Dancing on a razor blade: Why the Roma resort to loan sharks

The high-stakes world of borrowing when you live in poverty

Vela and Nicky on an early morning in September 2021, just having borrowed 100 BGN from the neighborhood loan sharks so they can spend the day running errands. | Picture by Nicky

One morning in September 2021, Martina took the bus to the neighborhood Zaharna Fabrika to meet with Vela and her husband Nicky. Vela greeted her at the bus stop and took her to the coffee shop to buy coffee for the three of them. Nicky pulled up the car.

Martina sat in the backseat. Vela was in the passenger seat. As she was lighting a cigarette, Nicky put on loud music and pulled out a crisp 50 BGN note from his jacket. He placed it next to his cup of coffee by the gear shift and started the car.

Minutes before Martina arrived, Vela and Nicky had borrowed 100 BGN (roughly 50 USD) from the loan sharks by the bus stop. One of the two 50 BGN notes was meant to cover expenses for the day: food, coffee, cigarettes, groceries for dinner. The other 50 BGN, the one Nicky placed next to his coffee, was for the police.

Nicky, while a fantastic driver, does not have a driver’s license. Why he doesn’t and why most Romani in our tribe and beyond don’t, is a story of institutional racism for another day. When they drive and get stopped by police, they do what most people in Bulgaria do to avoid permanent consequences: they bribe. Bulgarian police are notorious for happily accepting, and even encouraging, bribes. In Zaharna Fabrika, they specifically scan the passing cars for Romani drivers, in the hopes of catching them without a license and shaking some cash off them.

The crisp 50 BGN note was Nicky’s pass for the day. He and Vela had important errands to run and they needed to be able to use their car. So they made sure they had a bribe prepared. For the entire 100 BGN they took out that day, they had to pay back 200 BGN.

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This was one of many meetups Martina did that year, accompanying her Romani friends to institutions and municipalities and helping with the onslaught of bureaucratic problems.

Vela and Nicky were trying to apply for social housing because their house had been demolished a few years earlier and the place they had been placed after had, quite literally, dangerous living conditions. Vela and Nicky, like their entire Roma tribe, and most Romani in Bulgaria, live in poverty. The ancestral crafts of their tribe, which had been the source of income for centuries, were scrapped by nationwide government policies during Communism. Melted into ghettos, most Romani nowadays work minimum-wage jobs in street cleaning or back-breaking, underpaid gigs in construction where they are paid “under the table.”

The reality of life for the Romani is a daily, never-ending hustle. But the thing about poverty is that it sucks you in. When you make one step forward, it pulls you five steps back.

To be able to get their paperwork in order so they can get housing, Vela and Nicky had to take a loan of 100 BGN, half of which would be spent on bribing the preying police. Next month, they had to pay back 200 BGN - a third of a street-cleaning salary. However, they didn’t only have to pay back that 100 BGN. They had borrowed another 50 BGN here, another 100 BGN there, when they had no food or needed it for something important. When their salaries arrived, most of the cash went to the loan sharks. So until their next salaries came, they were forced to borrow again.

And what happens if they don’t pay back?

Violence.