If I were a Dom... updated

Ok, here we are after one week of impressions, brief interviews, more reading material and some contact to other people who researched the Dom of Jerusalem and/or volunteered at the center.

I am still 27, I am still married with kids but my father isn't a tourist guide anymore. He is unemployed because my grandparents didn't see the need of getting him a proper education since two of his older brothers were able to read and to write anyway. So the family decided that my father should support them with making pans and other metal work since he is really creative, has a good feeling for design and pans are needed everywhere. It felt like a good and save way to earn money. But the times have changed since his youth and pans are now cheap and good design and handmade quality is not valued anymore. There is no factory where he could work and he doesn't have the money to start his own business. In my childhoodyears he was still trying, but after having to do the worst day labour jobs he finally gave up looking for work.
Most of the time he is at home with some of his friends, they smoke and tell each other stories about the good old times and how much they want the society to change. He knows the most amazing tales of Dom origin and even after listening to them for hundreds of times they are still funny, moving, wise and exciting!

My mother, on the other hand, doesn't speak english anymore and in the last week she lost her small shop at the market, too. Now she is a hairdresser. Some women that know her since she or they were born come to our flat, get a new haircut and their hair staightened. She thought about opening a salon with some of the other haridresser-women in the neighbourhood but since noone encouraged her to do so she was a too afraid of failure and the risk was to high for the little income we have. "Thats something you can do one day" she once told me "My live is this way, and yours can be different. But I am old now. Why should I change at this late point?"

Some decoration in our house still shows the families past: There are flowers everywhere: fresh and dried, paintes and sewed. But apart from that and the area we live in there is no big difference to other Arab families. We are muslim, but not in a extreme way. Our religion helps us to cope with our situation but we have no intend to say it's better than another one for everybody. Me and my siblings learned hebrew in school and on the streets, so we have to help our partens with filling out forms, requests and documents.

I still want to be a nurse but I'm not sure if I'll be able to finish my education. I'm already two years older than the other girls in my class because I had to earn money after finishing High School. The support we get from the government just isn't eanough: Our rent is 1400 NIS per month, a three room flat for 7 persons with a small backyard were we tried to grow a little garden but couldn't water it enough. One shwarma costs up to 30 NIS, a skalf to cover your hair is available from 5 NIS on. But it looks even cheaper. Thats the worst thing: When you aren't rich you are forced to look poor. I wonder why they don't make nice clothes that are cheap. Perhaps they just want to stigmatize us. And the quality isn't that good either. All of us had to wear the bigger kids clothes but sooner or later they fall apart and we end up paying more for clothes than we would have to if we yould afford some high quality shirts once in a while. Same with the food: When you have to count every singe Agora you only buy small amounts of everything instead of getting the "5 for the price of 3 value pack". So, ironically, it's really expensive to be poor. And with 4000 NIS national insurance money and the little income of my mothers job we don't get far.

From my early ages on I remember that I envyed the other Arab kids. I felt if I wanted to succeed in live I had to change from being "a gypsy" and become a regular Arab. Apart from some moments were I heard something discriminating against my community and it made me feel literarly sick it worked ot quite well. On the street and at school noone knows that I am Dom. And I hardly tell people, even the ones I know very well.
On the other hand this makes it more complicated to explain to strangers why my family isn't as wealthy as I wanted it to be. Because once I consider myself as "Arab and nothing else" everyone assumes I had the same upbringing, the same education and the same value sytem as all the other "Arab an nothing else"s...

Oh, and when I am talking about "family" here, I don't mean me, my husband and my children. It's my parents whom I owe everything I ever achieved and will achieve in this live, my siblings on whom I can rely more than on anyone else, my children who are my reason to do what I have to do even though it might me hard and uncomfortable and my husband who tries to make my live as good as he can.

I hope to be able to tell you next week about my neighbours and further relatives, about the way we help each other in our difficult situation and if there still is - apart from all the assimilation to the major culture and society - an inner bond that holds the Dom together. But at the moment I just don't know!

"A population at risk"

In October 2004 the Dom Society Center and the Jerusalem Business Developement Center published a report on a survey among the Dom population of Jerusalem.
This report has been send with the proposals for funding womens business courses like sewing classes, cooking workshops and cosmetical education. Those lectures were no short-term evening classes but real educations that took up to one year and many women took part in them. It is impressive to see in the report that there was a percentage of 85% in the women and 90% in the men who wanted to learn a new profession but couldn't afford it or didn't know how.
Thanks to Amoun Sleems commitment to the community and to the center there are some women present who earn money with the skills they learned in the courses. But until today no woman and no man has founded an own business, shop, restaurant or salon because of the lack of financial opportunities.
Furtheron the report gives answers to my questions concerning the size of an household, the monthly income, the equipment in the flats and some of the formal economy strategies. Only 5% of the Dom owned a car, a TV is the most common "luxury item" and even a airconditioning system is not common among the Dom in 2004. The report devides between families with more than 6 members and those with less and points out that those expensive goods are more often to be found in lager families. This indicates that more people in one "economical team" lead to better conditions for everyone. But later it is said that in those families were adult children stay at their parents place those nearly never have jobs or a good enough education that they could bring an own income. As soon as children over 18 still live at the parents place they seem to be more of a burden than help. Nevertheless those families have access to TV, washing machines, oven and hot water most often. This indicates some intersting issues about informal economie and a selfregulating spread of money within the community. After all: The vast majority of the Dom families live from less than 3000 NIS a month wich is less than 1000 Dollars. With 5,6 children per family and the expensive rent in the Old City this is close to nothing.
So this report with its quantitative approach helps me a lot if I can rely on it - and it shows me the issues were a simple survey isn't useful anymore. I will have to get closer to the Dom to find out how they make this miracle of surviving under those conditions possible - but I wouldn't be suprised if that would be kept a secret.