Today marks 165 years since, as the text of the Legislation for the Emancipation of All Gypsies in the Principality of Wallachia said, the Romanian people parted ways with "the inhumanity and shame of holding slaves."

It was one of those moments of a very special relevance for the course towards the renewal and westernization of the Romanian society in the middle of the 19th century. Like the short-lived Union of Principalities or the reforms that followed, the liberation of the Roma played a major role in changing the profile and values ​​of society at that time, preparing our country for the encounter with its European modernity.

The liberation from 1856 was a great challenge for the Romanian society as a whole. For the Roma, hundreds of years of deprivation of liberty have left deep scars that are difficult to heal. The law that disobeyed them did not solve the enormous gap, economically and socially, to which the Roma were victims, and in the decades that followed many expressions of discrimination, hatred and racism tragically marked their existence.

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The first attestations of the Roma appear in Romanian documents dating back to 1385(Muntenia) and 1428 (Moldova) indicating them as goods of some monasteries. Roma were treated as slaves, because they had particular skills like metal-working, carpentry and entertaining. They were of great economic value. There were three categories of slaves: Crown (state), noblemen (boyars) and monasteries (of monasteries). The slaves of the Crown carried out three principal occupations: goldwasher, bear-trainer and spoon-maker. In addition, there were slaves known as “laiesi” who were allowed to move about the estates doing a variety of jobs, including those of musician, farrier, whitewasher, sieve-maker, blacksmith and coppersmith. Slaves of the monasteries were grooms, cooks and coachmen. Among the house slaves were scopiti, males castrated so as not to present a threat to the noblewoman whom they served.

Initially Roma were slaves of the State, but upon selling or donating them, they could become possessions of monasteries and the boyars.Field slaves lived in satras or collections of reed and mud huts on the outskirts of the estates, seldom visited by their owners. They were not allowed to have musical instruments for their own amusement, and they were bought and sold in lots, also called satras, cetas or salases. Groups of slaves remained under the supervision of a vatav (also called a ciocoi) or overseer, who was sometimes brutally cruel. House slaves were forbidden to speak romani, and their descendants, the Beyash (also Boyash or Bayash), today have a variety of Romanian, a Latin-based language, rather than Romani, as their mother tongue.

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On this day (13th December), 20 years ago, the founding members held the official paper that confirms the establishment of the People to People Foundation! Formed as a response to the critical situations we saw in that period, we have grown beautifully, set up services, become proactive and we are convinced that we have succeeded in changing the lives of the people we have met!

We thank all our colleagues, volunteers, donors and funders who have been with us all this time.

So good to visit our main partners from Finland. Thank you Patmos for your great generosity to us!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US! HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US!

This week, we at People 2 People Foundation are celebrating our 18th Anniversary! (in Romania this means we are grownups now:) ) It is a moment of joy, but also a moment of self assessment and planning for the future.

We know for sure IT’S NOT ABOUT US, it never was - IT'S ALL ABOUT THEM! About all the CHILDREN, WOMEN, MEN and FAMILIES we have met these years. It is about abandonment, tragedies, broken dreams, plans, success and sometimes failures. Is about having PEOPLE on our focus and trying to build a different future, a more empowered and brighter one. PEOPLE pushed us forward despite all the hard work and sometimes frustrations.