Pohoda

Flashback to Wednesday: It’s morning, about 9:15 am, and I’m getting off of a tram according to the directions printed on the note clutched desperately in my hand. I follow down the street, take a quick right and then another right a few blocks later, find the stairs where they’re supposed to be, and I am exactly where my directions tell me to be, except for the address at the bottom. I am going to a press conference that I have been looking forward to all week. The press conference is in the CEELI institute. The address for the CEELI Institute is 58, but it’s not on a street, no, it’s in a park, in a fairly large park. I’ll spare you the tale of 45 minutes spent running around this entire park (in the cold rain/snow mixture, naturally), asking several people in Czech and getting blank stairs, and deciding to give up several times, and just tell you that of course I stumbled into the CEELI Institute at precisely 9:59 after realizing that it was in fact the first building I saw, unmarked and empty, 44 minutes ago. I should know better.

In any case, the press conference was amazing, both because I had never been to a press conference before and because it was on a really exciting topic. Eight years ago 18 Roma students and their parents, with the help of the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC), had sued the Czech Republic for discriminating against them by placing them in special, segregated schools. On Tuesday, the court finally ruled in their favor. It was a pretty huge case, and the first of its kind in a legal court. Czech out http://www.justiceinitiative.org/db/resource2?res_id=103938 (I have a hard copy that I got in my “press pack” if you’re interested- Impressed?) for a much more objective report of the case and result. I like to think of it as on the same plane as Brown v. Board of Education, because it’s really the exact same issue. Unfortunately, this ruling will not be as monumental because, though the court has ordered the CR to de-segregate, that doesn’t really mean much in practical terms. That’s the really frustrating thing that I’m finding in my project: Countless organizations have told the CR that they have to change, and countless times the CR has said that they’re going to or has taken steps like changing the name of the schools so they’re “no longer for special needs”, but nothing real is actually happening. Talk about banging your head against a wall; I can’t imagine working for real on this case and having the Ministry tell you all of the things they’ve “done” and seeing that nothing ever changes, and it’s all just rhetoric.

But enough on that, the press conference was cool and very official. I ended up sitting right next to some of the Roma students, who were treated like celebrities, and this resulted in a half-second of half of me being on the news that night while they were filming the woman next to me. I was hoping to talk to some of the Roma students, but they didn’t speak English, so that was the end of that.

I’m not really sure what’s happening with my project right now. I’m a little frustrated because I had a lot of plans and ideas and I’m being told that it’s not feasible to do what I want to do, which may be true, but things are going from very ambitious to very lame. I’m trying to find some sort of middle ground so that I can still produce something I feel proud of, but I don’t know that I’m going to be able to even observe in a school, which is really disappointing and will result in a pretty worthless report. To be fair, there are a lot of barriers (language being the big one and people not wanting me poking around being the second most debilitating), but I feel like it would still be possible to do a lot more than is being planned for me. The other frustrating aspect is that I had been lining up interviews, etc, on my own, and I’ve been encouraged to let my advisor take that over. My advisor is AMAZING, but he’s not the best as far as organization, and he sees the scope of the project as much smaller than I do. Also, his idea of being helpful is to do things like do interviews for me, so that he can use Czech, which is indeed very helpful but not exactly helping me, if you know what I mean.

Sorry, that was a lot of complaining. It’s really silly, actually, because this project is so short and there’s no way that I could do the things I want to do in that time. Also, I’ve had to laugh at myself a lot lately because I had two days in a row with a lot of down time and that’s been driving me crazy and making me feel useless. I need to learn how to relax a little and that it’s okay to not be going full steam every second of every day. We’ll see how this week goes I guess.

Yesterday I went to a ceramics workshop with Elena. It was held at a local school, and I made a dragon. Haha. We all got big lumps of clay and the woman showed us how to make these really cool teapot-ish things (Egyptian, I think). I was a little intimidated at first, but comforted when I saw that the majority of people there were around the age of 8 (or their parents). Needless to say, my pot was around the fifth best, if I do say so myself. Elena said it was hezky. She made a type of mountain-goat thing. The coolest part was that we were there for over three hours (everyone was), just working and decorating. I thought that would never happen in the US because everyone’s always in such a hurry to get somewhere else. There were several “stopping points” where people could have just said, “okay, done” and been done, but everyone kept adding details and getting really creative. It was great, relaxing, and good to make something.

Before that, Elena “showed” me how to make dumplings. I suppose the word show doesn’t need quotes since literally, I watched and she made them. I think I could maybe reproduce something similar. We made dumplings with marmalade in the middle, which we had for lunch, and then a big dumpling loaf to go with gulas at night. Today she had to leave and she asked me to check the meal in the oven after an hour and turn the oven off if it was done. I checked it, and turned off the oven, and just then I heard her call Jan to see if I had done it. Infuriating, but she’s really a sweetheart. It was nice to see her at this ceramics thing because she was in her element- she knows EVERYONE and really cares about the community, and she helped out everywhere she could (maybe too much, from their perspective, but it was sweet). Anyway, I’ll try to make dumplings when I get home. We’ll see...