An interview with Kumar Vishwanathan, the leader of
Life Together
Kumar Vishwanathan
In the Czech city of Ostrava, it is a big problem that
the Roma children are just running about without masks, in spite of the fact
that it’s required by law to wear a face mask outside. Sometimes people give
their masks to each-other, and we have to explain everywhere why it is
important to put it on, how to use it, that they have to wash, dry and iron it before
using it the next day. We try to educate the Roma children to take the epidemic
seriously because if one person gets infected, the whole community is at risk.
It started as a community thing in our community centre in Liščina, Ostrava when the crisis was just at the beginning and there weren’t as strict regulations as today. We wanted to teach the mothers how to sew masks for their children and families. A non-Roma and two Roma women started the work: Olina, Alka, and Věra. The idea was that the Roma women from the community will come and we teach them how to sew the masks because we have a sewing machine. Then suddenly everything became more difficult and we had to keep social distancing.
It started as a community thing in our community centre in Liščina, Ostrava when the crisis was just at the beginning and there weren’t as strict regulations as today. We wanted to teach the mothers how to sew masks for their children and families. A non-Roma and two Roma women started the work: Olina, Alka, and Věra. The idea was that the Roma women from the community will come and we teach them how to sew the masks because we have a sewing machine. Then suddenly everything became more difficult and we had to keep social distancing.
More and more people asked for cloth face masks. The women decided to stich the masks themselves. We
bought clothes and strings that the women washed, ironed, cut, sewed, and then
packed. The person who asked for the masks comes to the window through which
he/she gets hold of them. Then we put the news of the initiative on Facebook,
so a lot of people heard about it.
We made 9 teams each consisting of 3 people. The women are working in their homes: they like
each-other, so they invite each-other. Somebody cuts, somebody stiches,
somebody irons. They distribute the tasks. Today, I know it because someone
asked me, a team made more than 820 face masks! People are donating us clothes
like bedspreads because they’re made of good linen, so we wash them, dry them,
iron them, and then we can make good quality and very pretty masks. Today, for
instance, I’ve just got one with hearts on it.
In the centre of Ostrava, we managed to start a new
sewing workshop. We
have a professional machine there, it’s old but very strong, and we can work very
quickly with it. A company offered us to cut the cloth to the required form,
they have a cutting machine that cuts 50 pieces in one go. Now we don’t have to
fit and cut every single mask. Different firms offer us help, not just money
but a professional sewing machine, for example.
When we communicated on FB that the machine was
broken, a nice Roma woman, Eva Tokarová lent us hers. We get a lot of community
support. Today Eva told me that she had the masks even in her dreams. It’s like
an addiction: she can’t stop teaching.
Life Together
Kumar Vishwanathan is the leader of Life Together, a
Czech Roma non-profit organisation since 1997 based in Ostrava in the Czech
Republic. It started when there were the historic floods in Central Europe, and
a lot of Roma lost their homes. There was tension between the Roma and the
non-Roma. Kumar Vishwanathan was a teacher of physics and together with some
university students they started a volunteer group to ease the tension, build
confidence and create things together. The only way to overcome the tension
is to do things together. So, they began the community work in 1997
building a coexistence village where 30 families, half of them Roma and half of
them non-Roma lived together.
Now they have a professional organisation of 55
people, they deal with human rights issues and the education of Roma children.
They also do a lot of community work and they’re a service providing
organisation. It’s their children who fought and won the famous court case in
Strasbourg in 2009 against a special school for the mentally retarded where the
majority of the students was Roma.
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