Three hours of childhood

The Roma, mostly unhygienic settlement of Mali Leskovac is known to those who are forced to live there, foreign and rare domestic humanitarian organizations that enable them to survive with wood, food, clothes and shoes, and the municipality of Palilula, which simply cannot forget them considering that they have been "covering" Mirijevsko brdo for about fifteen years. And probably no one knows exactly who lives there and how they live. According to the data of the local humanitarian association Romsko srce and the American humanitarian organization Catholic Relief Services (CRS), 93 indigenous families with 483 members and 75 families from Kosovo with more than 430 members live in the settlement. Families (from three to thirteen children) live by collecting old paper, reselling it in the markets or are employed in the City Cleaning Service. The natives have electricity, water and houses, while the newcomers have nothing.

For those people who live in houses made of cardboard, tin, partially built hastily, or according to material possibilities, without windows and doors, without electricity and water, a normal life happened last week. Near the settlement, a proper kindergarten for children from 2,5 years and up from Mali Leskovac has been officially opened. About seventy of them were lucky, thanks to the mentioned organizations, to go to kindergarten, to spend three hours a day in nice, clean and warm rooms, with peers, toys, teachers.

THIS SIDE LEARNING PARENTS: Danijela Antonijević, a young Roma teacher, tells us about the visible results: "When they came to the kindergarten a month and a half ago, most of them did not understand a word of the Serbian language." They spoke Albanian or different Roma languages. In order to communicate, we had interpreters for Roma and Albanian. Today, children already know how to say their first and last name, have learned songs and understand the Serbian language. They don't always know how to answer, but when you tell them to bring something, they know exactly what it is. That's a big improvement. We also have older children who teach their parents to speak Serbian. And when they go home, they won't eat until they wash their hands, and the parents are just amazed when they tell them that they won't start eating lunch until they say it's okay... This is valuable preparation for school and fitting into the environment they intend to live in." Most children from this settlement, even those of the natives, did not go to kindergarten, and many of them did not even go to school.

Experts on Roma issues estimate that more than 450.000 of them live in this area, and this country cannot boast of caring for a population that is not negligible in any respect. First of all, Roma are the youngest population in Serbia: more than half of them are under 25 years old. On average, they live ten years shorter than the rest of the Serbian population. Only 4,1 percent of them live more than 60 years.

In search of existence and survival, they spin in their own marginal circle between illiteracy, unemployment and poverty. In a country that even a few decades ago boasted that it had eradicated illiteracy, almost 80 percent of Roma have not completed elementary school. Only nine percent have a high school diploma, and barely 0,2 percent have a university degree. Only seven percent of Roma children have the privilege of attending preschool institutions. The Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia warns that as many as 37 percent of Roma children did not know the Serbian language before starting school. This, of course, creates additional difficulties for them because pedagogues, psychologists and others literally push them into special classes or schools for the mentally retarded when enrolling in elementary school right from the start. After that, they have no chance for further education.

CHANCE TO EVERYONE: "With the motto 'giving everyone a chance', we started the preschool program last year. Our target groups in providing assistance are children of refugees, displaced persons, children from marginalized and poor families of the local population who do not have the opportunity to send their children to preschool," Iskra Maksimović, advisor of the CRS education project, told Vreme. Parents and local non-governmental organizations are actively involved in the education project, and preschool programs currently exist in Belgrade, Aleksinac and Zemun. Soon this program will be organized in Subotica as well.

This was also the way to Mali Leskovac: "No one has ever offered anything to this settlement with so many children." The response was beyond all expectations. We had a problem choosing who to choose, since there was not enough room for everyone. There are also families with thirteen children, seven of whom are of preschool age. Parents themselves chose which child would attend kindergarten. They are a separate story again. They showed incredible interest and willingness to participate in all this. They say that they do not want their children to have their own fate, the fate of illiterate people. They want their children to get some education, to be able to attend school normally and later find a job. They are satisfied if at least one of their children gets a chance to move on. It is simply touching how those children who live in impossible conditions, without electricity and water and sleep under cardboard boxes, come to school neat and clean. They are poor and illiterate people, but they are very grateful that someone took care of their children."

NONE GETO: Only Roma children go to kindergarten in Mali Leskovac. All the teachers are Roma and the first news in the public raised suspicions that a new ghettoization is on the horizon. Activists of the CRS and Roma Heart, on whose proposal the kindergarten was opened, deny it by saying that the kindergarten is intended for children from this neighborhood, and that parents would not be able to take their children to and from somewhere else.

Živojin Mitrović, the president of the humanitarian association Romansko srce, to whom the main credit is given for the children from Mali Leskovac becoming a kindergarten, claims for "Vreme" that it is not about ghettoization and isolation of Roma children: "We want the children to integrate into the environment in which they live, and to get there, education is the first step. What should you do with a Roma child who will not be admitted to the state kindergarten, because he cannot pay, because he has no shoes and clothes, or has lice or scabies, and no one cares about it. If someone solved it all, no one would mind. Kindergartens like this are our first step on the way to school. After all, our experiences with some other similar kindergartens do not speak of ghettoization. Before we opened a similar kindergarten in Borča, also in a Roma settlement, out of ten children enrolled in the first grade, there were two left in the second grade, and only one child from this settlement in the third and fourth grades. And it's been like that for the last ten years. The situation is significantly different today. Of the 17 children enrolled in the first grade last year, all of whom went to kindergarten before that, 11 of them graduated with excellent results, and I think that all of them will successfully enroll in the second grade. And that's not ghettoization, but helping children to get involved in elementary school normally."

MONTESSORI METOD: The entire preschool program was created as a Yugoslav program, according to the Montessori method. The child is the center of everything, and the way of working ensures his physical, intellectual, emotional and social development. In CRS, they say that a whole team of local experts worked on the program with the aim that children in preschool education acquire the basics of habits, knowledge and abilities that will enable them to enter elementary school better and more successfully. For Roma children, the program is the same as for everyone else. In addition to acquiring basic hygiene habits and elementary culture of behavior, Roma children are also being worked on literacy and math education.

"Parents are involved in the functioning of the entire preschool program, from deciding what to buy for their children according to their capabilities to actively participating in improving the conditions for their children's stay." Together we whitewashed the rooms and furnished them. They participated together with their children in creative workshops, for example making figurines from dough. They also brought other children who do not attend pre-school classes. Those experiences are valuable to us in order to find out their interests and wishes", says Iskra Maksimović.

More than 90 percent of the children in this Mirije settlement between the ages of seven and 14 have never gone to school. For the younger ones, additional classes for school preparation will be organized in the pre-school institution, while according to the plans of the Roma heart, for the fourteen-year-olds, preparations for inclusion in school, language learning, literacy and similar will be organized at national universities. Our interlocutors claim that children do not go to school because they do not know the language, because their poor parents cannot afford a notebook, pencil, clothes, or shoes.

The majority of Roma children from this settlement already earn money at the age of nine, whether they help their parents in collecting and selling secondary raw materials, whether they are engaged in the gray economy or washing car windows at intersections. Recently, the burning problem has become "entering" prostitution already at the age of thirteen or fourteen. Children, like their parents, are in a vicious circle from which it is difficult to find a way out to a normal life. Nothing helps them, neither the social environment, nor personal and state poverty, nor illiteracy. Concentrated in 149 settlements, 70 percent of which are similar to Mali Leskovac, the famous Hayat, Deponia or Antena, the Roma have little to offer from life in the capital. It's as if they Googled insults and humiliations.