My name is Ramce but I am called Dzamce. Why? Because I am more naked than dressed, I live in a house, in fact a shack made out of carton, live bricks and iron. I will tell you a secret, I hid a jar buried in the ground and I hide money init. I want to collect more money to by my sister an invalid cart. After I finish eight grades I do not know what to do. I want to be a wall painter to dress in white so that I can be white. Sometimes I think that people do like me because I am black. But what can I do my grandmother says that our God is black. I am Ramce in fact Dzamce, through my window I see my future.

This is an extra from an essay of the student Elena Nakova from Stip on the subject “What is it like to be a Roma in school, home and the society”rewarded by the Macedonian center for international cooperation. The situation is not very different from the one this student has described in its essay. The Roma NGOs from Macedonia confirm that. With 70 % from about 200 Roma families from Kumanovo, Skopje and Prilep have a strong will to go to school but can not afford it . The Roma children are being discriminated form their classmates and even their teachers. The Country has a strategy on how to neither improve the Roma conditions but does nor realize it in practice. We have only a bunch of papers on how to do that but there is no coordination between the institutions – says Asmet Elezovski, the coordinator of the campaign “The key is in your hands” of the NGO National Roma Centrum from Kumanovo. Members of NGOs from Roma nationality for protection of the Roma rights consider that the citizens from Roma nationality are being marginalized and for that kind of a treatment they blame the state. Others say that the condition is not that desperate and that thing is getting better year after year.

Ghettoization of the Roma.

The Roma are left alone and the state is ghettoizing them in separated settlements, considers Ljatif Demir, member of the European Roma Forum. He calls upon the Constitution to blame the government institutions that the Roma rights are not being respected. Roma pupils leave schools because after fourth grade they do not have classes on their mother tongue. They have to learn Macedonian although classes on their mother tongue are guaranteed with the Constitution. How can people say that we do have our own history? Are 18 million Roma people not evidence that we do have our own tradition? That is why our governments need to take up activities with which they will more aggressively influence on the Roma children. Asmet Elezovski from the National Roma Centrum from Kumanovo considers that things are moving on for the better although very little is being done in practice. Macedonia needs to be proud with the Roma people and to see us like a treasure. It is good that the Roma from Macedonia are being slowly included in European activities, like in the projects of CoE in Strasbourg. In the European Forum we have five delegates who work on the Roma rights in Macedonia.

Scholarships for stimulation

From all of the minorities Roma children leave schools the most. And then come the children from Turkish nationality, Albanian nationality and part of the Muslim Macedonians, claims Dragan Nedeljkovic director of the Board for development and improvement of languages of ethnical communities with the Department of education. Poverty and early marriages are the main reasons why Roma children leave schools. The not enough knowledge of the language is another reason and that happens after the fourth grade. No one has the total number of children who drooped out of schools. But roughly said the largest droppage from schools is with the Roma. For example in first grade 100 pupils enrolled and by the time they get to the fifth grade 50 of the dropped out.

Ljubica Grozdanovska Journalist in daily newspaper “Dnevnik”