Chapter 3 - Moralities and Emotions

Summary

Who Is Jakub?

A few weeks into fieldwork in Nitra, I met up with Jakub in a local park to discuss my impressions from my research up to that point. I had known Jakub longer than other interlocutors since we had met at a three-day workshop on “Fighting radicalization with art,” an event organized by a Bratislava NGO, aimed at activists and pedagogues right at the beginning of my fieldwork. Now, a few weeks after I started doing participant observation at Pomoc a Nádej, I felt it was the right time, and Jakub was the right person, to go beyond discussion of everyday matters and the little crises of refugee work and address some of the questions I had been brooding over: about refugee supporters’ biographies, their negotiation of values and political pressures, their attitudes toward their clients—and how their actions and decisions emerged from the messy situation surrounding them. It was a warm day in mid-April, enticing dozens of families to recover bikes and roller skates from their garages and take them outside to the sunlight for the first time this year. Amid this jolly and noisy crowd, sitting on an ale bench, with a fragrant beer in front of him, Jakub looked like a man quite content with his life. Jakub was my gatekeeper at the organization in Nitra. Less than two years earlier, he had assumed the project manager's position for a refugee help organization, leading a small team of three social workers, an administrative worker, and a standby interpreter. Jakub was known for getting along with anyone and his extrovert approach and tireless effort to liven up every situation with his witty, mocking, but never harmful jokes.

On the sunny bench near the Nitra park kiosk, Jakub reflected on the recent changes in his life. They were quite substantial. Jakub had abandoned his job as a researcher and pedagogue at the University of Prešov's Faculty of Engineering. It was the kind of work he loved and considered himself to be good at, but the quickly eroding state of the Slovak education system and the meager financial prospects pushed him out of university.