The name is absent

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gathered around me, those related to Vasilo holding my hands and clothes as I
approached.

Today, Vasilo was happier than usual. Upon seeing me a large grin grew across
her care-worn face. She stood and strode purposefully into her house waving for me to
follow. Once we were in her home she handed me a glass of cold lemonade and declared
proudly, “We found them!”. The confusion on my face made her smile even wider.
Vasilo and I have enjoyed a relationship that began with my graduate education. In 2002
I conducted fieldwork at this same compound on the edge of the Athenian suburb,
Halandri, where I was now living. My MA was based on the stories she shared with me
and the struggles she endured and that I witnessed (Alexandrakis 2003). Over the years
we kept in touch through friends and I would visit her whenever I was in Athens. By the
time I came back in 2006 to formally begin my dissertation research, I shared with Vasilo
a familiarity few outsiders to this Roma compound could claim with any of its members.

The room in which we sat today was part of her new home. In 2004 Vasilo had
expanded the old home I was familiar with in 2002, divided it in two by erecting plywood
and cardboard walls, and had given the old half to a family friend and the new half to her
daughter, Evi, who was recently married and had just given birth to a boy. Vasilo’s new
home was on the opposite end of the same side of the compound, about a two minute
stroll, in a comer on top of a small hill away from other houses. It boasted a powerful
wood stove and a good size television positioned in the middle of the main room. This
was the only place in the compound that received the MTV Europe station and its wildly
popular and constantly replayed, dubbed-over program, “Pimp My Ride”: an American
show based in California in which a popular rap artist takes the broken-down car of an

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