Exiting the vicious circle of poverty: Omama supports children and their mothers in the socially excluded localities of the Czech Republic and Slovakia

“It has been proven that 80 % of our brain tissue develops during the first 36 months of life,” adds Svatava Plachá, director of Cesta von CZ in the Czech Republic, which grew out of the original project from Slovakia about a year and a half ago. Between birth and the age of three, the brain has the greatest potential to set up all of the basic emotions, knowledge and skills needed to grow to adulthood.

The specially-established program targets the development of the intellect, motor skills and social skills in an attempt to increase the chances of children from socially excluded localities at living better adult lives. 

Give children a chance

The video footage available on the Cesta von website is reminiscent of an early 20th-century film from somewhere near Naples. We follow a dusty trail on a hot summer afternoon as it wends its way between small, battered houses.

Laundry hangs out to dry on the wire fences around the houses. A woman in a summer dress is walking between the small houses with a small group of curious children.

The woman is carrying a red plastic box of books and toys against her hip and a soft folding mat under her arm. She is what is called an Omama, the crucial figure in the program.

Omamas are native to the communities where they work, Romani women who are trained to visit selected families to do this work. Mothers also attend the lessons so they can continue their children’s instruction later, when the Omama isn’t there. 

In the video we see Omama Sandra in one of the homes, sitting on her mat with a little boy and his mother. The Omama is helping the boy put wooden pegs into the right holes based on their size.

The mother’s husband and the boy’s older siblings are watching attentively from a couch covered with a colorful blanket. Next we see the Omama working in another home with a tiny toddler.

The child is concentrating on a game of putting little balls into a glass bottle. When he completes the task, which aids the development of fine motor skills, Sandra puts him on her lap and reads an age-appropriate book to him.

The reading is quite interactive, so the boy is naturally involved in the game. The Omama rewards his every success with applause or praise, just as she does with all the children.

“Once we succeed in pushing forward the starting line, which for children from socially excluded localities unfortunately is not the same as for the children who do not grow up in such places, the children from the settlement will do better in school and will have a bigger chance of making it to secondary education. If they access higher levels of education, they will do better, they will be able to afford better housing and it will be reflected in their relations with others as well,” Hrica says of the theory behind the program.  

The Omama program has been working for more than six years in Slovakia and culminated in 2022 with pilot research in collaboration with Oxford University in the UK. That study focused on the development of 251 children up to two years of age in the areas of their cognitive function, fine and gross motor skills, and social skills.

The result clearly demonstrated that the children in the Omama program were significantly ahead in all these respects compared to children from excluded localities who had not been exposed to the program. However, they were still behind compared to children from the majority society.

“There is more work to do,” the Cesta von website quotes Michelle Fernandez, a pediatrician and researcher from Oxford University, as saying. 

Erika and Marcela

The Czech branch of Cesta von, called Cesta von CZ, is in its second year of operations. It works in five excluded localities in Karviná, Orlová and Ostrava.

According to director Svatava Plachá, the program is slowly looking for other localities in which to work and is planning to expand the Omama team. One of the main conditions for choosing the Omamas is that they must be Romani women who know the excluded locality well. 

“If they are figures who are known in the locality, it’s easier for them to gain entry to the families,” explains Plachá. Mentors from the program closely collaborate with the Omamas, women who prepare them to give the lessons and who are close to them, aiding them with solving their personal problems.

Supervisors regularly observe the Omamas’ work and track whether they are sticking to the program, providing them additional instruction as needed. The Czech program has just four Omamas so far.

Erika Biháriová (42), who works in the excluded locality in Orlová, is one of them and experienced life in its difficult conditions herself. “I know what it is to be hungry, to not have enough finances, or to take a bath in a tiny washtub,” she says.

She succeeded in leaving the ghetto, lives in a beautiful home today, and has a job she enjoys that is fulfilling. Thanks to her own previous experience, she manages to empathize with the situations of the families in the excluded localities. 

“I don’t condemn them and I don’t look down on them. I accept how their lives are set up. I respect how they live and I never indicate to them that I live in another way somewhere else,” Erika explains. 

According to Plachá, the ability to be loving, the need to help others, and understanding for others are other essential conditions which the Omamas must fulfill. “We are working in the apartments and houses of people living in difficult situations. They can tell who is sincere towards them, they know if somebody is doing this just for money. If a person is not sincere with them, they won’t accept that person,” she says.  

Marcela Chudá (46), who lives in an excluded locality in Karviná herself, says the offer to work as an Omama was the answer to her prayers. She found out about the opportunity from Erika, whom she knows through the Christian community in Orlová.

Marcela has been devoting herself to both non-Romani and Romani children as part of her pastoral service and very much wanted to work with children. She, too, considers it important that their mothers trust her.

Her advantage is that she encounters these families every day in town – at the school her daughter attends, in the shops, and on the town square. “The mothers who don’t trust the program at the start learn about it from the others or see how the other children progress under the Omama’s guidance. Then they immediately call me to come to their place, too,” laughs Marcela.

According to Erika, progress is not immediate after just a few lessons. “After the third month, though, the mother herself notices changes, she sees the child progressing. That, for me, is the best feedback and success. I believe that if the mothers didn’t see this aiding their children, if they felt we were just playing with them, then they wouldn’t even let us into their homes,” she explains.

“These are mothers who have, for example, 10 children, which in and of itself is unmanageable. Most of the time they’re on their own. Their husbands are at work all day. What’s more, they don’t have enough money. These mothers go all the way, they’re doing their best,” Erika says.

The mothers participate in each session. “Our aim is for the mother to have a good relationship with her child, to know how to communicate with her child, to play with her child, to say nice things to her child, to praise her child,” explains Marcela.

It is frequently the case that there are no books or fairytales for children in these homes. If children do not develop through a stimulating upbringing in their families, then as adults they have nothing to build on and transfer to their own children, so the same patterns are handed down intergenerationally.

“I also had no methods to follow when raising my own children,” Erika confesses. “I felt that I had to give my children something better than what I had myself, but I didn’t know how. If somebody had come to me back then and showed me how children are meant to develop correctly, then my children would be better off now as adults. Today I know this, and I am using these methods with my grandchildren.”

“I missed out on a lot,” reflects Marcela. She, too, wishes she had learned about this method earlier.

Marcela has two adult sons and a nine-year-old daughter. When her sons were small she was going through quite a difficult period.

Her husband drank and took drugs, and she drank and smoked herself. They frequently argued and were violent with each other.

Marcela is convinced that her faith in God is what saved her. She and her husband decided to believe in Jesus, stopped drinking and smoking, and finally got married after living together for 15 years.

Once they changed the way they were living, they managed to earn respect in the community.

Parental support

Marcela now works with 14 families and Erika with seven. “I work in a locality where the families are perpetually moving house, they don’t stay in one place, and that’s a problem. Currently we want to concentrate on a different part of the community that’s a bit more stable,” Erika explains.

According to Plachá, the number of Omamas in the Czech Republic will rise in the near future. The program is also expanding into new localities.

In Slovakia they started with four Omamas and now there are 40 working in 30 localities. The program is continuing to expand.

“Currently we are working with approximately 900 children, but soon there will be 1,100,” Hrica says. He initiated the program with others more than six years ago.

“I was assisting with Romani a Scouting program. We understood how important it is to intervene at an early age so children have a chance at a completely different life. First we looked for something similar to this abroad, but we didn’t find anything. Most of the time health problems and social disadvantage were combined in those examples, but in Slovakia this is just about poverty and social exclusion. Then we found a similar program in Jamaica on which to base our own. After consulting with many experts, speech therapists, psychologists, physical therapists and pediatricians, we then created a manual for our Slovak conditions,” explains Hrica.

Cesta von‘s Omama program is financed by sponsors, from individuals to big companies and firms. However, the aim of its director is for it to be incorporated nationally into the social services program.

Already a Cesta von team is part of different groups at various ministries involved with social subjects. As many studies show, support for the very youngest children is advantageous to all of society. 

The financial return to the state is greatest when there are interventions with children before the age of three, as they exponentially increase a child’s potential to study and work as an adult. Such a child has a much greater likelihood of fully, successfully integrating into society and will pay taxes instead of drawing on benefits and other financial support.

According to Plachá, the attitude of many majority-society people toward such an investment, including young people, is frequently a negative one, though. “Last month we visited a college preparatory school in Ostrava. It was clear the pupils there perceive the excluded localities in Ostrava as places which are highly stigmatized. The Omamas themselves are a positive example of how it is possible to extricate oneself from an excluded locality and its fate,” Plachá says. 

Cesta von is aware that poverty is a complex problem. The Slovak branch has therefore also launched other programs of support for families in excluded localities.

The Filip program is meant to raise families’ financial literacy through the aid of mentors and try to improve their social situations. The Amal program concentrates on teaching Slovak to Romani people who predominantly speak Romani.

Hrica is convinced that parental support is one of the basic prerequisites for success. “Children’s parents in the excluded localities face existential challenges and frequently do not have the mental energy to handle anything else. They need aid and motivation in their difficult situations,” he says.  

“Sometimes it’s actually just enough to give a bit of help and support so people in the excluded localities can have a chance to extricate themselves from the vicious circle of poverty,” Plachá says. 

First published in Czech in the print magazine Romano voďi.