Irish-aided project helps give Roma children hope

Letter from Belgrade:Sprawled between a roaring motorway bridge and a clanking railway line, the decrepit shacks of Staro Sajmiste are home to many hundreds of Belgrade's Roma.

This is where they begin and end lives that tend to be cruel and short, where they hoard and sell rubbish for a pittance to recycling middlemen, and where successive generations of Gypsies have learned to tread the same tough path as their parents.

Now, though, that is not all the children of Staro Sajmiste are taught.

In a community bound tight by tradition, poverty and suspicion of outsiders, young girls still usually help their mothers at home, and boys work with their fathers to bring in whatever cash they can: school, and the state curriculum, do not shape most Roma childhoods.

But the iron loop of illiteracy and poverty is finally being prised open by an Irish-funded project that offers Belgrade's Gypsy children the teaching, the textbooks and the contact with young Serbs that could help them escape the squalid ghettoes that dot this city of 1.5 million people.

Dozens of children from Staro Sajmiste and two other Roma slums are now collected from home three times a week and taken to classes at a nearby school and, to help them catch up with their Serb peers, remedial classes in basic literacy and numeracy are provided inside the ghetto.

The project, which is funded by Irish Aid, pays teachers and provides children with the necessary books, stationery and a hefty sandwich which, for some, is their most nutritious and dependable meal of the day.

"It's hard to convince Roma parents that this is a good thing," said Natasa Kocic-Rakocevic of Belgrade's Roma Children Centre.

"We have to try and show them that, although they will be without their children's labour for a few days each week, in about six years they will have a son or daughter with a proper school diploma, which could change their lives completely." Rakocevic says the children are collected from home both to make sure they attend school and to reassure parents that they will not be abused or attacked while walking through the Serb district that abuts the ghetto, and where walls are scrawled with anti-Roma and neo-Nazi graffiti.

Beside the muddy paths that criss-cross Staro Sajmiste, piles of cardboard, plastic and scrap metal await collection by traders who buy them cheap from the Roma and resell them for a very healthy profit to factories and recycling firms.

Most of the ghetto's men and boys spend their days gathering rubbish on Belgrade's streets and industrial sites to feed the demand of these businessmen, who pay only about 6,000 dinar (€78) for two tonnes of waste - the equivalent of a full month's collection work and, for most families, the only source of income.

Occupying the site of a 1940s prisoner of war camp, Staro Sajmiste is one of several Belgrade ghettoes in which Roma live in filthy conditions that are ripe for the spread of rats and disease. Rubbish is burned to heat homes, and an acrid tang hangs in the air. There is no running water or electricity, save for that diverted illegally from nearby power lines.

Life expectancy is far shorter and infant mortality far higher for Roma than for Serbs, and many Gypsies do not have the documents needed to receive state medical care or benefits - especially the thousands of Roma who fled war-ravaged Kosovo for other parts of Serbia, and now live in a legal limbo as "internally displaced persons".

Education can at least help the young tackle bureaucracy - but of Serbia's estimated 82,000 Roma children, only about one in five attends school.

Nadja Isljami (13) says she likes taking classes. But her mother Makfireta (29) also needs her eldest daughter to help look after her brothers and sisters, the youngest of whom is paralysed and has epilepsy.

Makfireta looked baffled when asked what Nadja and her siblings could hope for in life, and whether education could help them achieve it.

"I don't see a better future for them," she said, as her children played on the cardboard and blankets that cover the floor of their tiny shack.

Then, as if not wanting to end the conversation on a sad note, she explained how she at least felt safer in Staro Sajmiste than in the slum where she used to live. "This one is just too big to knock down," she said.