I had done a little homework prior to the trip. News reports had turned up 3 settlements
on the outskirts of the city, but I knew there had to be others.
According to some reports Roma make up 7% of Serbia's population.
Approximately 500,000 people in all.
I would have to rely on the locals for more information.
One of the things I like to do when travelling through a city like Belgrade is to take
local busses or trolleys to the end of each line...to the outskirts of each suburb.
That is often where the Roma are to be found.
In this way, you get a glimpse of real life of a place...you get to see the outlying
neighborhoods far from the city center with all its tourist attractions.
I find that while I love the architecture, museums and other cultural accoutrements,
I am a people watcher at heart.
Nothing else interests me more than the people...their faces, moods, their daily lives...
They are the living history of a place.
I perch myself in the middle of the trolley and wonder what kind of job each one is
rushing to, what their lives are like. The neighborhoods they emerge from,
the environments that shape their lives.
I explore the various neighborhoods and districts, getting my bearings...
getting a feel for the place and its people.
Serbia's history lies heavy in the people..
It is better to be a discreet observer than to ask many questions.
People will tell you what they want you to know.
Their history is difficult, to be sure. Belgrade itself has been razed to the ground 44 times
throughout its history. Such conflict. Unimaginable to us.
The people have a resiliency and strength that defies logic.
Somehow they manage to live around that legacy.
I remember walking past various buildings and getting cold chills,
only to find later that they were places of horrific carnage.
The building that housed my hotel felt haunted by restless, disturbed spirits.
Belgrade, for all its glitz, would not be an easy place to live.
Over the last few years I have spent time in what was the former Yugoslavia.
After seeing the landscape still bearing the scars of the conflict in the 90's,
layer after painful layer emerges. It is such a strange conflict on several levels.
One wishes that everyone could find a way to get along.
But time spent in Croatia and Bosnia and now Serbia, showed me that
there are distinct differences in these people.
Their bloodlines, though sometimes mixed, have ancient roots.
Their bodies are different as are their temperaments.
They inhabit the same region, but, by nature, they are unique.
Perhaps that lies at the base of much of their natural struggle.
I'm not sure that it is wise to impose any 'solutions' on these things.
Each culture is quite beautiful and extraordinary in many ways.
If those distinctions could remain intact, perhaps some cooperation would naturally result.
Once I got my bearings, I began to ask delicately about the Gypsy neighborhoods and camps.
More than once, the subject was shifted toward tourist attractions. "A monastery, perhaps?"
"An ethnographic museum?" "Why would you want to see THAT?" "What Gypsies?"
"Oh no...there is nothing to see." The degree of discomfort was palpable.
I assured them that it was just idle curiosity on my part.
There were no takers...
I finally befriended a young tourist guide who told me confidentially that there might be a place
near the Holiday Inn in new Belgrade. Bingo! I had heard of this one.
The camp was in the shadow of the fancy hotel.
No cabbie, though eager for business, would take me there, however.
I was tired of being stone walled. I resolved to take public transport and walk there
early the following morning.
I was excited about what the next day would bring. I went to bed early to make the most
of the next day. Tomorrow I would surely find the Roma settlements for myself.
But that night a strange thing happened while I slept. At first, I thought I was dreaming.
I smelled something really horrible in my 'dream'. An almost unimaginable stench seemed
to take up all the air in my room. It was suffocating and vile. It woke me up out of a dead sleep.
I thought the building was on fire at first, but everything was quiet around me.
The stench was so strong that it almost had me in a panic.
I opened the window to the street below and gasped for air.
I surveyed the street and all was peaceful. No fire trucks, no smoke.
I called the front desk. The sleepy clerk assured me that all was well.
For the rest of the night, the noxious smell literally hung over me.
I eventually realized that the acrid smoke smelled like a garbage dump fire.
Horrible!! And strange....
As the sun came up, it subsided. It had been a hard night and I was glad to get up and move around.
I was strangely unsettled and my nerves were on edge. I took a long shower trying to get the stench
out of my nostrils. Once dressed and leaving the hotel, I looked all around, but there was no evidence
of anything out of the ordinary. The morning air was fine.
I checked my map and headed for the Holiday Inn. My map was far from scale and I walked for an
hour or more without much visible progress. Finally a businesswoman helped me trick a cabdriver
into taking me to my destination. He assumed that I wanted to go shopping at the market
near the hotel. I went along with the plan. My driver spoke reasonably good English and we began
to talk about Belgrade on the long drive. I was able to tell him my real reason for going there.
He was a bit mystified but he offered to guide me and wait for me as I would not be able to get a ride
back from that neighborhood. As the area came into view, I could see he what he meant.
Literally in the shadow of the modern hotel ringed by construction sites, was a shanty town of
dilapidated shacks thrown together with cardboard, old planking and corrugated metal.
I asked my driver to slow down so I could really see it. His inclination was to race by and rush me
back to the city center. I rolled down the window to see more clearly and was immediately assailed
by the smell of a garbage dump.
It was the same smell that had filled my room only a few hours before!!!
I took a closer look.
The shantytown was burning!
Smoke curled around all the hovels and I saw that these people were living on an active
garbage dump!
My God!! No human being should be forced to live like this!
People in the Balkans treat street dogs better than that!
It was impossible to think that in a civilized society that this could happen.
No wonder people were reluctant to discuss the Gypsy encampments.
My driver was visibly embarassed. I begged him to linger but the best he would do was to circle
the camp once more. He was afraid to stop or to even let me out for a few minutes.
'Afraid' I thought ?!
There was no sense of danger from the few miserable people we saw.
I wondered at the hypocrisy of people calling them "dirty gypsies".
There were no sanitation facilities and no running water.
The Roma were smudged with smoke from the burning dump.
I thought about all the rhetoric about their laziness, but I saw them picking through the garbage
and construction refuse to recycle what could be saved...to make a few dinars to eat.
Suddenly all the criticism about their unwillingness to assimilate, work, go to school,
make themselves presentable was a cruel and horrible joke!
How they were even able to survive this experience was beyond me.
Breathing in toxic vapors, living without water, worse than beggars.
This society had relegated them to the garbage heap on every level. Denied housing and jobs,
begrudging them water, food and assistance and then blaming them for their uncivilised state!
Serbia had just experienced it's worst winter in 100 years with most of the country placed under disaster status. Whole villages were buried under heavy snowfall for weeks, roofs and houses collapsing.
I wondered how many Roma had perished and what the struggle for survival must have been like.
One would become half mad from toxicity alone. I knew what a few hours of it had felt like.
Something galvanized inside me in that moment. Suddenly the whole trip seemed to hang
on this event. Nothing else mattered. My stomach was knotted with the reality of what I saw.
Everything in me shifted...and shifted hard.
I told my driver to stop a moment, telling him my camera had malfunctioned and that I needed
just one photo. It was a bid to get more time.
He did his best. By now he was deeply humiliated by the scene and for a moment he saw, as well.
He drove a little slower, a little closer. I stuck my head out the window, craning to get
a better view and to lock this scene in my mind when, suddenly, the most amazing thing happened.
As I did that, I saw three middle-aged men sitting on a makeshift bench outside one of the shacks.
We made eye contact in a startling moment.
They stood to their feet politely, smiled from their hearts and waved in greeting.
Their rugged faces were beaming.
There was no suffering or self pity, no begging or seeking.
They were simply and genuinely welcoming. It was a salutation, a greeting.
There was joy in their faces! It was a joy that went through me like a bolt of electricity.
Such joy...
It was not only joy, but a deep sense of humanity.
Welcome humanity in a desert of cold inhumanity.
It was as if they held the last remaining fragments of sanity and what it is to be a real human being
in a world that aimed to stamp out all remaining traces of it.
It is hard to describe the impact of their plight, their resilience in the face of all they suffer,
their innate humanity unchanged.
Had they transformed into angels to bear the brunt of man's inhumanity
and to continue to bear witness to a better way? I would not have been surprised.
"the meek shall inherit the earth."
to be continued...
