Janette Motlová came from a Romani settlement and today directs the Research Institute of Child Psychology and Psychopathology in Bratislava, Slovakia
Last year Janette Motlová was a candidate for the Children's Ombudsperson post in Slovakia, where she was supported by the nonprofit sector and others. However, she considers her greatest success so far to be when she became Instructor of the Year 2017, the same year she was given an award for exceptional contribution to building civil society from the Orange Foundation (Nadácia Orange).
Motlová comes from Nové Město nad Váhom, where she grew up in a Romani community. After completing primary school, she became the first person in her family to ever graduate from a college preparatory secondary school.
Her path to that education was not an easy one. While she wanted to study and was constantly asking questions, those around her wanted to see her as a future homemaker, mother and wife.
“Mom was my fan in her heart of hearts, for my ‘rebelling’, but she had to pretend she wasn’t in front of our male Romani relatives. Sometimes she even cried about it. She wasn’t crying because I was a good student, though. She always told me: ‘You know that paper won’t turn you into a gadjo [non-Roma]. Once you get a job, they will always see you as a gypsy [cigánka].’ All of that she already knew, in her simple way, and she told me so. She was unhappy because I was growing inside, and she was right, she told me that if I went to school she would lose a daughter. She was right, because I no longer had anything in common with those around me,” Motlová told online broadcaster ROMEA TV during the “Ten Minutes Plus” interview program.
Motlová matriculated to university 11 years after graduating from high school, graduating in social work and earning a master’s. She established the Eduma nonprofit, where she teaches youth, with the aid of story-telling, about where our biases come from and how we can better understand our own emotions and fears.
She also began blogging for the newspaper SME.sk, for which she won a journalism award, and then she wrote her autobiography, Cigánka [Gypsy Woman]. “In the book I describe things I’ve done of which I wasn’t proud. However, I describe why I had to do them. I wrote it for people whose children are Romani and who have to combat prejudice. Such children frequently think about who they are. What makes a Romani person Roma is not just the culture or the language. They’ve asked me many times if I can be a Romani woman at all when I don’t speak Romanes. I tell them I feel as if I were a gadjo who feels like a Romani person,” Motlová explains during the interview.
Why doesn’t she speak Romanes at home? Which parts of her life come from the Roma and which from the Slovaks?
Our guest on “Ten Minutes Plus” is the director of the Research Institute for Child Psychology and Pathopsychology in Bratislava, Janette Motlová.
