Jai Bhim Network

Then we all piled into cars and sped up the motorways to the border of Slovakia. The Jai Bhim Network runs a school in a small village about 20 miles from the border called Sajokaza. The village has about three thousand inhabitants, roughly 50:50 Gypsies and Hungarians although the Gypsy child population greatly outnumbers the Hungarian.

We were taken to the community house, a quite large premises in the centre of the village where János, Tibor and Kubu live with a number of other teachers and students who are from other parts of Hungary. Presiding over the kitchen was János’ mother, a remarkable old lady who, though illiterate, herself has raised a large family of active and intelligent children many of whom are playing a leading part in the struggle for the uplift and integration of Gypsy communities. She and her family come from a group of Gypsies living mainly in Southern Hungary who speak Beyash, a language related to Romanian, but separated from it in Hungary for many generations. Mrs Orsós had of course prepared us an excellent meal - vegetarian for my sake which she clearly did not altogether approve of. Throughout my time there she continued to churn out copious quantities of delicious, if not exactly slimming, food - the highlight for me being pancakes filled with cream cheese.

The next morning we drove down tho the school on the other side of the village for meditation having to negotiate the extensive road diggings all the way through the village - or almost all the way through. With European Union funding the village council is laying a new sewage system. So they had dug up all the roads through the village first and then started to put the pipes in thus creating maximum confusion. When we got to the school which is right on the edge of the village with the Gypsy settlement just beyond it I couldn’t help noticing that the roadworks stopped. The Gypsy settlement is not included in the sewage system! When the mayor was challenged about this he apparently said that since the Gypsy settlement has no running water they don’t need sewage! And anyway even if they did have water they wouldn’t be able to pay water rates! What can one say? And this is funded by the European Union it seems.

We meditated in the shrine room which has a brick shrine at one end with a standing Thai Buddha and photos of Dr. Ambedkar. In the corner a large wagon wheel rests against the wall - a symbol of both the Dharma and the Gypsy’s former itinerant life. Over the school’s entrance there is the traditional crest from Nalanda: two deer sitting each side of a wheel - this time clearly a Gypsy wagon wheel which also is a wheel of the Dharma.

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