Judit Berki

In 2000 there was a Roma Community Centre Grant. We applied for it. It included an opportunity for us to set up a weekend school kind of thing but only on Saturdays.We were expecting kids who, for some reason, would like to either excel in a subject or make up for the gaps in their knowledge. We were granted a moderate amount of money. We could open the school every Saturday. We rented a hall and got stuck in. It turned out that there was a huge demand for what we had on offer. Eventually, we gave lessons all over the place on Staturdays. We kept expanding. They said we won’t find any teachers who would do Saturdays. It turned out that they will come and work with the children as long as they get their wages. Moreover, they invest not only their fourty-five minutes into the effort but will go the extra mile as well. Then there was a sequence of EU grant proposals and we had won each and every of them.Then we undertook to establish a chain of open schools. That’s how Mátraverebély, a segregated township and Lucfalva, a dead end village got involved. And we also had an open school in Kisterenye, further up. So, we had four open schools. Later on, we had to close the one is Kisterenye due to lack of money. At present we operate three open schools with more than 110 people. We would have capacity for many more than that, but we cannot afford it as we are on a low budget. For the last couple of years we haven’t won any grants. We keep the schools running on private donations in additon to the four million Forints we were granted by the ministry for the three open schools.We have donors giving 2 000 Forints per year or 500 000 per year and there is an ltd supporting us with 2 million Forints per year. That’s how we manage. And with loads of voluntary work. I and Szilárd, we also work on a voluntary basis. […] If we don’t win a grant at the open school tender, we’ll have to think over how we want to proceed. Kids come at about half past one and stay till the evening.This is how it goes in each of the open schools. And you have to figure out on an ongoing basis how you go about supplying things that you need.

I was a high achiever at primary school and I was given a grant so I can attend a secondary school preparatory course. It wasn’t a huge amount of money but came in very handy for us back then. I completed a year long prep course and I was offered a seat at Madach Secondary School. And you know what, there were only two gipsies int he class of 42, István Kunsági and I? I believe that I was given all sorts of extra bonuses there, which proved very useful later on. I became part of a very good community. And whether you were a gipsy or not was completely irrelevant. […] I think that your schooling is rather formative for your life. The kind of classmates and teachers you have. What you are regarded as by them. […] And my classmates came to visit us. They loved my granny’s bread and butter as well as her apples. No one said that ’I just won’t come to your place’. And I also went to see the Jancsó’s. So I was an integral part of the community of classmates. I see that nowadays a part of kids get completely excluded from these opportunities. Wealthy families are so self-contained nowadays that they are inaccessible. As an advocate of integrated education I’m convinced that the most efficient way of learning is learning and picking up things from your peers. I got registered in Ervin Szabó Library and checked out lots of books regularly. I also made a list of what I’d like to get from the second hand bookstore, there was no way of affording brand new books. But I always made a list of what I’d like to get for my birthday of Christmas and I always did get them. I was an ardent reader. But it was maybe due to my peer group being ardent readers themselves. We came to that school to learn, to get knowledgeable and to be able to help each other. And this is the ability that I managed to maintain. And it has top priority in my life, too.