Roma People in Garla Mare
An insight in every day life of a poor Roma community in a WECF project village in Romania - A report by WECF field officer Anna Samwel
02.05.2008 |Anna Samwel
Roma woman with their children in Garla Mare
Garla Mare, Romania, is the WECF project village ‘where everything started’. The first WECF project on safe drinking water and school sanitation started in Garla Mare in 2003, in cooperation with the Romanian NGO Medium et Sanitas. Since then, many things happened and other similar projects were developed in many other countries. However, WECF is still working with the people from Garla Mare.
Roma people make up 25-30% of the population. Although WECF provided some small scale humanitarian aid, they remain a neglected but very much in need group. This paper wants to give an insight in the lives of the Roma people that live in Garla Mare, to create a higher awareness in the WECF network and to provide a base for new projects and initiatives.
This document is the result of many years of experience in Garla Mare and intensive informal contact with the Roma population. About Garla Mare many documents have been published; the first ecological Dry Urine Diverting school toilet in Europe has been build there. But so far we little interest was shown to the Roma people that make up about 25% of the population. This group deserves attention and eventually needs to be empowered, just as the Romanian part of the population in the frame of WECF projects.
As a volunteer and fieldworker for WECF, the author Anna Samwel, spend many holidays in Garla Mare. She lived at Roma families of different religions and socio-economic status, from middle class to an extremely poor extended family. She earned the trust of the community and established good connections with the local medical assistant, who has thorough knowledge of the Roma community and a deep compassion with its members. WECF cooperates with the medical assistant in small humanitarian projects.
The full report 'Roma in Garla Mare'
