Commentary: Ghetto children in the Czech Republic are victims of the system

When I was
young I wanted to become a musician like my father, my grandfather, his father
and all of our family. I first wanted to play either clarinet or saxophone, and
later I wanted to play bass, drums, guitar and piano like Uncle Jonko, and in the
end I wanted to play the electric guitar like Petr Janda – he’s not from my
family, but he plays well too.

When my Dad
bought his first Škoda 100 MB De
Luxe, I wanted to become a racecar driver, but I also wanted to be an actor
like Radek Dubanský, an astronaut, a doctor, a forklift operator, and a garbage
man. As far as forklifts go, I got the best schooling for that.

It seemed
normal to me that everyone around me was doing something. They all went to
work. When I started commuting to school in first grade, it seemed normal to me
to get up with my mother every day at 4:30 AM. She was commuting too, to the ČKD
factory. She had to.

Today’s children desire a different career. They want to draw welfare like
their parents, who are my peers. The People in Need organization famously reached this
conclusion through its research, and the flashy headlines say it all: “Romani people don’t want to work”. Their
children won’t work and the children of their children won’t either.
The respondents in the survey were the occupants of residential hotels, people completely
dependent on the welfare system.

Is this reality? Yes it is, in some places, and it’s very sad.

I am reflecting on what would be going on around me if I were growing up in a
residential hotel. I have visited several of them, and to this day I can still picture children living conditions of such extreme need that the reader would find hard to imagine. A room a few meters square with many people in it and no
hygiene. Would I want to live differently?

Poverty was the
biggest motivation and reason for me to decide to function in today’s society
differently, and poverty led my siblings to do the same. However, the poverty of my
childhood was almost luxury compared to how these children are living today. To this
day I tell my own children how I envied my schoolmates their bunk beds and the
snacks they brought to school, to say nothing of their clothing, but children
living in the residential hotels don’t even think about crap like that. What is
a bunk bed compared to the fact that they have nothing to wear, not to mention that
they often have nothing to eat? I think I would call that a higher level of
poverty.

I grew up in an
era where everyone around me had to work. I had to go to nursery school, which
I did not like, and later to school, and to childcare, where I spent whole days
practicing the piano and loved it there. No one was at home, everyone was at
work. It seemed normal to me that life was that way. It was the same way almost
everywhere. No one stood in line for welfare. As far as I knew, welfare didn’t
even exist.

Today’s children see a different reality. Neither their father nor their mother
work and their siblings don’t go to nursery school. When they see such a situation
for all of their young lives, they naturally want to be like their parents who
draw welfare – often because they don’t want to work, and often because the welfare
system is more generous than a private employer or entrepreneur would be. However,
for the most part they have no chance of getting a job in the first place. There aren’t any, and
those that exist are not for Romani people.

This is the
problem of the North Bohemian towns and also Ostrava. Even death doesn’t bother
with a wasteland. Parents often have no other option than to draw welfare, but the reality is also such that most of the money the family “receives”
is never even seen by them. If the population is under the impression that
large Romani families get tens of thousands in cash and lose it all in booze or
the slot machines, they are mistaken.

The reality is such that the vast majority of that money is swallowed up by what I
consider to be completely incomprehensibly high rents for rooms in the
residential hotels. The family gets whatever is left over for food. Most of the
time it’s so little that people simply do not have enough to eat. Believe it or
not, the owners of these facilities are often the municipalities themselves, or
sometimes private entrepreneurs. Those people are basically the best off,
because they make very good money.

This whole system is very advantageously set up for some. It makes it possible
to make money on the poorest of the poor, irrespective of their ethnic origin.
Whether non-Romani or Romani, rest assured that in a residential hotel,
everyone is in the same situation.

The children
described by People in Need are the victims of the system, victims of their
time. If we cultivate a feeling in them from their earliest childhoods that it
is normal to live on the outskirts of society, we are just raising another
generation to live like their parents. I think People in Need and other
organizations should dedicate themselves to this most of all.

This article
was first published on the author’s blog. Reprinted with his permission.