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.

Runic Signs - Finding your way in the woods

"We followed signs -- a knotted wishbone to turn left, a broken twig for a right fork in the road, a white cloth for a friendly farmhouse where we could water Red (the horse) and fill our canteens." Zoli at 29.

Runic signs. Look them up at ://www.symbols.com/index/wordindex-r.html. They appear in Germanic, Celtic and Slavic cultures. See ://www.zielarze.pl/runes.htm. "The Cambridge Ancient History," book by Alan K. Bowman, Peter Garnsey, and Averil Cameron, is online as an ebook. I did a search for runic signs and the book came up. It says the signs originated about the second century, spread, show connections to various cultures, used probably first as invocations, to increase efficacy of a weapon, for example; but also the kind of wood inscribed was significant - birch for fertility, or the rune for the now-extinct auroch, for strength.

Do an images search for rune signs or runic signs to see them.

While traveling, a band of Gypsies:

"...maintained contact with other convoys of the same clan moving along separate routes. They would leave signs at crossroads - a bunch of twigs tied with a red rag, a branch brokein in a particular way, a notched bone - the signs called shpera* among the Polish Gypsies (and patrin,** or leaf, everywhere else, from Kosovo to Peterborough. Fearing the devil's spawn, villagers steered clear of these markers."

Fair use quote from "Bury Me Standing, The Gypsies and their Journey," by Isabel Fonseca, NY Vintage 1996 at 3.

..................
* Shpera - road sign or marking, see Roma-English glossary at www2.arnes.si/~eusmith/Romany/glossary.

** Patrin - marker, leaf, see "The Patrin Web Journal, Romani Culture and History" at www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=patrin, and the meaning of "patrin" as "leaf," and further linguistic offshoots at www.languagehat.com/archives/001314.php