Martin Dudi

Martin Dudi

Martin Dudi is a 23 year old Romani student from Písek who comes from a family that does its best to uphold Romani customs and traditions and even still speaks the Romanes language. Until the age of three he only spoke Romanes at home, and he did not begin to use Czech until he went to preschool.

Today Martin is studying Philosophy and Religious Studies at the South Bohemian University. The following is his life story to date, in his own words.

As a child I never suspected that I was different from others because of my skin color and social position. At the age of four I first went to nursery school and I saw that the other children were different from me and were behaving differently towards me than they did towards each other. From the beginning it was difficult to find friends.

In the first grade I began playing basketball. The moment I touched the ball, I knew it would be my favorite sport. At primary school I never had any problems, not with discipline and not with grades. In the ninth grade everybody began asking what I planned to study at secondary school. Everybody believed I would attend a secondary vocational school to learn a trade and become a cook, a mason, a plumber or something like that. I had a clear idea, though, so my answer was always: “I’m applying to the Business Academy”. I felt disbelief from all sides – apparently nobody believed I would have the chance to properly graduate from such a secondary school.

Just after I began my first year of high school, my family was struck by our biggest financial crisis ever and my parents were almost completely unable to pay our bills.

I wanted to aid my parents, no matter what it took. I spent all of my free time training children to play basketball, and after several weeks the main trainers wanted me on their training team. I attended a trainers’ course and my first paid job was training children to play basketball. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it certainly helped. Every month I would give my Mom more than half of my pay, telling her I didn’t need the money. After successfully graduating from business high school, I matriculated at the Faculty of Economics of South Bohemian University in the department of Business Economics and Management. Suddenly I began meeting many educated people and I began to think about what I actually want to be, what I want to do with my life. During the second year I realized that the field wasn’t very beneficial to me. I came home from university every day in a bad mood, and I paid almost no attention to the lectures because they had stopped amusing me, so I decided to switch majors and apply to the Theological Faculty and the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. Over the last few years I have come to realize that I want to keep working with children. I want to become a teacher or an employee of a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to working with children who come from poorly-situated families. In the future I would like to give public lectures telling people about the options life offers them, and not just for Romani people. A couple of days after making that decision, I met my good friend Ivan, and it occurred to him that I might spend a month in the USA, in Denver, Colorado, where the American basketball organization Cherry Hills is located – I work with them in the Czech Republic on projects for children. As a basketball trainer I have been in charge of a basketball camp for three years that is organized by the Cherry Hills club together with American trainers from Denver. I had some friends there, so I contacted them. I asked whether it would be possible to return to the USA with them when the camp here was over, to spend a month in Denver and learn something new. My friends from the USA were enthusiastic about the idea. They designed a program for me and I had the tickets in my hand in a couple of weeks. “I still can’t believe it,” I kept saying to myself. A boy from a Romani family, who lives in the “house of horrors”, was now in America.