Roma girls show off the results of their dance classes at the Living Together community center in Ostrava.

Civic organization Living Together seeks to foster understanding between the Roma minority and general society in Ostrava.

By Rosie Gray

Music swells from the speakers as three teenage girls take the floor of the community center. Dressed in floor-length skirts, crop tops, and medallion-laden belts, the girls begin a traditional dance routine. They pop their hips and spin their wrists in moves not unlike belly dancing. The girls giggle shyly and miss a few steps; they seem like any average girls showing off the fruits of their dance classes.

These girls are Roma, commonly known as Gypsies. The very fact that their dance classes take place in a full-fledged community center is part of an unusual initiative here in Ostrava, a city in the eastern Czech Republic, where Roma are the largest minority.

The classes, and the community center in which they take place, are provided by Living Together, a Czech NGO that is trying out new solutions to Ostrava’s issues with its Roma population – and in many ways, succeeding.

In light of Nicolas Sarkozy’s expulsion of Roma from France and rising anti-Roma sentiment here and in neighboring countries like Slovakia and Hungary, the relative success of Living Together’s projects could point to new help for Europe’s Roma. But it remains to be seen whether the NGO’s accomplishments are replicable on a large scale or even fully applicable in other cities.

Founded by Kumar Vishwanathan, a former physics teacher from India, Living Together began in 1997 in response to a housing crisis in Ostrava’s Roma community following serious flooding. The incident brought to a head existing Roma-Czech tensions in the town, according to Vishwanathan, who went to Ostrava in 1997 with a “normal human impulse” to volunteer and has stayed ever since. Living Together has won numerous human rights awards for its atypical approach to Roma issues in Ostrava.

Roma in the Czech Republic face many of the same issues as Roma elsewhere in Europe – segregated schooling, housing problems, usury, alcoholism, and poverty. “I think they are marginalized in multiple ways,” said Stanislav Daniel, head researcher at the European Roma Rights Center in Budapest. “They are excluded because they are Roma. The cycle of poverty starts with being Roma.”

Czech Roma tend to have a higher standard of living than their counterparts in Romania and Bulgaria, but they also face extremist anti-Roma sentiment here as well as school segregation. According to a 2009 study by the organization Romany Dzeno, the situation for Czech Roma has not measurably improved since the Velvet Revolution over 20 years ago. In 2009, a three-year-old Roma girl suffered severe burns when far-right extremists threw a firebomb into her house. The mayor of a Czech town stated that “Gypsies merrily cause trouble by shouting in the streets, threatening people, including with knives, and committing theft and rape.” In a recent poll, a majority of Czechs said they wouldn’t want a Roma as a neighbor.

In this climate, the prevailing Roma narrative is one of failure and frustration, starting in childhood. “They don’t trust that they can achieve in the future,” said Katarina Klamkova, the director of IQ Roma Service, an organization based in Brno. “They don’t have role models.” Czech Roma children have faced and continue to face institutionalized segregation in schools; Roma children have been shown to be over-represented in the country’s “special schools” for the mentally disabled, which prevents them from going to regular high schools and having a chance at attending university.

Vishwanathan’s organization attempts to combat these issues by starting in the Roma community itself. “They have to overcome barriers within the community and outside. They have very little image of peers succeeding,” Vishwanathan said.

The community center, which is one of three in Ostrava, offers classes and programs like the dance classes for Roma girls. According to Simona Reichlova, a top official at Living Together, the community centers cost about CZK 2 million (about $110,000) a year, to run. The money comes from the municipal authority of Ostrava, and the organization also applies for some European grants, said Reichlova. Officials at the Ostrava municipality did not agree to comment on this story.

On a recent afternoon, teenagers were relaxing in the main room of the center as other children worked on computers. Members of the family who live next door – a family of seven children and three adults, all supported by welfare benefits – drifted in as the oldest girl, 15, began her dance with two friends. Her parents and little brother looked on as the girls performed.

The community center is an attempt to strengthen the Roma community itself – a community that Reichlova describes as “excluded” and “trapped in a circle” of poverty and crime. But perhaps the most novel initiative of Living Together is the Coexistence Village, a development that aims to integrate the community. The Coexistence Village, a small and extremely clean complex of 30 mint-green houses, consists of 15 Roma families and 15 Czech families. It’s the first of its kind here, and the only one of its kind in Europe.

According to Vishwanathan, the goal of the village is to combat the de facto segregation of Roma that has happened in Ostrava; most of the Roma live outside of white communities. The families took part in building the development. There have been no negative incidents and families must meet certain requirements to qualify to live in the Village.

The success of initiatives like Living Together is promising, although Simona Reichlova said that “I believe some of our goals can be achieved, but not immediately – in the course of time.” But the troubles might be too deeply entrenched. The father of the family next door to the community center has not had a job in five or six years, he said.

According to the mother, social benefits are not enough to cover the costs of feeding and clothing her seven children. The building they live in was slated to be demolished, but they live in it anyway. Even though some of their relatives were attacked by skinheads on a tram in Ostrava, the family said that the Czech Republic is less racist than their native Slovakia.

The oldest daughter, the tallest and most skilled of the dancers, is two years younger than her mother was when she gave birth for the first time. She goes to a school that is 70 or 80 percent Roma. When asked whether or not she would ever leave Ostrava and go to university, she shakes her head. “I’m used to it here.”