April 2006

Dear Friends,

Warm greetings to all during the Easter season.

I’d like to tell you about my recent trip to Eastern Europe during the last two weeks of March. As many of you know, Roma (Gypsies) live in almost all countries of the world. Over the last few years I have visited Roma communities in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Spain. I have also met Roma in countries like Germany, Norway, and Kyrgyzstan. Of course, in a large country like Russia there are Roma as well. According to a 2002 census, the number of Roma in Russia was put at 183,000, though the real number is thought to be much higher.

From time to time I receive from human rights organizations bad news about the treatment of Roma in Russia: for example, a Roma community in the province of Kaliningrad, in western Russia, families were evicted from land where they were forced to settle in 1956.

From such reports I have learned that Russian Roma are isolated from the mainstream of the European human rights movement, and that they have become scapegoats for social infirmities of the Russian society. They are called “beggars,” “swindlers,” and “thieves.” Officials accuse them of criminality and drug-peddling. This intimidation is accompanied by subtle administrative measures. Roma families who change their passports are refused stamps to prove their registration.

After all I had heard about the Roma in Russia, I was very interested when I received an invitation from one of our PC(USA) mission workers in Russia, Ellen Smith in Moscow. Ellen invited me to come and learn more about Roma in Russia and to start thinking about how to build bridges to church-based Roma networks in other countries. Ellen’s idea was to visit with a Baptist pastor working among Roma in the town Kostroma, about 400 miles northeast of Moscow.

Ellen and Al Smith, with their two daughters, were exceptional hosts in Moscow. And it was a pleasure to travel together with Gary Payton, the PC(USA) liaison for Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland. We had a long journey together, with plenty of time to share our experiences and impressions.

Before going to Russia, Gary and I went to Ukraine to visit the Reformed Church of Carpath-Ukraine (KRC) and learn more about their work with the Roma.

We started from Budapest with Steve, a young Canadian mission worker of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, who is a farmer and supports a farm project in Ukraine. He speaks Hungarian well, an important asset, because people in the KRC speak Hungarian almost exclusively.

On our trip to western Ukraine we learned many lessons about missiology. Mission among Roma can be done very differently, indeed. Here are two examples to illustrate this, one from a Roma community in Komoroz and the other in Szürte.

Together with Attila, the KRC Roma mission coordinator, we visited the Roma community in the village of Komoroz. Roma communities in western Ukraine live in tabors, or “Roma camps” separated from other ethnic groups at the edge of towns and villages. Komoroz is one of these pockets where Hungarian-speaking Roma live totally isolated in a Ukrainian-speaking environment, with no schools, churches, or other helpful social infrastructure in their mother tongue nearby. In this community, a small group has started a house church, encouraged by Misha, a non-Roma neighbor. This neighbor who cared about them became a pastor to them, not officially, but in the real sense of the word. (He doesn’t preach in a black robe from a pulpit but sits with them in his worn jeans around the table, sharing the good news of Jesus Christ, or works with them making the mud bricks for their small church building.)

Families started to support each other, and over the years they drew in more people (now 55) and discovered they needed a community building that could serve multiple purposes—as a church, as a meeting place, and as a school. Beyond Misha, in the whole camp of 250 adults and 100 children, only one adult is able to read and write! They also want to organize jobs, since besides seasonal work none of them has a regular job. When I visited last fall, they had started the mud brick structure of the community house. Now they have installed windows, plastered the interior, and strung light bulbs.

The PC(USA)’s Self Development of People (SDOP) has set aside funds for a well and for the purchase of a piece of farmland and the necessary seeds. Everything has been well thought through in the community. Farm work is a new business for almost all of them. And everyone is excited, as their first planting season will soon start.

Most exciting of all is a pre-school for children and adults to start this fall. The first teacher will be Misha’s daughter. We were excited to witness how Roma in Komoroz take ownership of each little improvement they have created with their own hands and minds. They are proceeding slowly, but steadily.

The situation in Komoroz is very different from other Roma communities in this region, where the churches thought they had to do something for the Roma, and where foreign donors with good intentions have invested large sums of money.

In such a situation we met Kristin, a very committed Young Adult Volunteer from the PC(USA) who is paired with Szidonia, a Hungarian volunteer, in the RGDTS-program (like Stacey and Jutka).

Kristin teaches English in the new school building and obviously has a lot of patience to deal with all the issues at once: prejudice and paternalism among the non-Roma, dysfunctional families, children at risk, power struggles in the community. This is rather a long-term job, she said, you need time to build trust first. We could see that she has already done a good deal of trust-building: The kids love to stay with her in school, even after the lessons are over.

Russia is different. Is Russia different?

First of all, it is still very cold here: the Volga River is still covered with 25 inches of ice, and mountains of dirty snow are piled up on both sides of the icy road. If you are poor (and it seems many are poor here), the cold is an extra burden.

Pjotr, a Baptist pastor in Kostroma, takes us to his Roma friends’ houses. They live in different neighborhoods, not separated but on the same street with their Russian neighbours. “Trust-building” was Pjotr’s first and most important task.

We are invited for a cup of tea, snacks, and some conversation. (Ellen translates.) From time to time, Rustam, a Roma who accompanies us, plays his guitar.

We learn that the Roma were placed here under Stalin. They were brought from different areas of Russia, and among themselves they still speak their own language, which is close to Russian. In Soviet times, some of them were self-supporting farmers or day laborers, and some were horse traders.

Times have changed enormously. Nowadays, most Roma are unemployed. They do some seasonal work and ask for social subsidies that are too small to live on. Some old people are waiting for money from Germany as a compensation for forced labor during World War II.

Pjotr visits many Roma families and talks about daily problems, proposes changes, and helps with tiny daily needs: How to find a doctor? How to cure your drug problem? How to create your own job? How to apply for a new registration document or stamp? In this country you are a nobody without an ID or propusk (stamp). You can’t get insurance, a job, housing registration, etc. And many Roma have sold those documents to cover whatever they need money for.

Pjotr underlines his advice or his encouragement with a small story from the Bible and invites them to his Russian Baptist church, because he knows to build bridges and to overcome prejudice is an important but not an easy task.

Pjotr tells us, “I have German ancestors from the 1800s. From the time I was a schoolboy in the Soviet Union until the time of Gorbachev’s perestroika, I was called a ‘fascist.’ Another name of disgrace was ‘Baptist,’ so I know how people feel when they are made aliens or even scapegoats in their land.”

Compared with Western countries and even with the western Ukraine (near the border with Hungary), mission to the Roma here feels isolated and is “hungry” for relationships and networking. Gary, Ellen, and I talked about how this could be improved and to what extend PC(USA) and its Russian, Ukrainian and other partners can be involved.

After this experience, the big question is how to enable the church to prepare pastors and mission workers in these two countries for this challenging task and for the kind of holistic ministry we saw demonstrated by Misha in Komoroz or Pjotr in Kostroma.

For all this we need your support, your prayers, your insights, and ideas.

Let’s celebrate and share our hope again: Christ is risen—he is risen indeed.

Burkhard

The 2006 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 178