Day Trip To a Roma Village (aka trying to walk the line between cultural sensitivity and cynicism and hopefully not offending anyone in the process)

Sorry, I’ve been bogged down with PhD requirements again, which is good in the long term interest of my not being kicked out of the program and maintaining a purpose for being out here at all, although bad in the short term interest of my being able to entertain you all with blog-a-stan-worthy stories (and I’ve accumulated a number at this point—the folkloric “Kuzminki” festival and an ensuing gay love triangle both worthy of the title “Cockfest” albeit for different reasons, the discovery of a fledgling hipster community in Kazan at a post-punk show and its after-party, the sexual exploits and functional alcoholism of the middle-aged women who regularly gather to drink with my host mother, and the final throes of living with said host mother before I finally decide to tick the home-stay box as done and reclaim an adult life in my own apartment in Kazan—all of which will be brought to you at a later date). I am hoping that once my prospectus is submitted the long and short run interests will be better aligned and I’ll be able to pass along idiosyncratic stories and tidbits of interest from interviews with colorful characters out in villages in the name of research. In the meantime, here is another quickly written photo-centric tale of my Sunday last weekend spent in a Roma/Gypsy** village called Sviyazhsk about an hour out of Kazan near the border with the Republic of Chuvashia (which by the way is *not* as many have already quipped the homeland of Chewbacca, that would be Wookieestan, obviously, as Chewbacca is a proper name).

So I trudged out into the snow that has been falling pretty much steadily across Tatarstan for two weeks now and made my way to the train station where I was meeting Sohei (pronounced So-hay) and Lilya, two photojournalists studying at the university, he from Japan, she from Astrakhan, as well as two of my friends and fellow Russian language students, Melissa of the UK and Ian of Long Island. Sohei the brave, who moved to Kazan from Japan not speaking a word of Russian and now in his third very fluent year in the journalism department, had gone searching for a community of Roma to photograph a few years back out of an intense fascination with their counter-cultural ways and followed rumors onto the electric train and out to the village of Sviyazhsk where he finally found them.

 Snow in Kazan and the cutting-edge technology used for its disposal.

Yes, that is a little escalator bringing snow up to drop into the back of a pick up truck. Highly efficient.

Quaint Train Station in Sviyazhk

Greater Sviyazhsk as seen from the station

Although Sohei describes his first few trips to the village as “scary” with the Roma not so warmly receiving him, he finally convinced them of his utility by snapping photos and bringing back beautiful portraits that they now display on their walls. Since then he and Lilya have become the personal photographers of this small Roma village—taking pictures at weddings, New Year celebrations and the like and coming back to distribute the photos and take some more.

Roma kids assembling for a portrait. Lilya preparing to shoot.

You can see in the background that the Roma houses were very spare, most without any furniture at all, but seemingly well-built and sturdy, sufficiently heated, although by wood-burning stoves, and surprisingly all contained televisions the size of which seemed to vary with level of status in the community.

One child not so happy about this turn of events. 

Apparently, he had been sick and visited by a slew of doctors recently so any unfamiliar faces in the house sent him into tears in fear of a new round of injections, as Russian medical professionals all for some reason prefer this unpleasant mode of pharmaceutical delivery to simple and painless pills.

Unfortunately, this was the point at which my camera died and the rest of the pictures were very graciously passed along by Lilya and Sohei, hers in colour and his in black and white.

Here's one of the final products from that house by Sohei. 

There were two loosely related complications with our visit. One was the distribution of photographs. When we got to the first house in the village the family descended on Sohei and Lilya and seemed to scoop up all of the photos from their package in a mad chaos of grabbing and gesticulation, taking even the ones without their family pictured. The father of the house assured the photographers that he would distribute the pictures to the rest of the village himself and then demanded more. Sohei barely managed to make it out of the first house with five photos to spare and this became a problem as at every subsequent house we visited people demanded their photographs and Sohei and Lilya had none left to deliver.

The related complication was the distribution of candy. We had all brought big bags of candy along for the kids. However, in the second house Melissa made the mistake of bringing her entire bag out at once and lost it all to the ladies of the house who insisted that they had many children to feed. Ian did the same, revealing and then losing the contents of his smaller bag to the kids. This made me the only one left with candy and very popular though slightly hated for not surrendering my whole bag at once.

There I am more judiciously handing out a piece at a time to the kids. Not because I am any smarter than Melissa or Ian but because I learned the same lesson the hard way distributing sandwiches at my OSCE-sponsored event for International Roma Day 2007 in Kosovo. The other lesson I learned organizing that event at the primary school in Novo Brdo was that if a Serbian school director tells you that she would be happy to prepare a "cultural program" for International Roma Day, you should insist on attending a dress rehearsal. As the "cultural program" for International Roma Day 2007 began, a girl with long blond braids got on the small stage all in red and started wailing a song that went something like "Serbia, my homeland, Kosovo, my homeland, Kosovo has always been and will always be a part of Serbia, our blood was shed for Kosovo, we were bombed for 78 days but we will never surrender our homeland..." I went red too as it became clear that I had unintentionally used OSCE funds to put on what amounted to a Serbian nationalist talent show. When I pulled the school director aside and asked how this was possibly a cultural program for international *Roma* day, she gave me a great-blanked eyed Slavic stare and said "Well, we *are* letting the Roma kids participate in the event," as if this were a revolutionary act of inclusion. Ah, Kosovo, you make Russia seem so well adjusted.

Also note the freezing geese in the background of many of the pictures. The village was overrun with an impressive number of livestock, mainly geese and ducks who were quite nonplussed to find themselves with their wings clipped and living through a Russian winter.

One of the women who made off with Melissa's candy

Her kids were ridiculously cute little things.

This guy was also very interested in having his picture taken with me and Melissa.

He paused to grab a cigarette to have dangling out of his mouth for uber-masculine, perhaps even implicitly post-coital, effect. I attempted to counter his move by putting on a "skeptical" face, but was uncharacteristically too subtle as it doesn't really show up in the picture.

Less skeptical on the arm of the lovely Lilya instead. Cigarette guy's young wife pictured to his left.

Same dude, same cigarette.

 Family portrait at the house next door. In front of a wall length picture of a lake-side scene.

 Here's grandmother and son having a drink by the lake.

 And granddaughter bringing her cat into the record of family history that will go on the wall opposite the lake-side scene.

Back outdoors the same father of the house has made a toxic fire of sliced industrial wires of some sort to burn off the plastic and melt down the metal to sell. This is of course better than the melting down of lead batteries that was said to occur often in Kosovo, but probably still not awesome health-wise for the kids out playing.

 Such as this little charmer in front of the flames. Those are a pair of his sister's pink tights tied around his waist as a faux-judo belt by the way.

 Me and Ian with the same pink-belted boy

Here come the series of group shots. Melissa far left, Ian in the middle.

It looks like I am digging my claws into that poor little girl's snow suit, 

probably because I really did covet it for my own.

Thumbs up. Or down if you're the girl in the back.

Close up.

I am making weird rabbit teeth I believe because the girl to my right had called me a Vampire Bunny. She called Melissa a Giraffe and said that Ian looked like Jesus. 

The girl front and center was ridiculously clever. She really wanted us to teach her English words that she already knew in Russian and Tatar, which she studied in school and seemed to know quite well. She said that they didn't start English class until the 4th form and she was only in the 1st but was very eager to learn. I couldn't help wondering whether despite all that talent and energy she was doomed to wind up handed off as just another wife to a guy with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.

Soon after this photo was taken a man came out of his house and started yelling at the girl who had decided that we were a posse of Jesus, a Giraffe and a Vampire Bunny to get home immediately. He shook his fist and screamed at her in a language that might have been Romani until she scuttled off home. He then came over and apologized to us profusely for her behavior saying that the way she cavorted with strangers she was bound to wind up as a prostitute by the time she turned 13. On that note, we left the village and began the odyssey back to Kazan very grateful to Sohei and Lilya who both need to get websites so that I can put up links to their fantastic photos!

**I am quite torn at the moment by what to call this community. In Russia, it sounds exhaustingly PC to refer to them as “Roma” and friends back home who haven’t been indoctrinated into minority rights parlance stand a far better chance of knowing who in the world the “Gypsies” are versus the obscure-sounding “Roma.” However, my OSCE past won’t let me type the word “Gypsy” without cringing, so “Roma” it is, but “Roma/Gypsy” for the first mention with this footnote by way of explanation and exoneration.