Luncile—the Roma Village That Is Losing Ground

One thousand Roma woodworkers live in huts built on a slope that has started sliding towards the Ramnicu-Sarat River in Romania. In Chiojdeni, a commune squeezed between two mountain ranges, almost 1,000 Roma live in unimaginable poverty. Their community dates back to the times when Prime Minister Alexandru Marghiloman (1854-1925) owned vast properties there. According to Mayor Stefan Pirlogea, of the 2,525 inhabitants in the commune, 940 are of Roma origin; however, when questioned for the 2002 census no one claimed Roma status for fear of further marginalization. Those who do not have two-room clay huts live in illegally built mud huts on the perilous banks of the Ramnicu-Sarat River.

The Roma, “Our Biggest Problem”

From the very beginning, Mayor Pirlogea regretfully tells us that “the Roma are our community’s biggest problem.” This is exactly what he told Romanian Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu, who, on April 27, 2007, visited the area after it was blighted by landslides. “The biggest problem in our commune is that of the Roma, who have always been marginalized and have had no access to education,” the mayor said. And he is right. It does not take long before your realize that the Roma really are a marginalized group, who have never had access to the center of the village. Luncile is a village inhabited by Roma renowned for their traditional woodwork craftsmanship—they make all sorts of wooden objects such as spoons, spindles, or troughs. Before the traditional feast dedicated to remembering the dead, which is observed in May, the Roma made over 3,500 wooden spoons which they sold at the wholesale price of only 3.5 lei a piece. Those who could no longer sell their spoons sealed their huts with wooden planks and went to work on farms. Only women, children, and the elderly stayed behind.

Of the 295 people receiving public assistance, 90 percent are from Luncile, according to Raluca Ticu, the secretary of the commune. The village is divided into three parts: Maluri, Saritoarea, and Lunci. As the commune has no adequate farm lots, the mayor contacted other counties hoping that somebody would accept the 243 Roma families to homestead in their commune. No one accepted his proposal. “I have sent memos to all the communes they go to every summer, to work for the farmers there, but no one wants to take them,” the mayor says. Until the authorities come up with a solution, people live in anxiety especially when it is raining and their houses slide a few more centimeters down the slope.

Food on Credit

Mariana Beldiman, 42, has a clay hut at the edge of the forest and five children “with two different men.” When her youngest children, Adina Ionela, seven, Georgiana Iasmina, six, and Sabina Andreea, four, are hungry, she chases them out of the house. Here is Mariana’s brief account of her impoverished life:

I used to have my brother near me, but now he’s in jail for some quarrel he got into. I have to take my food from the store on credit, or else we’d be starving to death. I never had free medicines, because the doctor said he ain’t got any. In January, I got a prescription for the little one for she had worms and her tummy hurt. We ain’t got no candles, the priest sometimes gives us the candles left from burials.

Maria Stanciu, a 73-year-old woman who claims to be living exclusively on pills, agrees with Beldiman, “She’s right; if it weren’t for public assistance and for Miss Marcelina and Mister Pantelica [the store owners] to give us food, we’d be starving like we did in ’47.” Two huts away, Veronica Stanciu, 31, a mother of three, says she is also very impoverished. The woman holds a child in her arms. “He can’t walk and he can’t talk,” the mother explains. Stanciu goes on:

We live on public assistance. My husband has asthma and he’s always carrying a bag of medicines. Sometimes we get to see the doctor, sometimes we don’t. You go to his office at nine and he comes in at 11. No one cares about us, we have no information. We are stupid, we die stupid! The doctor has no schedule and you don’t know when you can find him. If he says he comes at 11, he should be there by 11. He said, ‘If you don’t like it, go to the doctor in Dumitresti.’ He looks down on us and sends us away with fleas in our ears. But how can we go to Dumitresti if the lady doctor is from Focsani. She is very kind to us, God bless her soul, but it takes so long to get there.

Stanciu says she deals with discrimination every time she leaves the commune, “When we knock on the county officials’ doors and they hear we’re from Luncile, they won’t talk to us any more.”

One Sick Person in Every House

There is hardly a house in Luncile that does not shelter someone who is sick. Violeta Dobra, 27, is a mother of four, including a 12-year-old daughter diagnosed with “hydrocephalus and mental retardation.” Argentina Dobra, 43, has four children, including a blind daughter. Livia Dobra, 30, has two children one of whom is severely disabled. His name is Ciprian Cosmin, he is eight-years-old, and suffers from “spastic tetraparesis, microcephaly and mental and physical retardation,” according to his first degree disability certificate. He needs constant care and the mother was advised to place him in an institution, but she refused. Once a year, in order to prove that the child has not somehow cured himself, she has to take him to Focsani and show him to the expert medical commission. Livia Dobra has this to say about the situation:

Mrs. Raluca Dan, the head of the commission says that’s the law, but whoever did it never thought about us. I don’t have a wheelchair for him, he is taller and heavier now and I can’t carry him in my arms any more; we don’t have a refrigerator to keep his milk, because he still feeds on the baby bottle. I also quarrel with my husband for he is the only one who earns money for the family. When I take [my son] to Focsani he starves the whole day.”

The woman tells us she gave up consulting Dr. Dorinel Ticu, the commune doctor “because I couldn’t find him when I needed him.” Other mothers from Luncile did the same and registered with the office of Dr. Violeta Stefan from Dumitresti, a commune two hours away from Luncile. The mothers are also upset because the nearest hospital in Dumitresti, has closed its pediatrics department and now the women have to take the bus all the way to Focsani when they need to consult a specialist.

One Doctor, No Contract

Family doctor Dorinel Ticu works in the Luncile health unit only on Tuesday. His activity is part of a program implemented by the foundation Feed the Children in Bucharest and financed with funds from the European Union PHARE program. The commune had problems with this doctor because, for many months, he had no contract with the County Health Insurance Fund due to problems eventually uncovered at his office. All the while, the doctor did see his patients, but he could not issue prescriptions for free medicines. The doctor has finally been accepted as a partner of the County Health Insurance Fund and, with the help of Mirela Stanciu and Cuta Zbughiu—health and sanitary mediators for the Roma community—he has started to restore his list of Roma patients. Doctor Ticu says the poverty of the local community is reflected in the Roma’s health condition. The children frequently catch colds, the doctor says, because they are left alone at home for a long time while the parents are at work. “They don’t bother much about using water and soap and that’s disturbing. In order to solve this problem, I have contacted an NGO and suggested they build a public bath in this commune,” the doctor told us.

Sanitary mediator Stanciu said, “I have to admit that we used to have personal hygiene problems here because of the water shortage. People didn’t have enough water to drink let alone to wash themselves. But, thank God, a few wells were dug and paid for by one good lady who takes care of us.”

The Roma from Luncile go to work as field hands on farms where they live in mud huts which are even worse than those they call home. The medical staff informed us that in the fall, when the Roma get back to their village, they are very sick, infested with lice and even scabies. There have been many cases of endemic goiter—a disease characterized by a swelling of the thyroid gland—because the locals eat non-iodized salt which they take directly from the mountain mine at Jitia. As for the erratic consultation hours, the doctor explains that he provides care for patients in five villages. In fact, the locals have been through the nasty experience of not having a doctor at all and they are afraid of criticizing him. “He is a good doctor and if he leaves we can’t get another doctor,” Pantelica Micu, a member of the Chiojdeni Council told us.

A Ray of Hope

The sun shines again in the Roma village of Luncile. The aristocratic Buttu family, who purchased Alexandru Marghiloman’s Chiojdeni property at the beginning of the twentieth century, recently regained their former properties including 350 hectares of forest. The Buttus have grown fond of the commune, and Feed the Children—run by Marinela Alexeanu Buttu—has implemented several programs to improve Roma living conditions. A state-of-the-art medical center was built in Luncile especially for Roma, several wells have been dug, and six sanitary mediators trained, two of whom have already been hired by the Authority for Public Health.

All of this was part of a 52,000 Euro program designed to improve the health condition for the Roma community in Luncile. The project was awarded an honorable mention at the Civil Society Gala. With respect to the lessons learned during the implementation of this project, here is what Marinela Alexeanu Buttu stated, “No one can do it alone. Community partnership is the key to open the doors of neglect and ignorance. It’s a powerful motivator for everyone, something that helps them settle down.”