Art with Roma youth in Hungary
In early July, I travelled to Budapest and onwards to the small community of Bodvalenke in north-eastern Hungary, close to the Slovak border. Summer activity camps and educational weekends have been held in this village for around a decade, organised by Hungarian volunteers and with international volunteers joining in the summer for the past couple of years. I found out about the project through an organisation called IVS-GB, which holds a database and helps place volunteers on international projects. Last year I took part in a project in Lapland, also arts-related, and previously I have volunteered with young asylum-seekers in Belgium and Poland.
Bodvalenke is situated in a lovely rural location, surrounded by rolling hills, woods and fields, but there is also a great deal of poverty in the area and limited opportunities, especially for young people. Most of the villagers are of Romungro background and face a certain amount of discrimination. Some of the village houses were in need of renovation and few had running water- this needed to be collected from pumps in the street. The nearest secondary school was at least 40 mins away by bus.
Whilst we only had 5 days with the children, it was a very busy and energetic time, with five groups attending for 90 mins per day, aged from 3 to 16. We enjoyed a range of simple sport, nature, dance and art activities, including making glove puppets and designing ceramic tiles (which would eventually be fired and added to the new exterior wall of the activity house). It was great to see that some of the teenage boys also wanted to design and paint a tile.
The kids found it amusing to try and teach us international volunteers Hungarian words- it’s a complex language and hard to pronounce! I can only really remember what sounded like “kissy-couture” = a puppy.
The village is also unique in that the majority of buildings have at least one exterior wall painted with a colourful, striking fresco. This was an EU project from around 15 years ago, when artists from Romani backgrounds from all over Europe were invited to create murals on the houses- the idea being to help create a draw for tourists and provide much-needed income in the area. The frescoes depict a number of themes or stories from Roma culture.
Sadly, by 2026 it seems the project didn’t really have much of a long-term impact in terms of providing support to the community for implementing these ideas – though this short Youtube report from 2014 indicates that there was an initial enthusiasm.
For example, whilst we were in the village we did see tour groups of cyclists passing through every day, but they did not stop to view the frescoes- possibly they did not feel comfortable, as it would have required getting up very close to strangers’ houses, plus there is no interpretation or signage provided about the frescoes or their meanings.
For those children interested in art, hopefully their home village can serve as inspiration and I was grateful for the chance to spend a little time with them.
Acrylic painting and anodised aluminium jewellery