A company named Vaiduokliai, or Ghosts, just began its first tours of the Roma village of Kirtimai, advertising the trips as an “extreme challenge.”
People are being “treated like animals on a safari,” says Kvik, a Roma singer and community organizer, who fears such tours may further strengthen existing prejudices against the country’s Roma population. [...]
Lithuania has long struggled with the integration of its 2,000-some Roma population, with tens of millions of euros going toward housing and schools. But in the capital Vilnius, many residents say they don’t want Roma neighbors and so hundreds of Roma families are stuck in Kirtimai, a ramshackle village on the outskirts of town, effectively segregated from the rest of the population.
In local media, Kirtimai, the largest Roma settlement in the Baltics, is frequently described as a drug slum. A monitoring report from last year showed that news reports frequently describe Roma as lazy and criminal, often in the context of the drug trade, and one thing critics of the tour have fastened on is its emphasis on drugs and the fact that the tour guide is a former drug addict.
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