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European Roma also tend to have average lifespans significantly shorter than non-Roma; a 20-year gap was not uncommon until recently, and it's still in double-digits in some countries. The remaining nomadic groups have serious problems with access to medical care, which results in greatly increased infant and maternal mortality surrounding childbirth. And, thanks to the propensity of European governments for shoving the Roma into walled or otherwise inaccessible ghettoes*, all Roma populations have significant problems with communicable and chronic disease. The Gypsies I've met here have all been very cool people, but their lives are hardly what I'd call easy. The ones who can get work, work like Mexicans for even less money. The unemployment rate for Roma men is over 80% in the CR, for women it's nearly universal. The only job routinely available for Roma women in urban areas is prostitution, which is hugely destructive to the Roma culture, which values femenine fidelity. And of course, the Police roust, arrest, and assault them on a fairly regular basis, city or country. Country folks seem to be more tolerant of the Roma, because in the countryside they're a valuable pool of labour and traditional skills. In the cities...fuuuuj.
*The last such project was in 1997, when a 10-foot wall was built to seperate a Roma neighborhood from the "white" part of a town near Ostrava. Another example is of a group of Roma who were forcibly settled in a flatblock situated on a triangular plot of land which was surrounded on all three sides by 5-lane freeways. There were no exits accessible by foot, and since most of the Roma didn't own cars it was almost impossible to leave with any measure of safety. Any of you who've encountered Czech drivers, you know what I mean. The cops routinely arrested parents for not sending their kids to school...on foot, across an Interstate. The kids would then be siezed by the State. The Roma were finally resettled in newer and more accessible housing last year.
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