October 2018: My first volunteering month in Romania

As you may know, we are hosting at the moment our first EVS volunteer, Nikolia, from Greece. She will spend 12 months with us, helping to develop our youth center and create a more active community by volunteering! Each month our volunteer, Nikolia Papadopoulou will share her experience in Romania through a small report which we will post it on our blog.

I will start my article sharing with you what I learned every week but firstly I would like to thank Mihaela, the project coordinator, who gave me the opportunity to learn all these things, to my mentor Dragoş who supported me, my Romanian language teacher Alin who helped and teach me the language and the history of Romania and to the volunteers of Asirys who helped walk in the EVS path.

From the first week I learned from Mihaela a lot about Erasmus + programs, as she informed me about it and answered my questions. I met my mentor
Dragos and talked about our cooperation during the program. Mihaela showed me the way to write youth exchange projects and we started together to find information about a project for autistic children and write a youth exchange program. We discussed new ideas for other projects or events such as blood donation campaigns, fundraising by approaching sponsors, color run event - Cros in Tîrgu Frumos II, planting trees and flowers. I had my first Romanian Online Lesson and I also had my first Romanian lesson with my teacher. The first week ended with attending a cultural event in Iasi about books and a city game where I met a lot of young Romanian people and visited a lot of places in Iasi. 

During the second week, I got involved in the organization. I sent the Youthpasses certificates of Roma Heart project, in which I was part in August 2018 and we first met; I helped the project coordinator to make a report about the Rroma Heart project by analyzing the Youthpass certificates and leaders reports; I had another cultural visit to Pascani, a city near Tîrgu Frumos. Then I met with my mentor and talked; he helped me a lot by giving me his support, I could feel that I am not alone and that I have a friend and a supporter. With my Romanian teacher, I went to restaurants, to a supermarket and other places where he showed me how I can communicate with the Romanian citizens about some daily things.

During the third week, with the help of Mihaela, I did research about crafting traditional Romanian objects and start writing a project about traveling and crafting in Romania. I visited my mentor in an event which he organized about a book. I had another Romanian lesson.
I was also part of a science lab which was established in our youth center. I helped the chemistry teacher during the lab to cooperate with the children and took a lot of photos so we can post them on our Facebook page. 

Between 21-27 October I was in Bucuresti for the on-arrival training course about EVS. I had made a different report about this week. The next day I returned from on-arrival, I visited the Cucuteni camp together with my coordinator and language teacher. We discussed and planned the changes we will do in the area like tree planting and get ready the place because we will use it for the next projects. We also visited a local shop interested to support our projects and started organizing a new place in which we will integrate cultural events and activities in order to promote the involvement of entrepreneurs in the community and generally to support the local economy. 

This was my first month of my EVS journey in Romania. Every day I learned a lot of new things. It was a full month, I was meeting new people, learning new culture and made the first steps in Romanian language.

Building Bridges is a project funded by Erasmus+, a programme of the European Union. The content of this article is the exclusive responsibility of the authors, and the National Agency and the European Union are not responsible for how the content of the information will be used.