South Bend programs help give Roma people a voice

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) - In the eastern European country of Slovakia, two programs from South Bend have started to take root in an effort to lift the Roma people - often labeled with the word gypsy - out of chronic school failures and 90 percent unemployment.

The man who launched this long journey, where Roma make up 8 percent of the country, is Bill Howell.

The South Bend native and 1972 graduate of Jackson High School had served as a local pastor and minister for 27 years, including a spell at Calvary Temple, until nearly 11 years ago, when he and his wife, Linda, dived full time into leadership development throughout Europe.

Linda focuses on women's leadership through Emerge, a program she started that worked this year in five countries from Lithuania to Italy.

Howell, who first dabbled in European outreach in 1994, found himself in Slovakia a few years ago, asking pastors among the Roma for their greatest need. They all pointed to education. Roma kids enter schools when they know neither the alphabet nor the Slovak language that teachers use to instruct, Howell says, causing 60 percent of their kids to end up in "special schools," the equivalent of special education in the United States.

"After nine years, they have the equivalent of a fourth-grade education," he tells the South Bend Tribune (http://bit.ly/1K6DKM2 ). "A lot of it is discrimination."

So, he worked with Roma people there and contacts here in Michiana. They are starting a digital learning center, using online curriculum, wireless Internet and a rented building where kids will pick up what they're missing in school. The effort, called Roma Learning to Fly, aims to open the first center in June in Vtackovce, a village of just more than 800 people. Then Howell hopes to partner with one of the large tech firms that are doing similar digital centers around the world - in an effort to replicate the centers in Roma villages elsewhere in Europe.

Part of the digital center will involve a South Bend-born program called No Parent Left Behind. Co-creator Joyce Long was on one of her two trips to Slovakia with Howell, 10 days in 2013 and then two weeks this October, as she watched kids drawing pictures and telling stories to hone their literacy skills. When parents started to laugh at the curious words that their kids chose, Long put the parents on alert.

"You cannot laugh at your child," she told the Roma parents. "Right now you need to let them know you value the sounds coming out of their mouths."

Long had crafted No Parent Left Behind with Stuart Greene while they were both faculty members at the University of Notre Dame and with Darice Austin-Phillips while she was principal at South Bend's Perley Primary Center.

It got South Bend parents to work on their own education - even literacy - as it also taught them what it meant to be involved with their kids' education on a daily basis. Parents would then train other parents to do the same.

The program blossomed in South Bend schools from 2007 until 2011, when federal stimulus funding ran out.

Long now works part time as a research analyst for Memorial Hospital's Community Health Enhancement. She has given over No Parent Left Behind's nonprofit tax status to a task force that the United Way of St. Joseph County had started with Hispanic leaders and parents as they looked at how they could boost their kids' performance in school - a task force that remains active and runs a study center in South Bend's Marycrest Building.

In Slovakia, she says, No Parent's message and focus on literacy, math and brain growth all remain the same. But there is cultural distance to cross.

In South Bend, she observes, if Hispanic kids don't learn English at home, they fall behind in school as they absorb the new language and their other subjects, too. Likewise, many Roma kids hear only the Roma language at home - and only verbally, not written. They are handicapped as they jump into classes that are taught only in Slovak. Then they hit an extra hurdle about three years later when they must begin learning English in school.

"If kids don't learn Slovak from their parents, history shows they won't succeed," Long says.

Under the program's guidance, parents without literacy will use index cards bearing the Slovak alphabet, allowing them to both learn and teach literacy to their kids at the same time.

She recalls turning parents away from one part of their culture, or at least a habit: Parents there didn't play much with their kids. But it's crucial that they do in the child's early years, she says, since children learn through play.

"A lot of it is creating a new culture," she says.

Matthew Stackowicz and a friend started The Darkroom Project a few years ago, placing basic cameras with people in the margins - ex-felons who had returned to work at Goodwill Industries of Michiana, women pursuing ways out of poverty at St. Margaret's House in South Bend, people seeking their way to mental health, refugee kids in Yemen and poor shoe-shining boys on urban Guatemala streets.

He ventured to Slovakia with Howell this year, working with 10 young Roma people, ages 10 to 16. He taught them photo techniques and theory and sent them out to shoot themes like "joy" and "family" in their village.

At a fundraiser last month, he pointed out one of the young photographers' pictures that shows a paved neighborhood street with grassy yards and spacious, two-story homes that are being finished a little at a time as their owners acquire bits of building material. Another shot shows houses that are more like shacks with patchwork roofs of metal, boards and cloth.

"There's such a great divide between the Slovaks and the Roma," says Stackowicz, who was struck by the Roma people who emerged as colorful and "eager to learn, eager to share the good things about their community."

He's especially captivated by one shot: Resting on a rickety foot bridge that leads to a dirt path between homes, there's a scooter that has been cobbled together with discarded boards and red plastic wheels.

"They took found objects and made a toy," says Stackowicz, whose day job is coordinating a program for intercultural development at Bethel College.

They produced a total of 50 photos, he says, that "could hang in any gallery and look gorgeous."

In fact, the works will be part of a national exhibit this spring in the capital of Bratislava sponsored by the U.S. Embassy there. It will coincide with April 8, which each year marks the International Day of the Roma to celebrate Roma culture and raise issues facing the Roma people.

Next year also will conclude the "Decade of Roma Inclusion," a collaborative effort by European governments and nongovernmental organizations to "close the unacceptable gaps between Roma and the rest of society," according to its website, romadecade.org.

But Howell adds, "I don't think you're going to find many people who say inclusion has happened to any depth."

That's why he plans to continue trips to Slovakia in the years ahead in hopes of propagating more digital learning centers. Already, the fundraiser a month ago raised $5,800 for the project, plus the same amount for an unrelated school project in another Roma community where poverty is "beyond bleak" and where he hopes to open some form of a learning center.

Howell says the photo exhibit in Bratislava will include intercultural discussions that bring Slovakia's Roma and white people in the same room.

"It gives these kids a voice," he says. "When you're that poor and that hated - and that's not an exaggeration of words - you're taught to be invisible."

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Information from: South Bend Tribune, http://www.southbendtribune.com