It’s the middle of the night and I’m half way through an article for a British newspaper. I’m trying to do a piece on gypsies in Romania, but I keep on coming up against the same problem. I’m not convinced that this is even something the British public need to know about. It feels a bit like doing a piece about Count Dracula, or about malnourished orphans. What am I writing for? To reinforce a tired stereotype about the country I live in? I’ve realised that I’m writing for the wrong people. The people who need to know about the Gypsy situation, or problem, or minority, or however you want to put it, are Romanians themselves.

Last month, I was one of 11 journalists who were taken out to visit a number of gypsy communities in Romania. The idea is to generate positive stories about the Rroma – preferably not connected with the epithet “împuţit”. And so, I found myself on a coach full of journalists travelling out to Sibiu, not quite knowing what to expect, or what exactly what I was going to write about.

We pulled up to the “ţiglarie”, having left the village proper behind, and a gang of children had already gathered to meet us. Even from the main road, looking down on what in England we’d probably describe as a ‘shanty town’, it looked pretty grim.

For the TV crew that was with us, it was all perfect viewing material – naked children danced around in the dirt streets; families with twelve children posed in their tiny courtyards; pretty young girls with impossibly blue eyes smiled for the cameras. The story we were there to cover involved a local schooling scandal – local gypsy kids were being sent to the special school, rather than the normal one, leading to de-facto situation of racial segregation. However, the most interesting thing was just talking to the children from the village. “Do you go to the special school, or the normal one,” I asked a girl who I discovered was 12. Her mum intervened. “She doesn’t go to school. She’s pregnant.” She was, too – heavily pregnant.

A boy much younger than me asked if I wanted to see his house. Feeling like a voyeur of someone else’s misery, I accepted, expecting to be taken to his parents. Instead I was shown to a single-room earth construction with seemed to be in an advanced state of collapse. Just a few square metres in size and with an open fire in the middle of the floor, the rooms slept five people: himself, his wife, and his three children.

The next day, in contrast to the squalor of the ţiglarie, we visited some traditional gypsy communities. The most impressive were the Calderari. Arriving in their village was like visiting some kind of magical community from a Tolkien novel. One old man in his seventies with a beard that would make Father Christmas jealous took me into his back yard and gave me a demonstration of how to connect two pieces of copper using copper nails, while his wife cooked on an open fire. As he hammered, he told me stories of how they used to work at midnight in the forests before the revolution, as quietly as possible so as not to attract attention.
All the men were in their huge, black-brimmed hats, sporting the kind of moustaches that make anything else look like a pathetic cappuccino stain. The women were no less magical, with their long plaited hair and pleated skirts, and they started up an improvised dance in the middle of the street for our benefit.

The trip also involved a hugely entertaining visit to the King of the Gypsies himself, Florin Cioaba (I can now boast of having used the toilet of the King of The Gypsies – I have to tell you, it’s a disappointingly normal toilet), plus a visit to some gypsies who, until recently, lived in caves carved into sandstone cliffs. For everyone involved, the project was a success – numerous articles made their way into the press in the weeks afterwards. For me, there’s only one problem.
Most people reading this article, most of the editorial staff at Elle, most of the people who print this magazine and most of the people who sell it at the news-stands, would probably like to see the Rroma shipped off to a remote island. Perhaps this is an exaggeration. Perhaps they’d like to see them sterilised, or have their social security cut. Journalists can highlight discrimination towards the Rroma all they like, but I can’t see what good it will do, until we accept that the majority of Romanians are extremely, extremely racist.

It was exactly this divide which I witnessed during the three-day trip. While on the journalists’ bus, it seemed impossible that anyone could have anything but positive intentions towards gypsies. Once off the bus, once I started telling people what we were doing, I was met with utter incomprehension. I met some friends in Sibiu for a beer after the second day of the trip. Their response was simple: “Why the fuck would you want to help the gypsies?” It’s exactly the same reaction that friends of mine had when they found out that I was working with a Rroma NGO. In fact, the last time I tried to write a pro-Rroma article (obviously not in this magazine), I ran into serious problems with my editor. 

Is it any surprise that gypsies form such a deprived and alienated underclass when prejudice is the norm in a society? Is it any wonder that so few Rroma make it to university, when at every stage of the educational process they have to fight against the prejudice that Rroma students ‘don’t want to learn’? Is it any surprise that so few Rroma have proper careers, when having a gypsy name means you’re unlikely to even get an interview?

I grew up in the north of England, in a once-industrial area that fell into terminal post-war decline. We have towns you can drive through and won’t see a single white face, the majority of immigrants coming from Pakistan. My hometown held, for a while, the unenviable accolade of being the ‘racist capital of Europe’, thanks to the popularity of the far-right British National Party, and race riots which led to the torching of white pubs and Pakistani shops. The situation in Romania simply isn’t comparable. It’s far worse.