ROMA, GYPSIES ARE THE KEEPERS OF THIS EARTH, ROMA AND THE ENVIRONMENT, EDUCATION.

The earth has no boundaries, all countries are part of the whole, so along come people and divide it all up, speak different languages and so on, then they get all possessive about a country and land being theirs, mine! They don't want Gypsies traveling around 'their' country and even more so they hate the idea that we are not settled and educated. Educated at what I might ask, just look at what their education offers, what it does do is take us away from the earth and animals. Well I'm so very sick and tired of being told that we Romanies have no rights because we have no land, of course we have a bloody land, its the world. So when people ask me, Where is your country, where is your land, I reply that the world is my country and land and that we are the traveling people who travel to care for all the world and to watch what all the other people do to care for the world. The reason that Romanies are so neglected in the UN is because we are stateless, well we are not! We are travelers of the world, all the world is our home! We are not landless, and I also dislike Romanies saying that we have no land no country, of course we have, in my opinion, the world is mine to care for and if people do have a land and home then why the hell aren't they caring for it instead of bombing and polluting it to bits! I think all Gypsies should state that our land is the world and that we have the right to travel that world with pride and not persecution!

By Catherine Johns

A Resilient Spirit

By Catherine Johns, published by Lothian

I dont mind that you put my opinions up on the bazaar, they are the talk of my walk.Just look what is happening in Italy, the excuse is so old its boring, that we 'steal' children, oh please, they are so ignorant and hateful, they just dont want us to travel, to be free in spirit and place. My father line is Welsh, my mother line Irish. I was born in Australia and traveled on the road with my father for the first eleven years of my life. Occasionally we would live in a house, then move on. My mother would come to live with us only if we had a house, but then she'd get restless and off she'd go after about three weeks, with a new lover, of course. So I grew up with my father, sometimes having to stay with my mother, and often her lover, sometimes with my father and mother, often with my Nana, my mothers mother, three times in the orphanage, when my father had left me with my mother and she dumped me in there to run off,yet again, my Nana would come and get me, and for a few months with a guardian, so that I attended school as the welfare were going to take me into one of their homes as it was seen as 'bad' for me to be wandering with my father. I dislike the police and welfare, social workers and the like, they felt they had the 'right' to control our lives, they came into camp, into our homes and told us the way we had to live, their way, they never understood our ways. Even now all the social workers don't understand, they don't live or think the way we do but they are paid lots of money to be experts or some such to inter fear in our lives. By the time I went out to paid work at 14 I had been to 20 schools,all up I've been to 25 as I went back to formal education as an adult, and then to uni and teachers college. Jobs i've had many, I get bored being inside, I get bored! I need to be free not to be tied down by a job or money. Now I am on a disability pension as I have a serious injury due to a horse accident and I'm no longer able to be insured, so I live as I have always done, simply and so very richly. I have only a few dollars left over every weeks but you know, I grow my own veggies, make my own chees, milk a goat and live as one of the richest people on this planet. I have my horses and carts, my big clydesdale, five dogs and a spirit of living that is so rich and overflowing that for me is my walk and I walk to speak for the animals and the mother earth.