March

🎵

Kindergarten, activity about the 8 of March, we painted the children face, despite of our lack of skills they were pretty happy. 

CARnaval party with orphanage girls. 

 Décoration in school for the party

Situation with Corona. No school but possible to go out. 

We went on a hike in a village nearby

the scenery was pretty great. 

Then shotdown.

 We went out only for shopping. 

All of this was really weird. All of us were constantly checking the situation in our countries. 

We started sewing mask for the local communities. For the ones that couldn't afford to buy one. 

may

.                                🎵

End of the quarantine but schools will remained until September. 

It was still not possible to have big rassemblement. We continue to do videos but were able to have weekly meetings in the office. 

We made a video for the European day (link). 

We had online midterm on zoom. For a week.

April

I turned 20 on the first. We watched movies and ate a cake at home.

We made two videos a week, to show activities that the kids could do at home. 

(link of the channel). 

I learned a bit about editing.

One day we made packages of food for the local community.

The local theater had the idea to do a small parade for easter. We went to decorate the truck. Some of the volunteers participated in the parade costumed as bunny. 

June

                                   🎵

JUNE...   

It's supposed to be summer but it rains a lot. It's kind of relaxing though. 

We are not able to go in bars and travel around Romania. We went on the first week to Timișoara. It was the first time I hitchhiked ( the picture was taken on the road). We were surprised by the rain on the way back but it was a nice trip. 

               We are focusing on our personal project. We'll have a lot of event around this summer. 

With other volunteers we are preparing a movies projection on the thematic of racism. It will happen every friday of july..

february

In the beginning of February we traveled to Italy. My flatmates finished their project and new volunteers arrived. 

January

                                     🎵
The roads were covered by snow when I came back. It was not as cold as I expected it to be though. 

The activities remained the same but we also started to go to a new kindergarten. 

At first it was not easy for me to do activities with  so small children but they were pretty attentives and endearing and with the help of the teachers, we were able to teach them a few simple things about planets and road safety. We always finished by a game and a dance. 

We also went a few times to another kindergarten where the children were around 25, older and much more agitated and it was fun to go but truly draining our energy at the same time. 

In the mean time, I was still going to second hands ( there is a lot of them in Romania) and to drink in pub few times a week. 

Regarding the romanian language , going to school truly help (especially since the volunteer I went with could speak and understand so we didn't need a translator). I was still going to romanian class once a week. 

December

                                

                       🎵

The schools were preparing for Christmas, and I learned and sang a lot of Christmas song in the orphanage.

We still had language café every weeks where we got to exchange on our culture and meet some locals.

We went to the christmas market and to the ice-skating. 

We had two weeks of Christmas holiday at the end of the month and I decided to spend them in France.

We spent some days in Budapest and Vienna and from there I took the plane to France. Going back was a bit weird but still nice. 

November

At the beginning of the month we had a team building for a week end in Coronini ( a village closed to the Danube) it was really windy but beautiful).

We did some activities together to get to know each other and worked better as a team. I got to meet some volunteers for the first time since they just arrived. 

We also went to another village to use electric bikes and it was pretty nice.

Regarding the activities, we went a lot in the orphanage. It was particularly difficult , cause not a lot of children were willing to come and we often had to do activities with two or three kids. Sometimes only one will show up. After going more, we got closed to a few teenage girls and tried to do other kind of activities such as art and craft, playing ping pong or other simple games.

At the end of the month, we took the train ten hours to go to our on arrival training in Bucarest. It lasted around a week, where we got to meet other volunteers, learn more about the volunteering program and think about what we want to achieve with this experience. We also had time to visit the capital and share on our cultures.

First month

Soo, I arrived in October 2019, in Belgrade and we drove until Reșița. 

First Impressions : Weird enough I don't know how  I expected Romania to be but it wasn't difficult for me to adapt. The town  has a lot of industries and is smaller that what I'm used too but has also its charm I guess. We're surrounded by hills and nature. 

I was more suprised by how many volunteers we are, to be fair. I didn't expect to have five roommates, who already 've been here for a lot of months. But being a big group has also its assets and I got to meet people from all around and outside Europe. Which is really a good experience. 

Activities : I got one week to adapt and foolow the others to their activities. It was interesting, I got to see different kinds of establishment as well of different way of creating activities. From assisting to a course of traditional dance in an elderly center,  painting with the kids of a center for disabilities to running with the kids from a roma school. It was pretty fun. 

Also difficult, when I had to run activities (usually we work by pair or by three if there are a lot of children but never alone). Particularly, cause we don't speak romanian and we have to ask someone to translate (which sometimes makes the dynamics more difficult with the children). Also in some schools we have to deal with group children where there is a big age gap between them so it's difficult to know which activities to do and how to interest them.