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VIDIN,
Bulgaria, June 8 - Linka Shankova, a Gypsy mother in her 20's, is taking
part in an unusual experiment intended to lift the lot of her people in
Bulgaria, and indeed across Eastern Europe.
For decades here, Gypsies, known as Roma in this part of the world, have
been segregated in their schooling, confined to the poorly run and badly
maintained schools like the one across a dusty lot from Ms. Shankova's
ramshackle one-story brick home. That education kept them on society's
lowest rungs, subject to the poverty and discrimination that has been
their lot for centuries.
So
this past year, in a curious throwback to American desegregation of past
decades, Ms. Shankova has let her 10-year-old son, Bilian Mateev, join
some 460 other Gypsy children who are bused from the dusty Nov Put neighborhood
each morning to schools in other parts of Vidin to be integrated with
other Bulgarian children. "My boy's lively," Mrs. Shankova said,
praising a result of one year's integration. "But he's quieter now.
He's very wise now." In September, her daughter Silvia, 8, will follow
Bilian on the daily bus.
The struggle to integrate Vidin's Gypsy children has not been easy. Similar
efforts to integrate the children of Gypsies elsewhere in Bulgaria failed
after protests by non-Gypsy parents. Moreover, integration here was the
fruit of a local initiative - unusual in a region accustomed to awaiting
governmental remedy - that raised the hackles of education bureaucrats
in the capital of Sofia, a three-hour drive to the south.
If the efforts here succeed, the model could well spread elsewhere in
Eastern Europe, where Gypsies form a large part of the population. Vidin's
experiment is being imitated in cities in Hungary and Slovakia, and will
be repeated in September in four other Bulgarian cities. It has attracted
the attention of Western benefactors, including the George Soros Foundation,
which is paying salaries and providing books and other aid to Gypsy schoolchildren.
The need for desegregation is in part the paradoxical result of decades
of efforts by former Communist governments in Eastern Europe to better
integrate Gypsies into society.
After
World War II, Communist leaders forced the historically nomadic Gypsies
into a sedentary way of life, with fixed places of residence and jobs.
To eliminate widespread illiteracy, special schools were established for
Gypsy children.
For
all the good intentions, the program masked racist undertones. In Bulgaria,
for instance, the Gypsy schools were officially dubbed `'schools for children
with inferior lifestyle and culture."
Overcrowded and underfunded, they often served as penal colonies for uncooperative
teachers. The results were abysmal. According to Bulgaria's 1992 census,
while 36 percent of Bulgarian children graduate from high school, fewer
than 5 percent of Gypsy children do; 9 percent of Bulgarian youths obtain
university degrees, compared with one-tenth of 1 percent among Gypsies.
Donka Panayotova, 45, a Gypsy teacher, daughter of a construction worker
and the guiding light of the integration here, got to know this situation
in 1983, after finishing college and joining the faculty of Vidin's Gypsy
school.
"Officially, about 600 kids were registered," she said in a
recent interview. "In fact, no more than 280 to 300 were ever attending."
The conviction that integration was the sole solution came after she persuaded
a Bulgarian colleague to enroll her grandson at the Gypsy school. The
boy's presence forced Gypsy classmates to speak> Bulgarian, sharply
improving their academic performance, she said.
In 1997, Mrs. Panayotova decided to quit teaching and found an organization
called Drom - Bulgarian for "the road" - to fight for desegregation.
Despite the Bulgarian government's acceptance in 1999 of a framework agreement
with Gypsy leaders to integrate Gypsies more fully into Bulgarian society,
the government had dragged its feet on school desegregation. Seventy percent
of Gypsy children remained in Gypsy schools. That same year, after several
Gypsy families in Yambol, in southeastern Bulgaria, sought to enroll their
children in Bulgarian schools, Bulgarian parents blocked their entrance
with protests.
In Vidin, despite scattered resistance, preparations for desegregation
began in earnest last spring.
Katya Trifonova, the principal of a desegregated secondary school, said
meetings with Bulgarian parents and teachers who feared a drop in educational
standards were often heated and emotional. Gypsy parents, for their part,
had to be assured for the safety of their children, she said. In scattered
instances, teachers at the Gypsy school, apparently fearing for the future
of their jobs if children deserted the school en masse, suggested that
Gypsy children might face attacks from skinheads if they ventured out
of the Gypsy neighborhood.
"I was worried, because my boy is darker than the others," said
Aneta Sashova, gesturing toward her son, Goshko Kotsev, 11, a fourth grader.
Mrs. Sashova's situation is typical of many of Vidin's Gypsies, estimated
to number roughly one-quarter of the population. Her family lives with
the parents of her husband, who has never held a job. Until 1999, she
worked in a chemical factory but was laid off when it shut down, and has
survived on welfare ever since.
She overcame her worries for her children after learning that Drom would
buy them school books, materials like crayons for art lessons, and even
shoes. "I had about decided to stop sending them to school altogether,"
she said of Goshko and his sister, who is in eighth grade.
Ms. Panayotova's experiment in desegregation was particularly risky as
a test of tolerance in times of high stress. Slowly and painfully, Bulgaria
is weaning itself from a Communist, centrally planned economy to a more
open market. Vidin's two biggest factories, once employing tens of thousands
to supply rubber tires and water pumps to markets in the old Soviet empire,
are closed. Unemployment is so widespread that, by some estimates, as
much as half the city's 1989 population of about 60,000 have emigrated
in search of work.
The economic battering heightened the isolation of the Gypsies, who once
came out of their isolated slum neighborhood to work with other Bulgarians
in local factories, but are now unemployed.
Rumyan Russinov, the director of a center in Budapest that is run by the
Soros Foundation's Open Society Institute to help Gypsies, called the
organizers in Vidin "the sappers that find the mines," to enable
similar desegregation to succeed elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
"Every Romany leader feels he's a Martin Luther King," said
Mr. Russinov, 34, who was born in Dunavtsi, down the Danube from Vidin.
"We don't need that now, we need a movement, not just an individual.
We need critical mass." Future initiatives, he said, will include
university scholarships for Gypsy graduates of desegregated schools.
In Vidin, he said, despite initial acceptance of desegregation, the struggle
is not yet over. Few Gypsy children are in integrated schools, though
more are expected as the idea catches on among Gypsy parents. Moreover,
the long-term effect of desegregation has yet to be felt.
"This is not a one-act play: it will be a long-term process,"
said Mariika Vasileva, vice principal of a primary school whose Gypsy
pupils jumped last year to 110, from 80. "Only teachers who never
had the chance to work with children of different ethnic backgrounds could
believe that this would be an easy and quick process."
Lingering differences were evident as the sixth-grade class of Julia Petkova,
who teaches Bulgarian language and literature at the school of SS. Cyril
and Methodius, had a last lesson recently. In the first row, Borislav
Borisov, a boy of 12 who is not a Gypsy, shared a two-seat bench and desk
with Alexander Danchev, also 12, a tousled Gypsy boy - one of 7 in the
class of 26. It was the last day of school, exams were over, everyone
had passed, and thoughts were on vacation.
Borislav, asked about his summer plans, said he hoped his parents would
take him, as in past years, to the Black Sea coast. Alexander, when asked
the same question, appeared confused. After a pause, he replied, "I
guess I'll play."
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company top
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