Romany "Cousins" in the Middle East

 Hello!

Welcome to the last episode of the conversations with Amoun! I hope you have learned something new about the Dom people in each video as well as the Domari Society in Jerusalem.  In today’s video we discussed the life of the Dom as well as their experiences, especially that of Amoun and the Dom people in Jerusalem. Click here to see video.

I learned a lot from Amoun about the lives of the Dom people. As Amoun mentioned, the Dom people originated in India and can now be found all over the world with large concentration in the Middle East. Because of the fact that they find themselves mixed with other communities, they are influenced in areas like their languages and lifestyles. 

It was saddening to hear the struggles that the Dom children face just to have access to education. In Amoun’s book, she mentioned teachers who did not want her in their class after knowing she was from the Dom community. This kind of discrimination existed then and, unfortunately, it is still present now. The Dom people face discrimination in many areas, and this causes a lack of opportunities as well as a lack of access to resources. Amoun shared that despite the discrimination and exclusion that they face, the Dom people continue to be resilient and work towards a better future.

Thankfully, there are efforts to create safer spaces for the Dom people as well as to spread information to others so that the Dom people can be better understood. I hope this video series helped viewers in a way to better understand as well as inspired viewers to learn more.

Thanks for watching and look forward to more content in the future!

Jaya, Student.Go Summer Intern

Conversations with Amoun: The Domari Society

Hello and welcome to the second installment from my conversations with Amoun Sleem from the Domari Society in Jerusalem. 

In today’s topic, we hear about the Domari Society: the beginning, the programs offered, as well as some of Amoun’s hopes for the center. 

Conversations with Amoun: The Domari Society (click to open link).  This is compiled from two separate conversations I had with Amoun on different days.

The Dom people, more often than not, must be their own advocates. Support from outside the
community is rather limited, and Amoun noticed this. In her book, A Gypsy Dreaming in Jerusalem, Amoun mentioned that when she was starting the center and sharing her vision, people didn’t even know that there were Dom Gypsies in Jerusalem. Through various connections and volunteers from different places, Amoun was able to begin helping the Dom community even before having established the society. As Amoun stated in the video, when the nonprofit was started in 1999, the main focus was women and children. We saw in the last video that to this day that is still the focus even through the COVID-19 response.

As shown from the pictures in the video, the work started just out of Amoun’s home. The programs continued for four years out of Amoun’s home along with support from the DRC to close in the veranda and create an office and classroom space. Eventually they were able to move onto a bigger location and then now to their current location that functions well with their needs.

In the book Amoun wrote, “…I wanted a place that would be surrounded by positive thoughts about Gypsy culture…”. I really do believe that Amoun has achieved that through the Domari Society. 

Thank you for joining us for this video, I hope you learned something new! See you for the next video!

Jaya, Summer Intern

Jaya, one of our Student.Go interns, is working with the Dom Research Center. She has created a series of Blogposts for them based on interviews with Amoun Sleem, founder of the Domari Society in Jerusalem. We are pleased to share her video and written posts with you here.

Conversations with Amoun: COVID-19 and the Dom People (click to view video).

Hello and welcome to the first of a series of interviews with Amoun Sleem, director of the Domari Society in Jerusalem. I hope this interview series helps you to learn more and inspire you as it did for me! We are starting off the series by discussing the impact of COVID-19 on the Dom people. For people all over the world, COVID-19 and the resulting pandemic wreaked havoc on our lives. This has also been the case for the Dom people. Amoun shared with me that many of the Dom people work as day laborers and rely on that work as their source of income. Jobs that may have been abundant before the pandemic became scarce. In an effort to provide some relief from the dire circumstances, Amoun and the Domari Society worked tirelessly around the clock. She reached out to other organizations to provide aid such as food to families in need. Children were also impacted due to school shifting from in the classroom to online. With less access to technological tools such as WIFI or a computer, as well as losing the interaction and assistance often found in the school setting, many students fell behind. Also, many women lost their sources of income during this time. The Domari Society serves as a safe haven for the people of the Dom community. The Domari Society did not close, rather shifted focus to providing humanitarian aid. Amoun shared her hopes in the coming times for acquiring funding to have other options of programs for women. As we saw during this time, many businesses and establishments had to close their doors in an effort to take safe precautions. Events and some work could still take place on a smaller scale with less people. Because of this, Amoun hopes to equip women with skills that they can do one-on-one as a service. She hopes to offer classes such as hairdressing, catering, sewing, etc. Thank you for checking out this first part of the interview. Please share your thoughts! Hope you join us for the next post in the series! Jaya, Summer Intern

I'm not a pushy person, but apparently blogs like this one benefit from a "push." Sofia Hines, the Student.Go intern who helped us this past spring, set up a way for people to get notifications from this blog. And then, just before her term ended, we discovered that that service would also end, in July. So Sofia found this service which will send web push notifications. 

I've tried it out. It works. And the company which provides the service also provides this handy notification which we are supposed to share with you all. 

The rainbow is a different kind of notification all together. Our Creator provides lots of free services like that.*  

Web push notifications:

We provide news and updates on our site via web push notifications.
To benefit from this free service, operated with our push provider WonderPush (https://www.wonderpush.com/), you must first subscribe by clicking on an authorization request controlled by your browser and your device when you visit our blog.
The navigation data that is needed to operate this service and send you relevant messages is anonymized and kept on WonderPush servers for a maximum of 90 days and never shared to third parties. We do not store any recognizable data, neither IP address about you or your device in connection with the push notification service.
You can stop receiving our web push notifications at any time by unsubscribing.
Here is how to manage your web push subscription and to delete associated data.
(https://docs.wonderpush.com/docs/manage-your-data-and-unsubscribe-from-web-push-notifications)

* Photo taken outside Nisporeni, Moldova.

Student.Go . . . on the Go, but staying home

Have you ever had a summer job? Or an internship?* This summer two students are interning with us . . . virtually. 

Jaya Nair is a college student with a wealth of experience. This is her second Student.Go internship. She is working our partnering organization, the Dom Research Center (DRC). The DRC works with Dom Gypsies** in the Middle East/North Africa. Their website recently crashed. Jaya is helping post content and create content. You can check it out at the Dom Research Center. It's currently a work in progress. A post from Jaya's interview with Amoun Saleem, head of the Domari Society in Jerusalem, should appear in the next several days.

Songezo Nkolombe just completed his first year of seminary (Baylor) online, due to Covid travel restrictions. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and serves as children's minister in a Baptist church there. It was a natural fit for him to work with Romany education projects. His first blog post on oral learners and oral culture will appear on the Romany Education Network this week. He's read a lot, he's listened a lot, and now he's turning that into Yearn to Learn: A Tale of Two Towns. 

This photo comes from a recent online meeting with Songezo, or Songz for short. Both he and Jaya have virtual internships. Songz is still in South Africa, still serving in his local church as well as assisting with education programs in Romania, Croatia, and Moldova. Jaya is still in Bentonville, Arkansas, while also interviewing people in Israel and meeting at least weekly with us in the Netherlands. 

We thank God for these two interns, for CBF's Student.Go program, and for the technology which makes these virtual internships possible!

*Guess which summer jobs were Mary's and which were Keith's:  lawn maintenance; church secretary; ploughing cotton; painting houses; walking (soy)beans; working in a sewing factory; K-mart clerk.

**Amoun Saleem, head of the Domari Society in Jerusalem, prefers to call herself "Dom Gypsy." 

Strawberry Fields . . . for a few weeks

Photo by Massimiliano Martini on Unsplash

Strawberries are in season! We love them! Ever wonder--if you didn't pick them yourself--who did? 

Here in Europe, the answer is like to be Romany from, say Romania. Our friend Zoltan Barabas leads a children's Bible club in a Romany neighborhood in Transylvania. This past week the day of the club fell on Children's Day in Romania. But Zoltan didn't think the parents would be doing much with the children. Most of the parents had gone to Germany to pick strawberries.

A group of adults there get contracts from the same farmers year after year. First they pick strawberries. Then they pick raspberries. Then, after a month or two, they come back home. 

Grandmother and child

And what about the children? Romany have an extended family structure. On any given day, a child is as likely to eat at the home of an aunt or a grandparent as they are with their own parents. If mom and dad have both gone to work, someone else looks after the kids. 

How does that work out for the children? Sometimes pretty well. Sometimes pretty poorly. You might say a prayer for them . . . and their parents . . . the next time you enjoy some strawberries.

Moved by the Spirit

 Have you ever heard of the Eritrean Orthodox Church? I sure hadn't until these Christian brothers and sisters started meeting in our church building every other Saturday morning.* 

Normally I'm not in the church building myself. The Dutch Baptist Union, along with several other Christian organizations, is following the strictest guidelines for COVID safety. We are still meeting online rather than face-to-face. But on a couple of Saturday mornings, I've been in the church yard as part of the Tuin (Garden) Team. One Saturday morning a month, three members of the Tuin Team come to weed, trim, and rake. Half-way through the morning the team members take a coffee break. We go inside for that, while still keeping the regulation 1.5 meters apart.

So do our Eritrean brothers and sisters. They begin chanting and praying before any of us gardeners get there, and they keep going after we've left. Our familiar building is filled with unfamiliar sounds, the unfamiliar scent of incense, and dark, slender people wrapped in fine-woven white--men, women, and children who come and go all throughout the morning. They observe the limit of 30 people in the chapel at a time, 1.5 meters apart. 

So there were people coming and going when we went in to make our coffee/tea. The Spirit moved one of the Eritrean brothers, wearing a blue facemask and a white cotton wrap, to offer us a round loaf of bread from a stack on the counter. 

We do not share the same language. We do not share the same church traditions. We do share the same Lord. And we shared this loaf of bread.

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; 5one Lord, one faith, one baptism; 6one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. Ephesians 4:4-6

 *Photo from Internet of Eritrean Orthodox Church in Canada.