gypsies | Footsteps In The Deep

Today, after spending the afternoon speaking to people in Cismigiu Park (and, incidentally, getting ourselves kicked out because we handed a gospel flier to a security guard), we hopped on the subway to go visit our Gypsy friends along Drumul Taberei. They live in what I can only describe as complete squalor. The adults survive by begging and washing car windows. They sleep on strangely-smelling and lumpy things that vaguely resemble centuries-old mattresses (one family per mattress) in small rooms with no electricity that somehow survived the destruction of the building that had once stood around them. Their drafty homes are heated by wood, and only Vasilica’s has running water. The kids, when they’re not in school, join their parents to wash car windows at the intersections and beg spare change off of passersby.