‘Eva makes masks even in her dreams’

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.

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.