Survey Sites - Roma

A must read is ://www3.baylor.edu/~Charles_Kemp/gypsy_health.htm. This is a site to help healthcare providers understand Roma customs, in order to provide better care, accommodate relatives and their interest, and other areas that may be different from our approach. We like those sites that are intended to assist practical relationships, rather than those that just seem to take a recreational look at other people, a kind of cultural voyeurism. There is a fine line between that detached curiosity and genuine human interest. We value the human interest, and offer information in that way. We try.

More on the Baylor survey site, Charles Kemp. This one looks exhaustive - http://www3.baylor.edu/~Charles_Kemp/gypsy_health.htm. It is geared to informing those treating the Roma or otherwise dealing with them, to clarify health concepts, social system, beliefs, any background that would assist in understanding. How they stay invisible, by design, taboos, some origins of persecution.

UNESCO - article on preservation of Roma cultural identity. This also has an excellent for ordinary people about the Gypsies: focus on continuity and fidelity, roots in conscience and human and social values, and ongoing identity without rooting itself in a particular geographic spot. See and read carefully at "The Gypsy Destiny," http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310/is_1984_Oct/ai_3455602.

The Patrin Web Journal, at ://www.geocities.com/Paris/5121/index.html. This one - has it all. Any area you want to know, longer than the Baylor site, but each topic so clearly laid out. I could and should put it in every post here.

Cycles of Abuse: Anti-Roma in Belfast

Current Events

Is there a hard-wiring for sameness, identifying security with being among others just like us. Ireland has had its centuries of pitting religious group against religious group; with that possibly waning, see the targeting move to other groups more easily victimized. See the prejudice in Belfast now against Roma from Romania.

These Roma are not the traditional Irish Travelers with their own "gypsy" roots. These come from Romania, see video at ://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=Romanian+gypsies+Belfast/ and news at ://www.clickromania.co.uk/content/view/609/44/ . Apparently they had been "hounded out" from Romania.

Inadequacy of news coverage:

This issue was not addressed in any account we have read so far. How will the Travelers still in Ireland, and this new European group, relate; or aren't there enough left in the Travelers actually on the road still; to come in contact with a settled group from Romania. What has the immigration pattern been for European Roma to Ireland? Perhaps there will be little cultural recognition? Who can follow? Would the Travelers and Romanian Roma welcome one another, as needed support; or will the Travelers reject them as different, and engage in their own targeting. What has happened elsewhere.

The Gypsy Lore Society notes at ://www.gypsyloresociety.org/cultureintro.html that the Travelers and other gypsy groups have differing languages, roots, history, before coming to America, and keep their distance. Will that be the case in Ireland.

Roma in Great Britain - a history, as elsewhere, of prejudice. Roma sometimes called "Rom"

Voices of regular people. Go to this line of comments, descriptions of ongoing prejudice, this site in Kent, England. ://www.bbc.co.uk/kent/have_your_say/community/romany_voices_archive21.shtml. Find the one where the whites live on the first floor of the building (is this public housing?), the disabled live on the second floor, and the rom live on the third, and the food passes up, so if there is not enough, the rom go hungry. Scroll down to the 2/19/06 entry by one who identifies as a "romney gypsey."

The idiom in the entries is difficult to read, for this US person, and so many words we do not know - best to pick an entry that moves you and read it aloud as though you were the person writing. Then it becomes human drama again, even at the everyday level - as poignant as the stars.

Do we need a global kind of exorcism. Is this abuse of populations an outgrowth of what we see in relationships among individuals. What kind of interventions can channel the urges to productive results. Impossible?

In the area of domestic relations violence, there is an established concept of the cycle of abuse: this site addresses in a low-key way the three stages: tension building; acting out the abuse; stated remorse; followed by gradual but as time goes on, shorter and shorter periods of tension building, then more abuse, more extreme, more stated remorse, and the victim is pulled between wanting to believe stage 3; unwilling to act in stage 1 when there might be time to address it with help; enduring or dying in stage #2. See basics at The Cycle of Abuse, at ://www.drirene.com/cyclesof.htm/

Is abuse learned. See the dynamic at Domestic Violence at http://www.gmdvp.org/domestic_vio/gen_info/dynam2.htm/ But in domestic abuse, there is the chance, the option, of getting out of the relationship.

What do entire populations do. Domestic violence. Population violence. Outlets for hard-wiring, or learned and unlearnable.