Empowered Leaders and Alone in Community: Stories of Romanian Roma Health Mediators

Abstract

This article investigates the experiences of Roma women who work as health mediators to build bridges between Romani patients and the public health system. Given the precarious socioeconomic conditions, overt discrimination, policy changes, and rights advocacy that mark these women's lives—and at the same time the near invisibility of Roma women in scholarship—this study offers women's stories as communicative practices of telling oneself. The mediators narrate stories of successes and challenges in their profession, of discrimination, of empowerment, and of identity shifts toward hybridity and contextual alliances. This study suggests that although a sense of entitlement makes sense in the context of much responsibility on the Romni's shoulders, speaking for their own ethnicity may become problematic and is accompanied by feelings of loneliness.