She reminds me of a rubber toy on an elastic

Author: Verka Dudi K’oto
Location: Ostrava
This story was told to me by Eva, a twenty-five year-old nursery school teacher.
"Liduska is a poor Romany kid. A year ago she fell out of a third floor window and landed on her head. Since then she’s been hyperactive, and her eyesight is bad: she has to wear thick glasses. But she is very intelligent and forceful.
Her mother who doesn’t like her. Liduska is not what she had imagined. She says that the kid is “kind of deformed.” I guess Liduska does not create the right image for the mother.
Liduska´s favorite places to be are school and after-school care. She stays every day till four-thirty and then goes home alone: she lives about three hundred meters away from school.
But the other kids do not much like her either. She is very lively and often annoys them.
She sometimes reminds me of a rubber toy on an elastic. To her, every adult represents a chance to compensate for the lack of her mother’s love. She hugs and kisses everybody.
But why am I telling this?
At school, everybody knows how bad Liduska’s family background is. People feel sorry for her and tries to pamper her. She’s the one who gets a birthday gift from our secretary, and the new pencils go to her.
And that’s the core of the problem. It’s a kind of vicious circle, because Liduska often takes too much advantage of her position, and undoubtedly that has a bad effect on her.
But how to break the circle? We’re all only human.”

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