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It was only natural that my very first qualification obtained was as a veterinary nurse. Even thought I grow up in 5th. Floor tower building in a Council state, I have never forgotten all my happy memories of my summer holidays with my grandparents in the countryside. I use to cycle to my grandmother’s house right after school every day, to care of a rabbit farm I built myself, I even had a German shepherd. My family had always a strong village background, I remember when I was a kid my family being involved with a number of small agriculture projects. My Aunt (a school teacher) rent a quite large portion of land where she cultivated tomatoes, and we, as many other family members help her with planting and harvesting. There was also a cooperative which organised the plowing as well as selling the tomatoes. These projects helped young couples to save money to start them up as the base of a new family.
After the regime change, I worked as a community development social worker with a lot of people from the village. I helped them to analyse their problems, try to explain our interests in any kind of advocacy possibility, or gave them methods when it was needed to think together. Mostly I worked with a number of local members of the community as well as working with umbrella organisations which united local internet points, Youth and Community centres.
Mostly, at any given Hungarian village these organisations were the only Citizen Services & Advice providers. There were NGOs in 95% of the villages and little towns working alone. I worked along the Ostrich farmer’s umbrella organisation and the first LEADER program network which it's an EU community economy development method.
After a nationwide campaign success with the "Housing of the youth", I organised another 20 forums about "Employment", and prepared and another campaign about "What we want to see" as changes in The European Union Common Agriculture Policy. After a 7 year period the EU were open to make a decision about a new system. As European citizens we were supposed to let them know what our interests were, we were also supposed to explain our opinion and common interests. If our citizen voice is a public one, then within a negotiating round table our point of view could be accepted. But from a wall of silence is not possible to accept a thing. And that was our main mission in the Participation Democracy Network.
That campaign was never financed by any government fund. I tried to raise money through more than 10 different channels, but unfortunately nobody was interested. I even used a different trainings, conference and workshops in order to make an issue-book (leaflet) and without budget we finally managed to get first 4 forums.
For this kind of nationwide debate we mirrored the American National Issues Forum , which gives 3 or 4 possible choices to solve a common problem. Then we discuss the pros and cons as well as the possible repercussions. Once this is done, the group must come up with their own recommendation. And finally we collected all of the forums outcomes we generated a broad picture of the main issues and challenges consolidating them into a united voice to help the advocacy process with this mandate.
The main reason as to why I restarted my blog in English is simply because I had left the country 5 years ago, and even from here (London) I can see how community’s welfare is getting weaker and weaker by the minute.
Today I am going to write about a press conference when a mayor of a village Hungarian proudly introduced a proper Apartheid system against t emigrants.
In this village any Romanian emigrant is not allowed to go the local pub! If they try to bring their family or their kids to this village, the authorities, i.e. the “Childcare” System’s social workers will deport them back to Romania.
In this the villages there is currently a 60+% of unemployment rate, from kids aged between 14 and 24 to their parents, and within these families 80% of both parents are unemployed! And I wonder;
Why all these people are sitting at home? Why is the local agriculture NOT giving them permanent jobs? Not even temporary?
Why our agriculture is not supporting young families to save money to grant families’ welfare as it use to 30 years ago?
Why there was 2 million in agricultural jobs 60 years ago working mostly for their own cooperative and nowadays we have that many people working for private companies including agricultural jobs?
In a forum I had chats with the gypsy community in Ópályi and they explain to me that, the £10 that the farmers are normally paying them for a day’s job is not enough to feed themselves as well as the travel fare to work outside their villages.
And that's why the Hungarian farmers started to recruit Romanian emigrant workers, because the legal minimum wage is under the living cost.
In the last 4 years this government has destroyed the National Council of Interest Conciliatory and cut down on worker’s right. Also the Hungarian Central Statistical Office lies about the commodity wages.
The mayor of Morahalom in a press conference made this speech:
There is a new registration fee that all farmers have to pay in order to cover a new regulatory Service to hold in check the emigrant workers. We had an agreement with the farmers and we have put in place an "ethical and behaviour contract" between us, as part of this agreement, from now on emigrants are not allowed to come to public places. If they show their emigrants face in public, we would collect them and transport them back to their concealed concentration camps.
Probably we are not going to like them coming to our pubs at the week end or evening time, or any special event really. The mayor then follow up with this statement: It is possible you could say it is a priority restraint, but we couldn't care of this liberal point of view. As shocking as you possible consider it, I just couldn't see any way we could pursue any kind of integration! We would conceal them in their “settlement”! We assumed that they arrive here for work reasons but we won’t let them settle here, also we will try to stop them from staying! I mean it!!
In several cases we would involve all authority’s framework, including the Childcare Department and Health Care screening as we have so many tools to catch them, only the worker would be allowed! Therefore DO NOT bring your spouse here! Nor your children all, no more kids at all! And don't even think about using our education or social care facilities.
This mayor is a common case in my country. This kind of xenophobic hate speech is the a big part of the hole of the Hungarian public speech. On 6th of April the two extreme nationalist parties got 60-70% of the votes all around the country.
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