The Máj Housing Project and the Time of Love

Translated by Lani Seelinger

This definitely doesn’t seem like a place that has been passionately stirring the Czech Republic for the last few weeks. The new children’s playground in the center of the Máj housing project in České Budějovice seems more like an advertising brochure for the United Nations. Dark ten-year-old Roma boys childishly show off, already looking remarkably like their father, and white Czech kids run around amongst them. All of their parents sit around on benches. There’s no tension to be seen, just the hot summer calm and the vacation boredom of the projects.

Nonetheless, it was here in the middle of June that two preschoolers of different ethnicities got into a fight, which brought their parents into it, which led to a general brawl with dozens of people. Since then, thousands of exasperated citizens have been marching through this quality Czech housing project, protesting “against the Roma.” And unless something changes, further marches are already in the plans.

Here are the stories of the people currently living around the famous playground, whose lives have been affected by the events of the past weeks.

Michal

“This dog is just impossible,” grumbles the tall, light-haired young man, pushing aside a massive, clumsy dog that was watching his roommate. “If only he was at least trained for gypsies.” Michal Choura, 24, who called for the first meeting against “gypsy violence” in the center of České Budějovice after the fight in the playground, expects us and knows why we’re visiting him. Is he trying to say something about himself with this rough welcome?

Soon, it seems that he most likely does not. Mr. Choura doesn’t come across as a manipulator who thinks out his steps in advance. Even though he sometimes slips up and says “gypsy,” he meticulously tries to say “Roma.” Sitting on a worn-out couch in his makeshift apartment in the Budějovice region where there’s a rusty drying rack and a sock or empty beer or soda bottle here and there on the ground, he seems more like a person who didn’t expect what would develop from one online invitation. But at the same time, he’s not turning away, and he’s keeping his role as the initiator of an operation that there’s interest for with relish.

“It was a major success that I could get 1000 people on the square who feel the same way as I do. We’ve got to start doing something with this,” says Michal. With what? “With the two measures that the police and the officials use to gauge Roma and white people with. With people being attacked on the streets of Máj by Roma youth and with the unrest. Police don’t do anything with Roma crime, and they almost automatically get handouts at the government offices. These are problems that are just true. Ask people, look on Facebook. These are everyday experiences. I was attacked here once myself, and my friends who I trust say that it happens every day,” he argues.

The mass interest in the demonstration was really its own type of success. It’s not a simple thing to speak to a crowd of people, but after the initial trepidation, Michal managed to do it. “I kind of enjoyed working with the media, like being a press spokesman,” he says about his unexpected ability. Otherwise, things haven’t been going well for the young man.

A trained chef and waiter, he spent two years after finishing school in Prague, where he worked at a restaurant. It went bankrupt, however, so he returned to Budějovice. “I know this place, I have a base here,” he says. He’s occasionally worked in warehouses or in the technical services and taken temporary jobs, but he’s been looking for work for over a year now. In order to save money, he lives with a few friends in a residential building on the grounds of an auto repair shop on the edge of Budějovice.

“I ran out of patience,” he says, describing the feeling that he had when he read the news on Facebook about the fight in the playground. “I lived in Máj for a year myself, I know people there. I said to myself that something has to be done.” And so, he posted an invitation to a peaceful meeting on the square. Supposedly, for him it was mainly for people to talk to each other. “The main thing is to communicate, for white people and Roma to meet and clarify their points of view,” he says.

Given that he invited all of the people who were “unhappy with Roma crime and the inaction of the city and the police” to the town center, mainly white people came to clarify their points of view. How would the communication have looked, though, if the thousand-person march – which quite predictably came out of this kind of meeting – had gotten inside the housing project? “Yeah, that would have been carnage,” concedes Michal, “which of course would have been bad.” The young organizer is satisfied with his actions.

He doesn’t know if the marches and clashes with the police will change anything, but they’ve started to talk about the problems that he’s describing at the housing project, and this, as he says, is a good start. “Someone yelled a racist slogan? People are angry and they’re letting their emotions run away with them. And after all, it’s mainly the neo-Nazis yelling. I’m not making a fuss out of that. I only wanted to point out the problems, and that was a success.”

But what is it a good start for? Ideally, how would Máj look in ten years? “It’s hard to put it that way,” says Michal, thinking about it. “There isn’t crime, and people aren’t complaining.”

He’s basically got his own future figured out for the time being. He likes working with computers, and he’d like to make a living on that. Alternatively, he could be a trucker, like his father. “Once I have a job, everything will change,” he promises. He’ll also buy himself a worn-out BMW that he can tune up, which is another of his hobbies. “And then – I’d like to find a girlfriend and a nice apartment, obviously.”

Anna

When Michal Choura dreams about a nice apartment, he quite probably imagines it exactly this way. The seventh-floor apartment in one of the local high-rises is perfectly polished, excessive perfection taking the form of a cozy family nest. Oil paintings crowd the walls, figurines on the shelves, bright colors everywhere, a leather couch, a silver ashtray on the coffee table, carefully ventilated air in the room. In the middle of it sits Anna, 31, the mother of two preschoolers and a long time resident of Máj.

“I would never move away from Budějovice, I’m at home here. It’s just that my partner is a chicken, and he’s completely on edge about what’s going on here. He doesn’t sleep on Fridays because of what will happen over the weekend, he doesn’t want to live here. Yeah, he was never a bruiser,” she says with a smile. So, Anna’s family is moving to her sister-in-law’s in Birmingham. Everything’s already prepared, their apartment is on the market at a real estate agent’s, their car is for sale. She speaks about far-away England with a strange mixture of naiveté and experienced practicality. “They definitely live better in England. You get a weekly salary and you can buy everything you want with it. And there’s a lot more work in Birmingham than in Sheffield or Bristol. It’s impossible to go in blind.” They’ll work at the slaughterhouses, maybe, or at the post-office. Another possibility is at the gas pump.

After her training, Anna looked for work for two years and then got into the production of office equipment, and she’s gone from job to job with the help of a network of friends and relatives. She worked at a factory and cleaned at a hospital. And while she’s on maternity leave, she at least cleans the halls at home. As a welder, her partner has a pretty decent salary, so her maternity pay amounts to about 7,000 crowns. “But every little bit counts.”

Until recently, Anna could only speak highly of life at the housing project. She doesn’t remember any bigger problems either, besides complaints of disturbing the nighttime quiet. “Yeah, it’s like that, we’re noisy. We sit outside on the benches. But that’s what they’re there for. And if the noise bothers anyone, why don’t they try politely saying ‘please, could you be quieter?’” Of course, it even bothers Anna when bored young people make a real mess, and that happens a lot. But she repeats: “Still, whenever I say, ‘boys, I have kids here, could you go have fun somewhere else and not smoke your grass outside the door,’ they always apologize and go away. Have any of the people who are yelling under the windows now ever tried anything besides ‘Shut up, you fuckers’?

The frequent attacks that the protesters talk about constantly are nonsense, according to her. “Once, when I was young, skinheads ran after me in the center of town for a laugh,” she says. “And clearly, sometimes, on the other hand, Roma chase after Czechs. It’s clear that it’s going on, even here and now, and there’s no excuse for it. But it must be forgiven. Will some marching help with his, when we have to have our curtains drawn all day and tell our children fairy tales all the time? The Roma aren’t better than the Czechs, but when they burned up that little girl Natalka – did you see any marches anywhere?”

Petr

“No last name. This is no laughing matter. I’d like to live into my 40s,” says Petr, 39, who lives a few dozen steps from the children’s playground.

He’s a driver by profession, and he doesn’t really want to talk about his life. He has two children, he’s been driving a car forever, and his wife, who is a year younger than him, has been a chef forever. The former smoker constantly chews on a toothpick – and when he’s talking about his life in the housing projects, he keeps it between his fingers.

“This is an illusion, this idyll,” says Petr about the sunlit housing project where women with strollers and dog-loving retirees walk around. “There’s one attack after another here.” Apparently, three Roma teenagers tried to steal his wallet a year ago. “But they didn’t march then,” says the greying hulk of man with a massive mustache, indicating with his huge palm. “I just yelled, and they ran away,” he recalls.

Petr isn’t afraid for himself, but for his children. Nothing has happened to them for now, but he hears about attacks from his classmates and neighbors on a daily basis. “Why would we make this up?” he objects indignantly. “Like we were all radicals and racists?” No, but according to police statistics, Máj is an ordinary and safe place, compared to other Budějovice housing projects. “We even recorded a decrease in crime and infringements compared to last year,” says Lenka Holická, spokeswoman for the South Bohemian police, looking at the numbers. This, however, makes no impression on Petr. “Police statistics aren’t worth anything, because no one reports anything,” he explains. “It’s not worth it to report anything. The cops just shrug their shoulders, say investigating it won’t do anything, and they let it be.”

According to Petr, what is worth it are the demonstrations – and marches, when appropriate. “I’m against violence and shouting. I don’t ever yell anything about sending them into the gas. That always gets twisted because of the neo-Nazis and the police,” he says. “It’s important with what’s going on that the problems are visible, and that the local people are heard. Meeting on the square and going home, that’s nothing. When people start collectively working together towards something, that means something already, and the problems are visible.”

What about when the problems are only overblown stories? “It’s always around. Whether you want to believe it or not. What’s indisputable is the mess and the racket. And the filthy language. Shouting doesn’t help. And I’m supposed to beg them to have peace and quiet by my house at night?” He doesn’t want to, and he’s actually at least satisfied with the strengthened police patrols that people can actually see and meet every now and then and that, according to him, have helped.

What angers Petr about the events of the last weeks is that none of the local people are listening. “Here, no one ever wants anything besides for everyone to act appropriately. It isn’t normal to holler throughout the night. It isn’t normal to ruin bus stops. I have the right to want that, don’t I?” How do people who don’t do anything like that, like Anna, seem to you? “You don’t understand it, you don’t live here, they’re different. This is one big family, a clan. It works differently for them than for us. They’re not all the same, I also know decent Roma. But they keep to themselves, and it’s still their fault that they have badly-behaved teenagers.”

Michaela

Michaela Marešová, 28, has spent the last ten years at the Máj projects, and in that time she’s changed apartments a couple of times on the same street. The Třebon native came to Budějovice for high school, and she chose Máj because there was open and available housing there. And she swears by her choice.

“People have always lived here without issue. The real problem is just that people are horribly making things up. When you add up all the attacks from Facebook, it comes to about five robberies a day,” says the petite, dark-haired girl, who in her own works has never been afraid to go out at three in the morning to buy cigarettes at the gas station a few hundred meters away, and still isn’t afraid now. “Not a hint of trouble, ever,” she adds.

The graduate of a textile technical school who now supports herself as a nurse and caregiver agrees with Petr that people are going on the marches – with which she does not agree – out of anger. However, it’s hard to say at what. “From what I saw from the balcony, the majority there had had a few beers. Everyone came there to solve some problem of his or her own. Everyone has a different problem, but the trouble is that they’re all going to solve them under one window.

She also knows what people are talking about when they complain about the loud and distinct life of the majority of the Roma. Loud, collective fun, life in a big family. Hubbub and yelling, because, “in short, that’s how they are.” But according to her, this generally has a clear-cut solution: partly to accept that people are different and to be decent, and also to define boundaries and passively keep quiet.

“When a little kid wants a cigarette from me, I politely say, ‘don’t misbehave, I’m not giving you one.’ I don’t tell him off, I don’t chase him away. When someone acts inappropriately to me, really loudly or vulgarly, and it bothers me, I just go up to him and tell him that. Me, personally, to him. Look at me, I weigh 50 kilos. No one has ever done anything to me.”

Michaela doesn’t know what actually happened here three weeks ago that so roughly changed the tranquil life here at Máj. Nevertheless, she believes that they’re exaggerating it. “I like to travel, but I like coming back to Budějovice more. I want to stay here for good. It’s really tough to find a better place to live.”

The text was originally published in Respekt magazine 29/2013 

Článek Sídliště Máj a lásky čas vyšel v Respektu č. 29/2013