From a mud hut to Paris - the Roma life struggle

CHEVERESUL MARE - The day is cold and damp and Miron Neda, 52, is wearing his Sunday suit with plastic sandals. He owns no real shoes. Nor does his 40-year-old wife, Daniela, or the couple’s three children, Patricia, aged 10, Manuela, 7, and Bodgan, 4.

A Roma, or Gypsy, from the west Romanian village of Cheveresul Mare, Neda returned from Paris three weeks ago. He says he received no money and no plane ticket from the French - he voluntarily boarded a tour bus and paid a fare of 120 euros ($156).

After a month selling newspapers on the Seine, Neda is back home with his wallet nearly empty.

On July 30 at about 7 a.m., French police cleared out the Roma camp in Moulin-Galant on the southern outskirts of Paris.

Neda had been living in a caravan there. Then he received a document from the prefecture of the department of Essonne ordering him to leave the country within a month, no reason given.

Neda has carefully preserved the paper in a plastic cover. He signed it without knowing what it said because he is unable to read, least of all French.

This time the French gave him no money - probably because they gave him 300 euros in 2008 for his so-called voluntary repatriation. The French record data of returnees.

Will Neda ever go back to France, he is asked. “How could I?” he replies. “They’d deport me again.”

The plaster on Neda’s house is crumbling outside and has exposed a wall of mud mixed with straw. In the tidy kitchen-cum-living room, a savory-smelling cabbage stew simmers on a wood-fuelled brick stove, the home’s sole source of heat. There is no plumbing. Water must be fetched in buckets from a well on the other side of the street.

In Paris, Neda earned up to 25 euros a day selling newspapers. “I don’t want to lie - I also begged in front of a boulangerie,” he admits, using his favourite French word. He says that begging brought him another 10 to 15 euros daily.

Neda had thought that by selling newspapers and begging he could get his family through the approaching winter.

In Romania he was a street sweeper in nearby Timisoara, the district capital, until 1995. Then the redundancies came.

Once in awhile he earns some money as an agricultural day labourer - about 30 lei ($9) per day. What to do, though, when there is no maize to cut or harvest to bring in?

His family does not have enough money to buy clothes for the children, let alone pay for a doctor. Daughter Manuela is the one most in need. She looks a lot younger than a normal 7-year-old and does not like to speak.

“I think she’s got it in the head,” her mother says. Is the child mentally retarded or just underdeveloped due to poor nutrition and inadequate mental stimulation? A doctor would know.

Like most Romanian Roma, the Nedas are not nomads. Utter poverty, the product of centuries of discrimination, is what drove the family’s men to France.

In the ongoing debate surrounding France’s controversial expulsions of predominantly Romanian Roma, Romania’s President Traian Basescu has repeatedly said that the nomadism in the ethnic group’s “blood” was behind their migrations.

Madalin Voicu, a half-Roma musician, Social Democratic member of parliament and leading lobbyist for Romania’s Roma, accuses Basescu of behaving in a contradictory manner toward France.

Basescu first unofficially assured French President Nicolas Sarkozy that Bucharest did not oppose the repatriation of Roma, then criticised the repatriations as “uneuropean”, Voicu says.

Some 200 Roma live in Cheveresul Mare and a least one member of every family is in France, according to Viorel Marcu, their “bulibasha”, or leader. He says most of these family members were working legally in France and that one of them was the newspaper

wholesaler from whom Neda had received his wares.

So the Roma have a contact in Paris. Marcu said they took a bus directly from Romania to Moulin-Galant, that each bought an old caravan for 100 to 300 euros and then sold them upon their departure to the next arrivals.

The bulibaha lives opposite Neda in a spotless house with a shiny stone-tiled floor, polished furniture and porcelain knickknacks. Marcu was also in France in 2008, working as the newspaper wholesaler’s partner. He, too, was deported then.

Marcu said the French at the time had promised each returnee 3,600 euros - either in cash or livestock - to build a livelihood in Romania. But the money never arrived in Cheveresul Mare, he added regretfully.

It - investments that create jobs - would be the way to eliminate poverty among many Roma in his village, he said.