Vaska Bajramovska Mustafa comes from a poor family. With only one pension, without scholarships, walking each day 9 kilometers to school, with modest clothes and shoes, but with strong support from her parents, Vaska graduated on the Faculty of Law in Skopje. Parallel with her studies she worked in MRTV and for 10 years she was an editor of the Roma editorial. The only graduate from the village of Morino, today she is working at the legal office of the Ombudsman and she is also a councilor in the Roma municipality, Suto Orizari.

Vaska Bajramovska Mustafa is a trade mark of the educational campaign of the National Roma Centrum. Through the positive example, the story about the success of a Roma woman, the success of all of the Roma has been shown and also a motive to be persistent to succeed and shoulder to shoulder to be equal with everyone else in the community.

Guided by the motto that the education is the key which opens the doors to a better life, the National Roma Centrum has organized the Campaign for education of the Roma (Mobilization of the Roma parents to send their children to regular schools) in the period January – October 2006, with a financial support from the Roma Education Fund. Through these activities NRC ahs succeeded to enter in almost every home in three cities in Macedonia and to point out to the parents that their children might live a different life if they are educated.

The fact that the Roma in Macedonia make the most vulnerable category of people, with difficult material, financial and existential condition, make the children to see school, which is a basic factor and whose completing will widely open the doors for a step further, as something different.

„How could we blame these children”, says miss Bajramovska Mustafa, “and to label them that they do not want to learn when each day they wonder whether they have something to eat, to wear, where will they spend the night, as a precondition so that they could turn their attention towards school”.

Main goal of the project is to motivate the Roma parents to include their children in the educational process, and also to work on bringing the problem in front of the educational institutions as well as decreasing of the prejudice and stereotypes towards the Roma pupils.

The project has achieved to realize many of its goals through direct increasing of the number of the Roma pupils in preschool and first grade, through intensive interest about the education of the parents as well as through providing information for the Roma.

Through Vaskas’ story, we recorded a documentary film whose message started to create a different image for the Roma in the minds of the teachers, principles, officials…

„I believe that that day when the number of persistent Roma will be increased and we will have real statistics about them for their participation as doctors, economists, engineers, lawyers, judges, journalists… Roma everywhere amongst the Roma and Roma amongst the non Roma in Macedonia”, points out Vaska Bajramovska Mustafa. „I believe that many young Roma, many Roma parents more and more realize the meaning of education and that the state is prepared to enable inclusion of the Roma as its citizens, with the same rights and obligations as the others who live in it have”.