Kids, the ghetto and the magic of sports
When I was a child, I loved sports. I played football and basketball in some of the best teams in my town, Craiova, in southern Romania. I ran the 800 metres and I was a decent swimmer and tennis player. For the poor Roma child I was, the state rations of food received in the Communist times by youngsters playing sports was an extremely strong incentive. Hot showers, equipment as well as warm gyms and training camps were some other things I thought to be almost magical, especially during the cold winters or summer holidays.
But what I liked most was that in my teams I never felt I was the stinky gypsy most of the people around me said I was. I was just a good player and my teammates treated me with friendship and respect. Some of my friendships created then remain strong after three decades. I learned most things I know about hard work, discipline, competitiveness, ambition and respect from sports.
No drugs, no violence – just sports was our motto.
No wonder I focused on sports when I started working with ghetto children in Bucharest. Drugs, violence, prostitution and petty criminality infest the ghetto. Everybody I talked with told me that I was crazy to try to work there. I asked a friend from the European football governing body UEFA to give me some T-shirts and I told the children in the ghetto that I was starting a UEFA-sponsored team. My colleagues and I at the Policy Centre for Roma and Minorities organized street-dance, basketball and volleyball classes. The children got hooked. No drugs, no violence – just sports was our motto.
It is less than two years since we started working in the ghetto and we have some great results. Our children (around 200) stay in school – their attendance has improved dramatically. We have a national vice-champion in street-dance and very good football and street dance teams. None of our children abuses drugs.
Violence and racism in and around football stadiums are still a huge problem. The last game of the Romanian season at the end of May 2012 saw two teams from Bucharest, Rapid and Dinamo, playing for the Romanian Cup. I took my son to the game. At one point over 10,000 people in the stadium started to chant against the Rapid team – perceived in Romania as a team of gypsies. “We’ve always hated the gypsies, f--- you Rapid,” reverberated around the stadium. My child, a 10-year-old who loves sports, froze and started crying. He asked me if we were going to be killed. I tried to calm him down and I yelled at the people who were chanting around me. Some of them seemed thunderstruck and deeply ashamed. My child doesn’t want to watch football anymore. Words can kill not just innocence and love, they can kill people. Racism has been the motive for abject killings – some of those crimes have had sports people as victims.
Violence and racism in and around football stadiums are still a huge problem.
Some of the most famous football, basketball and volleyball players in Romania have come to the ghetto and played with or trained the children we work with. Twice a year, together with the Romanian Football Federation (FRF), we conduct children’s tournaments against racism and violence and we also organize exhibition games with famous journalists and personalities. UEFA has in the past years sent a very strong message against racism and violence in the stadiums. Stronger than any European government. UEFA’s president is the only visible European leading figure who has dared to say openly and bluntly that anti-gypsyism is a problem that needs to be fought seriously.
I still believe sports are magic. But I have learned that magic is simply not enough to stop violence and racism. For that we need serious and constant campaigning and education. We need governments and inter-governmental institutions to step in and do what some sports bodies have already been doing for years. Recognizing that there is racism and violence in our societies and in sports is important, but only a first step. What we need most now is to fight against them, openly and efficiently. We need to feel that we are all playing in the same team.