My name is Darina Gorvat. I live in Uzhhorod, in the Radvanka district, where mainly Roma people reside. For the past four years, I’ve been working as a mediator, specifically a social-medical mediator. Our work involves providing social and medical assistance to the Roma community.
Let me share another positive story. This story became positive quite recently, just a couple of weeks ago. Once upon a time, there was a family. Back in 1993, during a major flood that I’m sure everyone has heard about, they lost all their documents. The mother fell ill. She had three adult sons – aged 19, 22, and 24. However, none of them had any documents because their mother lost everything during the flood: birth certificates, passports, everything. She couldn’t renew anything because she only spoke Hungarian; she didn’t know Russian or Ukrainian, and there were no opportunities.
We spent a long time searching through archives to obtain her birth certificate. Then we updated the records from the maternity hospital, where she gave birth to these children, along with information about where she gave birth and who the father was. We also established the identities of these three sons through legal proceedings. We first helped the mother get a passport, and then we obtained birth certificates and passports for her three sons.
It all worked out, but we had to wait a long time. The process of searching for documents in the archives after submitting requests was quite lengthy. At first, we couldn’t find anything. Then we filed requests with the city archives and later with the regional archives. We found lawyers who processed these requests, handled our cases, as a simple application from us wasn’t accepted. This whole process took about seven months.
But now, these four Roma individuals have official documents. The three men have entered the labor market and are looking for jobs. I believe things will go well for them from now on.
