majority of the hour waiting in front of the crisis center as Vela and the family were dancing to the drums of a Romani orchestra in a room indoors.

Adjacent to the crisis center is a police station. Several policemen walked up to the limo and took pictures and videos. Who knows what for. But for sure, if they thought they had “seen it all,” Vela showed them they were wrong.

The crisis center is the most unlivable place we’ve ever seen. Constant power cuts, bug infestations like from a horror movie, doors that don’t lock, missing sinks and plumbing, no furniture, preying policemen, preying reporters. Rain bursts down the stairs from the holes in the roof.

The Romawere forced to live here with a very clear purpose. The erasure of their dignity. The municipality wants them to scatter and magically disappear.

But they neither scatter nor disappear. They roll up a limo and board it dressed like kings and queens, on their way to celebrate a new baby’s 9-month milestone.

“Whose idea was this?” Martina asked after Vela called us to help her find a limo service. “Vela’s or Nicky’s?”

“Vela,” Pepi said. “This is all Vela.”

In the face of eviction, threats, and violence, Vela never shrinks. This is what drives outsiders crazy about the Roma. The unapologetic joy. The fierce, unshakable dignity.

Whatever happens, they stand tall. They put tiaras and gold on their women. And they celebrate each other so loud that the Gods can hear.

An old washing machine stops working. You haul it to the garbage container and forget about it. Its destiny is to go to the piles of trash in the junkyard.

Unless it’s spotted by a Romani first.

For obvious classist reasons, people here look down on the Romani for “picking up things from the trash.” The history behind this is simple and tragic: systematic destruction of the Roma ancestral crafts and way of life, the segregation of Roma communities in ghettos, a life in extreme poverty with performative but limited access to education and work. You can read more about this in our article Are the Romani lazy?

But for now, let’s set all this aside. Let’s only look at the act of picking up a broken thing from the trash.

Our modern consumerist societies see this as unskilled and even parasitic labour. Of course they can’t see it as anything else, because that would require taking a realistic look of what they throw away - and this is harder than you think.

The reality though, is that this is an entire culture of recycling that runs on very rich and practical knowledge, on a big portfolio of skills, on significant physical strength and fitness, on knowledge of psychology and human nature, and on ancient hunter-gatherer instincts. It is hard, skilled labour that for Roma communities, provides a more reliable income than anything else, and for society in general, provides recycling in its purest form.

Why are people more likely to throw out big things after sunset?

How does a magnet determine if a material is worth the effort of picking up?

How can you tell, with a single glance, in a split second, the make of something and its price?

How do you dismantle a huge broken thing into small intact parts of great value? How can you quadruple the value of a washing machine’s motor by breaking down to its components?

We will lift the curtain a bit and tell you.

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Here in Bulgaria, mainstream society looks down on the minimum-wage street cleaning employment not only because it is “low class.” Even more so because it is done almost exclusive by the Roma minority and, according to most onlookers, it’s an easy job. Sweeping some streets, loading some trash into trucks, what’s the big deal?

For Martina, this wasn’t very funny. She asked Todorka about the boys and this kind of attack in general. “It happens all the time,” Todorka shrugged it off like a non-issue, it happens so often so what’s the point of talking about it. “But we’re usually all nearby so when one person gets attacked, the others run to help.”

And then they tell it like a funny story - how they fought away the attackers with brooms and shovels.

It was again with Todorka when Martina’s eyes were opened a bit more to the reality of street cleaning.

Fighting the elements

At around 2:00 pm on a summer day, they were sitting in the blazing sun and waiting for someone to go and run an errand. Across the boulevard, the street cleaners, still in their orange vests, were gathering at the bus stop. Their shift had just ended and they were waiting for their bus.

“Ivan is not well,” Todorka said suddenly. Her eyes were pierced into one of the men in the group of her coworkers and relatives in orange across the street.

Martina looked at Ivan. He was sitting at the bus stop and was holding his head.

“Something’s wrong,” Todorka said. Ivan tried to stand up. He was swaying. Then he dropped.

“He fell,” Todorka jumped to jer feet. She started shouting across the boulevard as cars, buses, and trucks swung past. “Someone give him water! Give him water!”

People quickly gathered around him but he seemed unconscious. Soon, an ambulance came and after a quick check, the medics loaded him in and drove off. By this point, most of the Romani that were on the bus stop had crossed the boulevard and sharing a smoke with Todorka, telling her what happened. “A heat stroke,” Todorka translated for Martina and shook her head. “Happens all the time.”

Under the blazing sun or in snow blizzards, the street cleaners are out there with no protection. And no breaks. Every single minute they take to smoke a cigarette, have a coffee, hide in the shade, or just sit down and talk with each other for a bit - it’s stolen, not given. If they’re “caught”, they’re reprimanded and punished for slacking off.

What’s ironic here is that mainstream society only sees this: the stolen minutes. A very common complaint against the Romani is that they are lazy and one of the things given as evidence is that they don’t even sweep the streets, they smoke cigarettes and drink coffee under the shade.

What people don’t see is that these workers begin their day before the city wakes up, so that the streets are clear for the 8:00 am rush hour. Then they are forced to keep sweeping and keep cleaning, even if there is nothing left to sweep away. Or, even if there is no point in sweeping.

In autumn, when the leaves fall, the Romani are forced to work overtime in order to remove the leaves from the streets and sidewalks. It doesn’t matter if the wind is gushing in their faces, bringing waves and waves of more leaves. A worker can sweep a single street 10 times in a day, and by the time they go to the bus stop exhausted, after having stayed overtime, the street would still be covered in leaves. The same logic goes in winter. Shoveling snow as the snow falls and falls.

And in summer, under the blazing sun, the workers have to rip out strokes of grass from in between concrete pavement. They spend hours bending over, ripping grass with their bare hands. You can always tell when someone’s task that day was the grass. Their hands are always covered in small cuts and bruises.

There are smarter, modern ways to take care of all these things. Spraying the pavent so the grass falls off by itself. Using a specific blower for the leaves. There are ways to handle this without using human beings for mindless and dangerous work - but this costs money that the owners of the street cleaning companies don’t want to spend.

All this work is done with no boots, no gloves, no hats, no work clothes. The ones provided by the company are second-hand, ripped, and thin - designed for winter work. In fall and winter, everyone is out for themselves. People pull winter clothes from the garbage containers, cover themselves in plastic bags as protection against the rain and snow, and always, always shake from cold and exhaustion by the time their shift ends.

Back pain, severe colds, throbbing muscle aches, fainting, and debilitating exhaustion are a big part of the life of a street cleaner. But there’s more.

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Mending wounds is part of the job description

Pepi’s eye almost got poked out a few months ago. Luckily, the metal pole that hit him in the head missed the eye and caught his forehead. He was bleeding all day but he was fine. He even laughed about how scared his supervisor got when he told her he’d go to the hospital. A workplace injury would mean a bearocratic hell for her, so she is very insistent on discouraging people to seek medical help when they get injured on the job.

Pepi’s not part of the group that sweeps the streets. That’s usually reserved for women. Men take care of loading the garbage from the containers into the trucks and - what Pepi does - loading “heavy objects” into the trucks. Heavy objects include washing machines, ovens, wardrobes, sofas, mattresses - big, voluminous objects that people leave half-broken by the garbage containers. When the street cleaners lift them, they sometimes fall apart in their arms, or pieces jump out. It was when Pepi and his co-worker were trying to lift an old oven that a metal pipe jumped out and hit his head.

A more recent incident was a piece of wood that quite literally stabbed him in the stomach as he was lifting a wardrobe. He managed to jump back quickly enough for it to only go a few centimeteres deep. Martina always gets upset when Pepi has close calls like this at work. And he always brushes her off with “Don’t worry, I’ve been doing this for years: I know how to protect myself.” Ideally, the trucks should have a claw for the heavy objects - but, like we said, the Romani street cleaners are not employed in the 21st century.

The men who lift the garbage containers don’t have it easier. Their trucks are also not equipped properly so the men have to lift the containers with their own muscles. Often the wheels of the containers are broken, so they can’t even be rolled to the truck.

But if you ask these men what they hate most about the job, they won’t say the backpain from all the mindless heavy lifting or all the things that stab them.

It’s what they have to step on.

“We don’t have proper work boots,” Pepi explains, “so shards of glass, wood, and all kinds of things keep getting in our shoes.”

All of these small and big injuries are a daily reality for the street cleaners. But they don’t seek medical help. They mend their wounds themselves, in the truck, on the way to or back from the garage where they dispose of the garbage.

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One time, Martina was talking on the phone with Nada, one of the elderly women in the tribe. As they were ending the call, Nada said she’s about to sweep a section of the boulevard. Martina had seen so many of the women sweep the boulevard as buses and trucks woosh past them. One time, Martina saw Todorka from the bus. Todorka was sweeping and Martina drove past her so fast that Todorka couldn’t notice that Martina waved at her.

So as Nada was saying goodbye, Martina told her, “Be careful.”

Nada laughed. “Do you think this is my first time?”

We believe this article is a good place to express our gratitude for all people who made a donation to the fundraiser organized by Anya Redgewell for the street cleaners in our tribe. With the first donations, we were able to buy high-quality work boots for all workers, so both women and men now have the most essential piece of gear!

You can learn more about the fundraiser here and you can watch our video with the distribution of boots here.

Our next goal is to buy gloves and hats.

You can support the fundraiser by clicking on the button below.

GoFundMe Page

Imagine you are a regular middle-class person belonging to the ethnic majority of your country.

What is the worst thing that has happened to you?

A devastating breakup or divorce? Complete financial ruin? The death of a loved one - a parent, a sibling, a child? Homelessness? Prison? Sexual abuse? Debilitating illness or disability?

If you pick anyone from our Romani tribe and look into their life, you will find they’ve experienced worse. Not just one tragedy. Many, many tragedies. This is usually the case with every Romani community.

In our tribe, we can tell you about how a building collapsed and killed two of Pepi’s brothers. About the unspeakable, brutal violence from police. About the demolition of the Romani houses and the loss of documents, birth certificates, family pictures. About loan sharks breaking people’s limbs. About a woman who was murdered and cut up in pieces. About a child who recently fell into boiling water and barely survived.

“We have so many dead, Marti,” Pepi’s sister Nana told Martina recently. “We have so many dead.”

She didn’t refer only to the elders who have passed away naturally.

But this is not a competition about who’s got it worse. It’s a question about compassion.

If you are a regular middle-class person belonging to the ethnic majority of your country and you happen to talk to an average Roma and share with them the worst tragedy that has befallen you - what would the average Romani feel, think, and say?

“This was the worst year of my life,” Martina was telling Pepi’s nephew Little Pepi after having a few drinks at his 33rd birthday party in October 2021. It had indeed been a horrible year. But this party and conversation were taking place in the crisis center Little Pepi was living in, following a few months of eviction threats, dealing with lawyers, and fighting municipalities. Little Pepi and his entire family were hanging by a thread. They were almost left out on the street and social services were ready to pounce and take their children. And this was only one of the problems Little Pepi had that year. What was he thinking and what did he say when Martina was telling him how bad she had it?

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The Bohemian lifestyle and aesthetic represent counter-culture, freedom of spirit, and the unusual.

All these things usually emerge in adversity and poverty. A comfortable life doesn’t bring about anything unusual. Because any desire to be free from anything usually gets sapped or sedated.

While the French intellectuals and artists of the 19th century happily borrowed the term “Bohemian” along with many of its markers and elements, they were not the originators. “Bohemian” is what the French called the Romani, because in the 15th century, the Romani entered France from the Kingdom of Bohemia. The Romani were called “Bohemian” for 400 years before the name was taken.

There are many fascinating, riveting stories about cultures and movements that emerge against the mainstream.

But the reason the “Bohemian” or “Boho” label has stuck as a catch-all descriptor, is because the Romani have been counter-culture for over 1,000 years. They have lived in adversity and poverty for over 1,000 years.

The mainstream can borrow and borrow and borrow from the Romani, but it could never capture the spark that makes the Roma (or true “Bohemian”) style so enchanting.

What is the recipe?

It’s simple and yet, hard to follow. Because it might bring about an identity crisis.

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Martina was in the throes of grief and depression when she met Pepi’s tribe in the neighborhood Zaharna Fabrika. She was in a volunteer group that visited twice a week to organize games for the children. She quickly realized that the interaction with the Roma children did more for her than she could ever do for them. These visits were soul healing and, for months, the only thing in life Martina was looking forward to.

One day, the volunteer group was holding an event in another city, and there was going to be no organized visit to Zaharna Fabrika. That day also happened to be one of the three big annual days in Bulgaria commemorating the souls of loved ones who have died. Scores of people visit the cemeteries to light candles and honor the close ones they’ve lost. Martina, together with her immediate family, was at the cemetery in the morning to honor her father, who had died just a few short months ago. By the early afternoon, all the traditions had been followed, all the usual surface-level things said, all the customary food eaten, and Martina was back home feeling even more alone in her grief. In a state of near-madness. The walls were closing in, the sky outside was grey, and the unexpressed, unshared sorrow had her in a chokehold. Opening a bottle of wine with the full intention to down it all, Martina realized that it was now about the time she would usually leave for the visit to Zaharna Fabrika.

“The kids,” she thought, “will still be waiting for us. I should tell them there will be no games today.”

During COVID there were several skipped visits, and the kids always waited, and always asked afterward why no one came. With the mission to not let them down today, Martina hopped on the bus and, half an hour later, for the first time, walked into the Roma neighborhood all by herself.

The kids were already out playing despite the gloomy weather. When they saw Martina, they quickly surrounded her, one pulling her by the hand, another showing her his new soccer ball.

“Where are the others?” Asked 8-year-old Sadik.

“They’re not coming. There will be no games today, this is what I came to tell you.”

Sadik’s eyes grew wide. “You came alone?”

Martina spent an hour in Zaharna Fabrika. A few of the adults in the tribe were sitting on a bench and invited her to sit next to them. One of them sent his granddaughter to buy a drink. “Tell me,” he insisted, “tell me, what is your favorite juice? Orange? Peach?” He wouldn’t take no for an answer even though Martina didn’t want to be a bother. “Orange,” she relented finally. Within two minutes, the granddaughter had run to the store and returned, handing her an ice-cold Fanta. The kids were playing, joking, and laughing. The adults were chatting idly and telling Martina funny stories from the tribe.

At one point, as she was sitting down, Martina told them her cover story. “Our group is in another city today so I came to tell the kids there will be no games.” Of course, she knew the reason she was there was because her soul was beckoned and it was the only place on Earth she felt there was human connection. “Oh, okay,” nodded the adults, and quickly moved on to another topic. Of course, they knew the real reason Martina was there had nothing to do with announcing the obvious absence of the entire group. Did they sense Martina’s grief and sorrow raging under the surface? Probably. But they never would have even inquired for a reason for her to be there. They just welcomed her like a fellow human being and, miraculously, made her laugh and laugh with their stories.

After almost an hour, it started to rain. “I better go,” Martina said and got up. The kids surrounded her, one holding one hand, another holding the other hand, the others running around and jumping in the puddles. They walked with her to the bus stop.

Martina returned home with a lighter heart, having swapped an afternoon of pain with an afternoon of laughter; and a bottle of wine with a bottle of Fanta.

“You get what you’re looking for”

The white middle-class residents of Zaharna Fabrika want the Roma community gone. They want “the ghetto” gone. Because of “all the theft and danger.” In many interviews on national television, during many protests against this very ghetto, you see trembling white women complaining to the camera how afraid they are of the Romani because they are so dangerous.

The fear of theft and physical violence in Romani ghettos is unshakable among outsiders. It is a given, in their mind, that if you walk into a ghetto you’re inviting trouble.

But the truth is that it is the outsiders who bring the trouble.

Very few, and we mean very, very few outsiders walk into Roma ghettos with good intentions.

They usually go there to destroy, beat, exploit, or steal. Policemen hungry for punishment, racists hungry for violence, politicians and activists looking for votes, religious groups looking for clout, non-profits looking to profit, mobsters and loansharks looking for people to exploit and blackmail.

The violence, lies, and scams that the Romani have seen from outsiders can fill up several books.

So the very first thing you’ll see, walking into a Roma ghetto, will be mistrust.

If you don’t know anyone there, you will be greeted by friendly children chatting you up and collecting information, and by adults who will directly walk up to you and ask you what or who you’re looking for.

This is the crux.

“If you’re looking for a fight,” he continues, “you will get a very big fight. If you’re looking to get drunk and dance, you will drink and dance with the tribe all night. If you’re looking to rob or scam someone, you’ll leave without your wallet and phone. And watch.”

Martina has never had a bad experience with the Roma tribe even though before she “married in,” she paid many visits by herself after the initial one on the rainy day at the bench. She got drunk with the tribe a few times, and along with the jokes and dancing, people were always making sure she was feeling well and having fun, and got her safely in a taxi when she decided it was time to leave. Her phone or wallet never went missing.

But telling this to fellow white people has been like sharing a fairy tale. Or rather, a scary horror story. As if, it was by sheer luck, that Martina narrowly escaped with her life, dignity, and money.

It was no luck. The Romani quickly scanned Martina, as they do with every outsider, and knew she had no ill intentions. They knew she was a friend. And they treated her with respect, love, and warmth.

The people who have bad experiences are the ones who want the Romani to have a bad experience.

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“You’re different.”

Years ago, the white residents of Zaharna Fabrika formed an Initiative Committee that pressures the municipality to do this or that. The demolition of the Roma ghetto has been at the top of their demands for all these years.

The chair of this committee, a woman named Annie, had a scary experience about a year after some of the houses in the ghetto were demolished. Her son was crossing the railroad tracks and was attacked by a stray dog. Pepi, who was nearby, rushed to the boy and fought the dog away. Full of gratitude, Annie resolved the impending moral conundrum as most racists do. “You’re different,” she would tell Pepi every time she saw him walking by. “Not like the other ones.” She would stop and chat with him, treat him like a human being, but only because in her mind he no longer belonged to the rest - the ones who are not human. She would even shake her head and empathize with how difficult life must be in the crisis center - which is where he was living because his house was among the ones demolished per her demands.

Of course, Annie is not beloved by the tribe. She has never been attacked in any way by anyone, but one time her son - the same one who got chased by the dog - realized his phone was missing when he came home after he had brushed past a group of Roma kids in the streets of Zaharna Fabrika. Annie sought out Pepi for help and, the same day, the phone was in her hands. Pepi delivered it himself.

“Who stole it?” Annie kept asking, fishing for justice.

“It doesn’t matter who,” Pepi kept answering. “It’s back now, is it not?”

“There’s no fixing these people,” Annie would shake her head. “See what I’m telling you? You’re different, but the rest are trash.”

Because a missing phone is the true tragedy. Not a missing home.

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The strange strangers

If anyone can say, quite literally, “I’ve seen it all” - it’s a person living in a ghetto. The people who walk in are from all walks of life, wearing varying degrees of mask and pretense, driven by all kinds of needs and desires.

One time, the wife of the then-president of Bulgaria visited with an entire entourage and announced she would fix the plumbing in the ghetto. She was wearing expensive clothes and knee-level boots. “Fix this,” she would point, talking to a person scribbling notes in a notepad, “and this, and this.” Pepi walked up to her. “You know what this reminds me of?” He then told her a joke that is both dirty and makes fun of the empty promises of politicians. The people from the tribe around them burst into laughter. The president’s wife left in a huff, offended and not being given the chance to feel like a savior. She felt ridiculed. The Romani also felt ridiculed by her visit. Everyone knew that the plumbing was never going to get fixed.

Mobsters in big cars would drive through the muddy paths, looking for a woman in the tribe known for her healing and fortune-telling gifts. Some found her, some didn’t. All of them parted with piles of cash.

Reporters would come in with their cameras and agendas, looking for a story. They all get thousands of stories. The Romani interrupt each other adding detail. What is factually true and what isn’t, is a whole different question.

The list of visitors is endless.

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You will see a mirror

Roma culture is very closed. It is extremely hard for outsiders to experience it or even witness it beyond the surface-level fanfare. There are layers and layers to walk through before you can truly enter.

This is one of the reasons it has survived 1,000 years of genocidal and assimilation attempts.

So the very first thing you’ll see if you walk into the quarters of a Roma tribe will be a mirror.

Who are you?

The Romani will see it even if you can’t. And they’ll show you.

The children from our tribe roam freely around the neighborhood. This is, in fact, one of the first things the white middle-class residents point out when they justify why they want the Roma quarter demolished and the Roma community to disappear. “They don’t take care of their children.”

Young children cross the busy streets and boulevards, play at the playgrounds, hang out at the benches, befriend and sometimes adopt the stray dogs and cats, chat and giggle, and when they get tired they go back home.

There are some socio-economic factors here that judgemental onlookers like to ignore. Our tribe lives in extreme poverty and the parents as well as most adults in the tribe go to work to make ends meet. Signing up kids to daycare has become more problematic since the mayor erased the address registration of the Roma quarter. Even going to school is filled with obstacles. But we’ll tell you about this another time.

This article is about something else.

Our tribe comprises over a hundred families. It will take forever to count the children. The neighborhood streets have had Roma kids roaming them for years if not decades. Can you guess how many times a child was hit by a car crossing the street, tricked or hurt by a stranger, or injured in any other way while out unsupervised by an adult?

Once.

In December 2021, the tribe gathered to celebrate the birth of a new baby. 10-year old Kerim, and his younger sister, snuck out, got on a bike, and rode it on one of the boulevards. They were hit by a car and had to spend some time in hospital. The story made national news and, predictably, there was a flood of “this never would have happened if Roma children were not allowed to roam unsupervised” comments.

The reality behind this incident? Kerim is almost fully blind. He seized the opportunity of his mother celebrating the birth of her grandson, to try and experience some freedom because, unlike all his cousins and siblings, he and his mother are attached at the hip due to his disability. He ventured out after dark - something that the kids in our tribe are not allowed to do. If a child or a teenager is not back by sunset, the network of the tribe activates and the phones and messaging apps of all aunts and uncles go on fire until the child is tracked down - almost always hanging out with cousins from the tribe.

So, in December 2021, a 10-year-old blind boy was riding a bike after dark on one of the busiest boulevards in our city, with his younger sister riding along for company and “protection,” when they were hit by a car at an intersection. This is the only time something bad happened to a child while out unsupervised. In other tribes, when children get lost or hurt, it is also a rare incident and the circumstances are also always an exception.

Why doesn’t anything bad happen more often? After all, these are small children, often as young as 4 or 5, with no adult in sight.

The answer lies in the wisdom of the Romani about raising children, who - from their very birth - they see not as property but as individuals. They don’t teach their children to survive by being scared. But by connecting with their senses, intuition, and strengths.

Here is how this looks in practice.

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One push of the button and your entire life can turn around.

One push and you might be able to feed your family tonight. Or buy back your phone from the pawnshop. Or pay back the money you took from the loan sharks. Or buy a fridge, so that the food you bring doesn’t go bad. Or an oven, so you can cook on something different than a pan held above a fire you kindled on the ground. Or a big bed so neither one of you - your wife, your kids, or you - has to sleep on the ground.

One simple push of the button. Colorful pictures of oranges, cherries, lemons and what-have-you spin on the screen and grind to a halt. Nothing. Zero.

But it’s ok. Because the next push can be it. So you push, again and again.

Share The Sky and Earth Know

The casino in the Zaharna Fabrika neighborhood is the place where you can always find someone, often groups of people, from our Roma tribe. Outsiders see them as foolish and, worse, guilty for their poverty. How can you expect to have any hope for financial stability if you’re “always at the casino”?

The Romani work very hard. They get paid minimum wage. And like clockwork, on salary day they crowd in front of the casino. The loan sharks are there too, because they know that if they don’t seize the moment to collect on debt now, they might not see their money at all. They have a more sinister reason, as well. They are ready to loan money to the people who will gamble their entire salary away and step outside looking for more cash in the hope of turning their luck around.

Are the Romani foolish? Are they addicts? Are they chronically irresponsible with money? What can be the reason for them throwing away the cash that they broke their backs working for?

We will tell you the reason. And you’ll see that, if it were you in their place, even if you’re the most financially responsible person on Earth, you will do the exact same thing.

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