FROM GRAVES TO CRADLES
BRUSSELS, EESC 14 JANUARY 2011
//1/
//2/ I live in Florence and am the Custodian of the Swiss-owned
so-called 'English' Cemetery where many opponents of slavery are
buried.//3/ Roma from Romania also come to Florence. They are the
restorers of our historic Cemetery. Buried with us are
//4/ Frances Trollope and //5/ Richard
Hildreth
who
wrote
the
first
and
second anti-slavery novels, which //6/ Harriet Beecher Stowe
copied with Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Uncle Tom's Cabin translated into Romanian //7/ freed the
Roma who had been slaves from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth
century in that country. //8/ Buried with us also is Nadezdha
(Hope), who came to Florence at 14, a black slave from Nubia, her
story told on her tomb in Cyrillic. As well we have the Romanian
nobleman Joan Kantakuzen who enslaved Roma. //9/ And
Southwood Smith, friend of Florence Nightingale, advocate of
improved housing for the health of the poor. American black slaves
were forbidden to learn to read and write. //10/Frederick Douglass
wrote and published the Autobiography
of Frederick Douglass, Ex-Slave, Written by Himself
breaking this unjust law, //11/and he visited our
Cemetery.
//12/ I learned first from the Roma women, then the men, that
their greatest needs and wants are for roofs made of better
materials that do not let in the snow and rain, affordable
schooling for their children, and medical care for their families,
in order to rise out of their poverty.
//13/ The Roma skills as blacksmiths, stonemasons,
carpenters and gardeners are invaluable to us. They restore the
Cemetery, build shelves for its Library, and together we build
cradles for their babies and learn/teach the alphabet.
//14/ I am President of the Aureo Anello Associazione which exists
to support our library, the Mediatheca 'Fioretta Mazzei, and to
raise funds to restore the 'English' Cemetery. //15/ We have
formed with the Roma a sister association in Romania called
'Asociaţia Agrustic Somnacuni-Inel de Aur', both names meaning
'Golden Ring', to preserve Roma families and the
Romani language. //16/ Its President is Daniel-Claudiu Dumitrescu,
who is 25, has three daughters, who drew the plan for the house he
would like to build on our library table //17,18,19/ and who first
restored all our Victorian wrought and cast iron work, //20/ then
built the walls of his house in Romania in 2008, //21/ next
apprenticed with Alberto Casciani to restore the tomb of Viscount
Gough's almost ancestress, //22,23/24/ going on to clean and
restore many other historic tombs, //25,26/ even, from his
ancestral skill working with copper, using the same tools for
replacing lead letters, //27 /with which earnings he then could
buy the materials and roof his house in Buzau, Romania, in 2010.
Before that he, his wife and their three daughters, lived, with
other family members, twelve to one room with no windows. Social
Assistance was going to take away their three children from them
because of this. His new house has three rooms and four windows,
with a fine metal roof with gutters for water storage and
hopefully soon solar panels for electricity, all of which he and
his family have constructed. //28/ He and his wife, Vandana, have
written Romany Vocabulary
with his drawings and text in four languages, and a recording of
them reading the words, for Roma and Gadge alike, for literacy and
for educating against prejudice.
His 'Asociaţia Agrustic Somnacuni' has
applied to George Soros' Open Society Institute in Budapest for
funding to create a project called 'Home Building, Home
Schooling', where Roma workers in Florence could earn the money
for materials with which they would rebuild each others' roofs in
Romania, and at the same time work with teaching each other
literacy in the home, giving their children a head start in
schooling. //29/ Chinese immigrants learn our alphabet writing
tourists' names in their beautiful calligraphy in Florence's
streets. They keep both cultures and immediately rise into the
professional classes in the U.S. Italian immigrants to America and
Australia are forced into 'English Only' integration and remain as
pizza cooks. //30/ Where Roma can teach each other in
Romani, the language of their homes and their families in which
there is security and happiness, they quickly learn the other
languages also. We paint planks of library
shelving black to be used with white chalk as laptop blackboards
for writing letters on. //31,32/ In the
summer, school is outdoors as one of the teachers has
tuberculosis. //33,34,35/ In the winter it is held in our library
with its welcoming photographs of Roma families by Karen Graffeo,
//36/, and in my office with its computer.
We hold it on Sundays because on other days
the Carabinieri come to check our documents. The
participants then teach their womenfolk who beg at church doors
during the week and bring me the sheets of paper where they have
been copying the Latin plaques on Florentine church walls and the
English inscriptions on the tomb stones. //37/ Cemetery
inscriptions are ideal for literacy training. I pay each one
studying, women and men, two euro and fifty cents a week, the
teachers, ten euros a week out of my small pension, and give them
lunch of sandwiches with crostini (chicken livers), apples and
water, as well as used clothes.
It is difficult to carry out this project because of Italian laws.
//38,39/ Our families are bulldozed and burned out of the illegal
shacks they build from material no one wants at Osmannoro, where
they have no water, no electricity and no rubbish disposal,
consequently there are large rats, and where there is also
asbestos. Now they are forced to live in the streets in groups of
no more than three persons together, women and children and the
elderly as well as men. Their babies are taken from them here in
Italy by Social Assistance for lack of housing. In Romania also
their babies are taken from them by Social Assistance because
there their dwellings are substandard.
Because they have no legal address they are not allowed legally to
work. Our cultural association in its statute permits economic
activities amongst its members. //40/ So we teach the Roma how to
write their names in our membership book for our library, I buy
their insurance coverage, and we give them work in the cemetery.
When we can get permission from the Swiss owners of the Cemetery
they live with us, this giving them the legal 'domicilio', so we
can pay them with government vouchers. //41,42,43,44/
They repair everything, the women building the library bookshelves
being excellent carpenters. The Roma have valuable
manual skills most of our families have discarded and forgotten.
When work is carried out by Roma that is appreciated by Gadje
there is great happiness, dignity and reciprocity. Roma
are wonderfully clean and courteous, ideal people as houseguests.
//45,46,47/ Roma babies are loved, swaddled, held,
nursed, rocked, given security, despite the great economic poverty
in which they live. Because mothers who beg with their
babies would be imprisoned, their babies taken from them by Social
Assistance, they return with them to Romania as soon as they can
pay the expenses for the travel document for the baby and for the
Atlassib bus tickets (€300 total), so the children can be raised
by the grandparents, then both parents return to beg in Florence
for their families' survival, sending the money home again by way
of Atlassib. A Roma baby, abandoned for lack of the €300, costs
Social Assistance €90 a day.
We strongly recommend that individuals be valued not only
for their schooling but also for their ancestral skills they learn
in their families that they will teach to their children. Roma
need combined Work/Study projects, where members of
families can be given restoration work for a limited time in the
richer countries to be able to return to their families in
Romania, the work being coupled with literacy training. What is
crucial for such projects in Italy is housing, such as dormitories
or currently unused buildings, with water, light, and rubbish
disposal services, as well as a library/school for its
participants, which would grant these workers, both women and men,
the 'domicilio' for a few months at a time. We need to structure
projects not just for mothers and children but also for the
fathers, so the whole family survives. We need to integrate
culturally with them in a sharing and an appreciation, rather than
forcing their integration to our empty consumerism and broken
families. The Roma have so much to teach the Gadje,
among them excellent survival skills, but which our
dominant culture destroys.
//48/ Our Swiss-owned so-called 'English' Cemetery was
formerly barren, vandalized and abandoned, its history forgotten,
its Carrara marble tombs black with traffic pollution, its iron
rusting away, and its earth put to weedkiller for decades, its
leaves blown about by noisy machines. //49,50,51,52,/ The Roma
insist on gardening carefully with their bare hands. This Spring
the Cemetery will bloom with thousands of iris and daffodil bulbs
planted by the Roma amidst the now cleaned marble tombs and their
conserved wrought and cast iron railings. //53,54/
This is Arnold Boecklin's and Sergei Rachmaninoff's 'Island of the
Dead'. It is potentially also a birthing, a cradling, of a new
Europe. //55/ Thank you. Especially, thank you, Roma
People, for restoring and healing this monument of European and
world culture.