Charity digs deep to give Roma less reason to roam

Letter from Tileagd:The Gypsies who camped on the Ballymun roundabout were not the first members of the Rostas family to try their luck far from their home in the Romanian village of Tileagd.

On St Patrick's Day this year, Kevin Hoy, head of the Smiles Foundation charity that works in Tileagd, was on a ferry heading to a conference in Ireland when the call arrived.

"I got a call from one of our sponsors who lives in Rugby in England, telling me that he had Cristian Rostas and his wife and a couple of friends on his doorstep." Rostas had stolen the sponsor's address from a charity worker's bag, and taken a taxi there after landing at Luton airport on a low-cost flight from Budapest, which is about five hours' bus ride from Tileagd.

"I was drunk and people were saying life was great over there, so I sold my horse and took my wife and we flew off," recalls Mr Rostas, a burly man with thick stubble and a bushy moustache, who left his seven children at home with relatives when he set out for England.

Mr Hoy advised the sponsor to call the police, who in turn contacted social services, who put Mr Rostas and his companions in a local bed and breakfast.

They were flown home to Romania a couple of days later.

Contrite before his brother, Gyuri, who is the leader of his community, and Mr Hoy, whose charity is one of the few sources of work in Tileagd, Cristian insists he is a changed man.

"It was very bad," he says of his trip to England.

"Now I don't drink or smoke and I'm not going anywhere ever again."

Cristian is one of about 600 Roma who live in 6,000-strong Tileagd, a village about 25km from Romania's border with Hungary.

There are shoe and furniture factories nearby, but little work for Gypsies besides that offered by the Smiles Foundation, a Christian charity that has operated here since 2001.

That was when Mr Hoy met one of Gyuri Rostas's sons begging in the nearby city of Oradea and, after giving him a meal and discussing his life, went home to meet his parents.

"I discovered an extremely poor community living in difficult housing conditions, largely begging and stealing to survive," recalls Mr Hoy, who hails from London's East End.

"But I looked at their alternatives, and saw there weren't any - they had no education, no prospects, no hope. There was also great prejudice against them - some of which was justified by their behaviour - and they had no chance to break the cycle of begging and crime."

The charity built a pristine new school for Tileagd, where 108 children will start term in September, 60 per cent of them Roma, and it is now completing a health centre. It also offers legal, social and medical help to local people, provides food parcels to 300 families around Romania, and employs 73 staff, 15 of them Gypsies.

Having started in 2001 with a budget of €100,000, Mr Hoy says the charity now has €1.5 million to spend, with about 10 per cent of donations coming from the Republic and Northern Ireland.

Mr Hoy's chance meeting with Gyuri Rostas's son - who now works for him - forged the link between his foundation and the so-called Gara community of Tileagd Roma, who take their name from the train station which is close to their huddle of houses.

Sponsors have provided money to build or improve houses for the Gara community, and most are very small but solid. The charity is also spending €18,000 on drilling a deep well to provide clean water, after parasitic worms infested their previous source.

Life is tougher over the railway tracks in the rival Cris community, which is named after the river which runs near by.

People there get no help from the Smiles Foundation, and the overgrown paths running between the ramshackle houses are alive with a gaggle of children, few, if any, of whom attend the charity's school.

Tileagd mayor Gheorghe Groza led The Irish Times on a quick dash through the Cris community, waving at wonky television aerials as proof of prosperity and insisting, in a style reminiscent of a loyal communist official, that unemployment in the village was 0.05 per cent, and that all but 5 per cent of Roma had a job.

Slightly amending his view in response to sceptical looks, he said that all the Roma could have jobs if they wanted them, and that discrimination was not an issue.

"We have plenty of good things going on here - just look at that," he said, with a wave towards a canary-yellow block of renovated flats.

"But we couldn't let the Gypsies live there," he muttered. "They'd only ruin it."