Yasmina Impushkatu was in the 9th grade at the Technological High School “Cezar Nicolau” in Brenest when, at the suggestion of her very good friend who was the president at the time, she decided to run for the position of vice president of the student council. During the election, each of the ten candidates had to go from class to class to support their initiatives and convince their classmates to vote for them.

“It seems that we were two girls, the only Roma girls,” Yasmina recalls. When it was her turn to give her speech, she chose to speak fluently and confidently looking others in the eye, rather than reading from paper, like most. He talked about the rights of students, how important it is to defend yourself, even in front of teachers, about the projects he wants to implement in their school. In the end, he got the most votes and came out on top. “It was my biggest chance,” she says. “The council helped me impose my respect on students. Let me show them that I’m not a bitch, I’m not a black woman and I’m not a bitch, as they say. I showed them that it doesn’t matter what race you are, where you’re from, what color you are. What’s important is what’s in your head.”

“I decided to stop being labeled like that in high school. To show who I can really be”

Yasmina is 17 years old, in the 11th grade, studying horticulture and agriculture. He feels that he has grown and developed the most over the past three years.

In elementary school, he was ashamed that he was of Roma nationality. She was the only black girl in the class, and she felt that there were some differences in her classes, her grades, and especially when she went out into the city and the guards in the stores followed her, as if she wanted to steal something.

“I decided to stop being labeled like that in high school. To show who I can really be.” It also happened that some colleagues threw angry words, opened a flashlight and asked: “Where are you?”, or refined some subjects in order to take them seriously. At home, she did not talk about what was happening at school, because sometimes it seemed to her that she could not be vulnerable.

However, he found refuge in music and painting. Yasmina has been drawing since the first grade, ever since her mother bought her Barbie magazines and she loved their illustrations. He decided to rethink them, otherwise to snatch them from her hands. “I noticed that through drawing I could express exactly what I was feeling,” he recalls. Her first more complex drawing was a whale and a fish lost in the ocean, in abstract colors.

From drawing, Yasmina moved to the art of make-up. She was 10 years old when she found a makeup tutorial on YouTube that convinced her to go shopping. He bought a box of eyelashes for seven lei and started practicing. At first, she applied them to her mother and sister, in her room, on the bed. Later, they invested in a special lash bed that is much higher than a normal bed and is more comfortable for the technician’s spine and visibility. He had no experience in this, but he did it out of passion and wanted to learn. She did not have a client yet, because the family was uncomfortable bringing strangers into the house. “Then my mom told me to wait until she did my salon and then I would do what I wanted,” she recalls.

Last year, Yasmina, together with her sister who is two years older, who also completed make-up artist courses, arranged a separate room in the house for a salon. They started making appointments and that’s how their little business started. “In the summer season, I was already full,” she says. “I never dreamed of having my own place to apply eyelashes.” During the summer vacation, Yasmina also attended courses to deepen the basics of make-up.

Her first client was a friend. Then gradually more people gathered from Facebook who had heard about her, and then girls started coming for recommendations. The best marketing strategy that worked for Yasmina was word of mouth. It fell in months when the flow was lower, but also in months when it was full – in December, for example, it also had four meetings a week. First, he sat on the lash bed for eight hours to make sure they were applied well. Along the way, however, he reduced the time, and now he manages to fit in two and a half hours, if it is a simpler procedure.

“Dear parents, let your children dream”

Yasmina chose the profession of an eyelash extension artist, although she works more and sometimes the income is not as high as, for example, her sister, who is strictly a makeup artist and also collects 2,000 lei for a full day. “I could earn 100 lei a day. That is, there was an extremely big difference.”

At some point, her mother had doubts – because she did not see results, she thought that her daughter was struggling too much and that it was a waste of time. Yasmina was not disappointed, but convinced her with the patience she had enough to pick up each individual eyelash, the passion she invested from her first clients, and the happiness she radiated because she was doing what she wanted “I told her then: mom, let let me continue that you cannot do something if there is no continuity, there will be no results. Just like you planted something and want the result to be tomorrow…”

Yasmina also spoke on stage earlier this year about the importance of trusting the choices you make about your future. “Maybe I haven’t always had the chance to open up,” he said at the EducOm Together conference. She then explained that it was not her family’s fault for being skeptical of her desire to attend high school or, later, college. “There are still people who do not believe in the necessity of these measures. Stigma and discrimination still affect Roma children. Do we really need to find the culprit? Exactly not. What really matters in our discovery is ourselves.”

He talked about how he understands why parents sometimes doubt their children’s abilities and how racism often cuts their wings. But he also noted that if he had ignored all these doubts, he probably would have dropped out after high school.

Her speech, delivered with great poise, was about how she proved to those around her, including her loved ones, that she could be so much more than they imagined. “My parents taught me that I can have a beautiful life, which I now allow myself to build step by step according to my dreams and desires,” Yasmina said with a smile. From the hall, the mother listened to her daughter, who urged all parents to believe in the strength of their children: “Dear parents, allow your children to dream, discover and develop. In the recipe for success, you and teachers are the most important ingredients,” the teenager concluded her speech.

“I will never forget this dream”

Sometimes it is difficult for Yasmina to combine school and meetings. She is still involved in student council and says her fellow students are begging her not to step down. He has revived the GS – Cezar football team which has been on hiatus since 2013, started a weekly student radio program Vocea LTCN and is preparing to launch art clubs (reading/painting/painting). “I can never reconcile them all, just cancel them,” she says. Appointments are usually scheduled first. If the client tells her that she can come on Tuesday, from 08.00, then she leaves the school, with everything she has, and calls her to take care of her eyelashes. And what he lost at school, he later recovers separately.

She also encounters shortcuts in her work. She always has a basket of candy, cookies, or nibbles in the salon in case customers get hungry so she can help herself. “A client once told me that she was a little sick of being eaten like that by people like us,” she recalls. “When I heard that, the sky fell in my head.” Then it was thought that maybe the girl was sensitive to food from foreigners, and also to the fact that, being Roma, they are often told that they are not taken care of. She couldn’t help but think about this option, which hurts her the most, but which she tries to ignore more and more often.

As Yasmina’s passion for this industry grew, she began to look for tools that would help her decide on her next steps. She googled make-up schools and found a prosthetic she could study at Gorton Studio in the UK. Makeup with special effects fascinated her, and she continued to read about the designer Neil Gorton, who founded the school, and about the films that the students of this studio worked on.

This is how Yasmina’s dream to work in the film industry, outside the country, appeared. She knows it may seem like an impossible dream, but that doesn’t stop her. She was told about all kinds of incidents, but she still didn’t get out of it. “It’s a bit more difficult, but I hope it will work out in time. I will never forget this dream.”

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On International Roma Day, the “Together” Community Development Agency Foundation presents the life stories of some Roma who are proud of themselves. The articles are part of the project “Getting to know the (r)human next to us”, funded by the Active Citizens Fund Romania program, financed by Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through EEA grants for 2014-2021 and aimed at raising awareness of human rights and equal attitude with an emphasis on the Roma minority. The campaign is conducted by HotNews.ro.