Searching for Constantine back home in Romania
Paraic O'Brien
Foreign Affairs Correspondent
Last October, Paraic O’Brien spent three days and two nights with Constantine Boboc, a Romanian living rough in London. Here, he goes to Romania to try and find him.
Last year we met a Roma gypsy called Constantine Boboc living rough around Marble Arch in London.
He brought us on a night time tour of Roma London. His story hit a nerve. Not just because of the squalor or the fact that he’d hidden bin bags full of clothes for his children in the scrub around London’s railway stations, but because he exuded resilience and humour.
He made us laugh. Some viewers got in contact to say they’d even shed a tear.
You can watch the original film here.
Our report finished with us seeing him off from a bus in north London, returning home.
But where was home? Why would you leave it to live under an underpass? What does someone like Constantine leave behind when they travel to London to try to find work? We decided to travel to Romania a few weeks ago to find out.
We ended up in a remote area on the border of Romania and Moldova. We had a partial address but the phone number Constantine gave us didn’t work.
What ensued was a surreal road trip into the poorest part of the European Union. There was the owner of the most remote, kitschiest night club in Romania who paid for it thanks to a stint washing cars in Bristol; there was the small time crook who would become our “guide”; there was the other local wide boy who became a YouTube phenomenon after his arrest in London.
But would we find Constantine and what would it tell us about Roma migration to the UK?