SOFIA, Bulgaria — Krasimira Alexandrova was struggling to make ends meet for her family, who live in Fakulteta, a Roma neighborhood on the outskirts of Sofia, well before the pandemic hit.
Her grandson Krasimir has autism, and she relies on government assistance to pay for his medical expenses. When Alexandrova took him for a routine psychological assessment in early March, before the coronavirus lockdown, the doctor claimed she and her son — Krasimir’s father, Trayan Metodiev — had been faking the child’s disability and downgraded his assessment of the severity of his disorder, cutting off access to funding.
Devastated, Alexandrova planned to use income from her part-time job cleaning offices in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital city, to make up for the lost income while she appealed the case. But just a few weeks later, one of her co-workers tested positive for COVID-19, leading her employer to lay off the entire staff. Shortly thereafter, Metodiev and his wife both lost their jobs. Then the police sealed off their neighborhood.
The pandemic has hit Bulgaria’s Roma particularly hard. When case counts started spiking in late March and early April, authorities moved quickly to institute sweeping lockdowns in Roma neighborhoods. In Fakulteta, residents were barred from leaving the neighborhood, with military police barring the exits.
Roma neighborhoods, most of which are technically illegal settlements, are only marginally connected to local infrastructure. Even the large neighborhoods, like Fakulteta, lack essential businesses like supermarkets and pharmacies. Under lockdown, residents who would otherwise travel to nearby neighborhoods to stock up on essentials were stuck with the scant supplies of their corner stores and whatever produce local merchants could find.
The strict restrictions exacerbated already glaring disparities between Bulgaria’s Roma and non-Roma populations: Some 74 percent of Roma families in Bulgaria, like Alexandrova’s, already live below the poverty line.
“Families we work with, who previously were poor but had enough to eat, were reporting they can’t feed their children,” said Sarah Perrine, the director of the Trust for Social Achievement, an NGO that works with Roma families in Bulgaria. “They were on the brink of starvation.”
At the time, authorities claimed these measures were necessary due to a higher concentration of positive coronavirus cases in Roma neighborhoods. However, Roma rights advocates say that there was no evidence of higher case counts and claim Roma were unfairly targeted because of long-held biases against the community.
This problem isn’t specific to Bulgaria: Between March and June, the European Roma Rights Centre (ERCC) identified 12 countries across Europe in which Roma communities faced movement restrictions or disproportionate impacts from emergency measures.
“[It didn’t matter] if it was in Italy, Slovakia, or Bulgaria — Roma faced different, and often harsher, emergency measures than the majority population,” said Jonathan Lee, advocacy and communications manager at ERCC.
“When cases were identified in Romani communities, we saw entire neighborhoods quarantined, police and military checkpoints on Roma-majority areas, violent police actions and even crop dusters spraying disinfectant over the homes of Roma,” he said. “These things simply would not happen in white, middle-class areas.”
Alexandrova and her family of four survived for almost two months on her disability pension, which provided 170 leva, or about €87 per month. (The average salary in Bulgaria is €580 per month.)
When she missed the due date on her electric bill, the company shut off service. Money for groceries soon ran out, too. “We got some food from organizations, which kept us alive for a bit,” said Alexandrova. “But mostly, we paid on credit. When that ran out, we had to sell our relatives’ jewelry.”
For Sandra Angelova, another resident of Fakulteta, the strict lockdown brought other fears. When her newborn came down with colic, she was forced to turn to Google to diagnose and treat her son, instead of visiting a doctor at a nearby health clinic. Not that she could have afforded the doctor anyway — her husband Xoro Georgiev had just lost his job.
A disproportionate number of Roma are, like Georgiev and Alexandrova, employed in the gray market. Without contracts or regulations governing their employment, Roma employees were in many cases the first to be laid off when the pandemic hit. Many of those who were lucky enough to keep their jobs at first lost them later when lockdown measures barred them from showing up. In order to leave their homes, police required they be able to show documentation of employment, which most workers on the gray market were unable to provide.
Without income, Georgiev, too, was forced to rely on donations from a local NGO, as well as money from his parents to buy groceries and basic items like diapers for his son.
As the lockdowns began to ease up over the summer, Georgiev found work at his father’s upholstery shop. But the pandemic had taken its toll, both physically and mentally, on the family. What little savings they had before are now gone and they live in constant fear of another lockdown.
“There have been rumors that there might be another lockdown but nobody knows when it will happen or how,” Angelova said. “It feels horrible to not know.”
Coronavirus cases in Bulgaria have spiked over the past few weeks — on November 4, the country reported more than 4,000 new cases, its highest one-day tally since the pandemic began. Authorities have started slowly implementing new restrictions, such as limiting the number of people allowed in restaurants and clubs, and stepping up enforcement of existing social distancing measures and mask-wearing. Faced with ongoing anti-corruption protests demanding his resignation, Prime Minister Boyko Borisov has resisted instituting another lockdown. But memories of the speed and strictness of the first lockdown — as well as the belief that a second risks decimating the country’s economy — has left many on edge.
“For most Roma, who are living in very marginalized and segregated communities, the existential threat of hunger and poverty — which was exacerbated by the pandemic — is probably their primary concern,” said Lee, of the ERCC.
The pandemic will further entrench longer-term issues plaguing the community such as poverty and discrimination, according to Lee.
As families struggle to make ends meet, students are likelier to drop out of school because they can no longer afford the fees, perpetuating a cycle of poverty in the community. The looming economic disaster is likely to lead to cuts in social funding and to mass evictions, which right-wing politicians tend to implement in Roma communities after periods of social or economic turmoil.
After the NGO Trust for Social Achievement stepped in, Krasimir’s appeal was approved and his full disabilities pension reinstated. But it was too late: Frustrated by the process and a lack of opportunity, his parents decided to cut their losses and move to Germany in a last-ditch effort to find work.
Alexandrova, however, was unable to join them. Faced with more than €1,000 in debt, she thought it best to stay and pay it off. “I can’t even afford to buy shoes — as soon as I get a paycheck, I put it straight into paying off my debts,” she said.
She returned to her job cleaning offices in September, but it wasn’t long before another worker tested positive for COVID-19 and she was once again laid off.
With no income and a significant amount of debt left to pay off, she is once again struggling to keep the lights on. “First the electric bill,” she said. “The relatives will wait a bit.”