Empowered Leaders and Alone in Community: Stories of Romanian Roma Health Mediators

Abstract

This article investigates the experiences of Roma women who work as health mediators to build bridges between Romani patients and the public health system. Given the precarious socioeconomic conditions, overt discrimination, policy changes, and rights advocacy that mark these women's lives—and at the same time the near invisibility of Roma women in scholarship—this study offers women's stories as communicative practices of telling oneself. The mediators narrate stories of successes and challenges in their profession, of discrimination, of empowerment, and of identity shifts toward hybridity and contextual alliances. This study suggests that although a sense of entitlement makes sense in the context of much responsibility on the Romni's shoulders, speaking for their own ethnicity may become problematic and is accompanied by feelings of loneliness.

Keywords:

• empowerment
• ethnicity
• gender
• health communication
• identity
• interviews
• public health
• Roma/Gypsy

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Anca Andriţoiu, MD, and Corina Ernst, MD, whose support during the research process has been unwavering, and the reviewers for their keen remarks on earlier drafts of the manuscript. A first version of this article was presented at the 2012 annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Notes

The Roma are called many names in various countries. Some use tribal names (such as the Romanian Căldăraşi), others adopt wider group names (such as the British Travellers), and yet others opt for “Roma” (or “Rroma” in Romania), used in national and international discourse and regarded to be the politically correct term at present. Roma is most often used in reaction to the commonly used “Gypsy,” with its linguistic variants of tsygane (the German Zigeuner, the Hungarian Cigany, the French tsigane, or the Romanian ţigan, to name a few).

Romani CRISS started the program in partnership with, and financed by, the Catholic Committee for Fight Against Hunger and for Development (in Romanian, Comitetul catolic de lupta impotriva foamei si pentru dezvoltare).

The exact number of health mediators is difficult to assess, as some organizations might have reported the number of practicing mediators at about 500 (Zoltan, 2010), whereas others might have recorded the number of trained mediators to be at 570 (Romani CRISS, 2010).

Roma is the plural form of the term, with Rom for masculine singular, Romni for feminine singular, and Romani as the adjective (Lemon, 2000).

Among the reasons for the different statistics are the population's historical fear to declare themselves to the majority group due to their persecution throughout the centuries, the nonsedentary or homeless nature of some groups' living conditions, as well as the political interests to discursively minimize (on the official side) or maximize (on the NGO side) the size of the ethnic minority group that must be served.

The Romanian Ministry of Health is represented in each county as Directions of Public Health. Because they are similar in function to a Department of Public Health, I refer to the entity as such, so that the non-Romanian reader can better understand the function of the organization that I interacted with for the purpose of this study.

At the time of the study, ten health mediators were employed in the county, but only nine attended the DPH training. The tenth was not available for contact.

The two group interviews each lasted a little over two hours. We took a lunch break in between, all nine mediators and I, during which they took the opportunity to keep sharing stories and anecdotes about their lives.

All the translations from Romanian into English are the author's. The women's use of colloquial Romanian and vernacular, and their free flow of ideas does not always respect grammatical or sentence-structure rules. I trust that the reader will note the women's style of speaking in the way their emotion carries them through the conversations.

According to these mediators, a typical day starts with checking in at the mayor's office, where they each have a room and/or a desk, and then at the doctor's office that is assigned to their communities. Their own connections to the Romani families guide where they need to go, some in the towns where they live, but most of them in different localities. Some drive their own cars to work, and others depend on commuter buses and trains.

This is a direct translation of a derogatory Romanian expression.

Several women explained that some doctors require payment to accept Romani patients when they should consult them for free, and some nurses demand favors to make postnatal visits when they are required to.