The March issue of doc! photo magazine is now available, with eight new stories. To introduce this new edition, we published Michael Biach‘s story named “Slum life of Roma kids in LunÍk IX“.
Luník IX is an apartment complex in the southwestern suburbs of Košice, Slovakia. Originally build as home for middle-class families with a capacity for 2,500 people, the Slovakian government started to resettled thousands of Slovakian people from the Roma minority in the 1990s. Today Luník IX is home to an estimated number of 6,000 to 8,000 Roma making it the largest Roma community within Slovakia.
Over the years Luník IX became an urban slum. The unemployment rate is nearly 100%, inhabitants aren’t able to pay their water, gas or electricity bills. The waste disposal isn’t working, inhabitants constantly throw their trash right out of the window. Everything that was not nailed down has been stolen and resold. Several buildings are in an unacceptable condition, at least one complex is at risk of collapsing. The toxic standard of the waste disposal has reached a dangerously high level starting to harm the town’s ground water. People are supplied with freshwater only during a few hours a day.
The children from Luník IX are the first to suffer from these horrible conditions and they should be the last to blame for the situation. Luník IX is overcrowded, more and more flats become uninhabitable, winters are long and cold. Open fires inside the flats, rat plagues, diseases, malnutrition and worsening hygiene standards are among the fatal threats to the children in Luník IX.
Košice is, along with Marseille, this year’s European Culture Capital.
Contents of this issue :
– Hiroshi Watanabe – “Love Point”
– Marc Erwin Babej – “Buddhists in Burma: Timelessness In a Time of Change”
– Ole Elfenkämper – “Waiting For a Better Past”
– Tomek Gola – “M41 – Portrait of Heart of Asia”
– Michael Biach – “Slum Life of Roma Kids in Luník IX”
– Miguel Gaudencio – “A Sailor, a Captain And a Dreamer”
– Paolo Pagnini – “Free Spaces”
– Jennifer Trausch – “Touching Ground”
