Yeah I remember that interview.I agree, thank you. As a high school teacher I couldn't imagine that a parent would publicly announce the gender of their child, since there are several transgender students and teachers in our school and it's not rare. Still, I'm sure they have to put up all kinds of comments. It might be more usual in Finland to belong openly to minority but other students cän make it really hard even today.
I remember reading somewhere that B told he didn't face any discrimination being a child of Serbian parents and there were many similar children in the school, but they were kind of poor. What did he mean by that? I mean, his parents are doctors, so I would imagine, they didn't have any financial problems so maybe he meant his friends in the school. Are children of Serbian heritage usually from poorer families? Are there schools for the rich and for the poor in Slovenia and B's school was for the poor?
I hope, you can interpret what I mean, since my english skills are very limited (not that kind of teacher).
He mentioned that for the first few years they lived in Fužine. It's a neighbourhood in Ljubljana with a lot of tall apartment buildings built in the 80s. This neighbourhood sometimes gets a bad reputation but it's just dumb talking really, it's actually a nice place to live, lots of green. It is not by any means any kind of ghetto or anything like that, though some people like to say that, these are people who have never travelled the world and actually seen what a real ghetto is. There was even a documentary about it (as a bunch of entertainers/artists come from there) and they all spoke fondly of it, back then being a tight knit community etc. The buildings do have that socialist appearance but the actual quality of how apartments were built back then was actually better than today a lot of times. At the time of when those apartments were built a lot of economic immigrants from other YU republics moved to Slovenia. As you can imagine, these are often people who do low wages jobs. Back then companies owned apartments that they would rent cheaply to their employees, so a lot of immigrants ended up living there, and still do. Similarly where I lived as child, the coal mine owned a lot of apartments, so it was common for co-workers to be also neighbours. (can't imagine that nowadays...)
It's possible that the hospital also owned some apartments there and that's how B and his family lived there, until they bought a house and moved to another part of town where B met neighbour Martin.
So as a result of that, it makes sense that a lot of non-Slovenian kids were at his school as well.
I wouldn't say there are schools for rich and poor in Slovenia, there's only a few private schools (Montessori, Waldorf, etc) but if we are real, gentrification is also a thing here nowadays, just like in many places around the world and it is starting to feel that some neighbourhoods are richer than others which is unfortunately, reflected in the neighbourhood school kids as well.