My personal volunteering experience started before arriving fiscally in Romania with the screening process and then
the organization of the trips to go and come back. In this first approach everything went well and the contacts and
communications were clear but we did not know yet in which of the communities we were going. We discovered in
which community we were going to. I have been assigned to Filiași (Dolj region).
In July the 16th I did the trip to come to Romania, I arrived in the city of Craiova where I was welcomed by some of the
organizers of the project and given the first part of the money. I have seen for the first time the accommodation that
day and it have been a particular experience to wonder around in the kindergarten where most of the furniture are
child-measure, like chairs and some of the toilets and sinks. In the first week we had the possibility to meet each other
and it went well, following the suggestions and doing the activities of the person in charge of the teambuilding
activities. The following week, the one starting on Monday the 24th, we started the actual activities involving the art
part in the morning and the sport part with the children in the afternoon. The working time was scheduled to be six
hours per day five day per week. Excluding the weekends we achieved a total of 28 working days (for a total of 168
hours).
For the activities we split in two groups, one was for the sport activities and the other for the art activities, the groups
then would have to swap into the other activities. Actually, most of us were involved in both parts, and this was nice
because the amount of work was distributed over a vaster number of people. The art work went well and fast and
ended rapidly with the las touches done it in the week that star t with August 7th, the sport activities continued
without interruption and are still going on. The sport activities seem like to have been successful and involved a lot of
children and some of them seems interested on continuing to do sport between them, and others maybe will start to
do sport activities in an actual team. This part probably had success because of the empathy that have been created
between the volunteers and the local community, especially the children, that looked happy to have the possibility to
interact with foreign volunteers. The welcome from the locals have been most of the times warm and pleasant.
All of us had the possibility to improve in some field and to gain new skills and knowledge in different fields. There has
been also space for fun activities, party and travelling around Romania, with the accessible prices of the trains we have
been able to see a lot of the country’s best places, including the Transylvanian region and arriving to the far west on
the Danube River at the “Iron gates”. This volunteering experience also permitted me to see the country where I was
hosted and explore a different culture from the other participants in this project coming from different nations with
different traditions.
But there is one thing where I think that this project is failing. This part is the attention to the environment. I have
personally more pleasure to practice sport in a place where the nature exists and there are no biological hazards, like
abandoned cars exactly in front of where there have been made the art project to create a more pleasurable place for
kids to play. And as a European Union project is not aiming to some of the important objective that are listed in the
sustainable development goals promoted from the UN and also strongly sustained by the European Union. Little have
been done for creating actually a good sport place, where there are no abandoned vehicles in a school yard and a
plastic waste. The goals that are far from being reached are the number 13 and 15 involving respectively climate action and life on land (THE 17 GOALS | Sustainable Development (un.org) ).
I personally think that this project has a big potential and, in some communities more and in other less, and it is
working in the right way involving children to play together and start approaching sport if they never had the
possibility of doing it before. The hope I have is that some of them will continue on their will to do activities and to
hang out together. The most important thing for me have been achieved; the kids had fun until now and likes to do
sport with us. We also had fun since we came here and the possibility to meet new people from different countries,
starting friendships and sharing our cultures. The environmental part is not achieved yet, but I am pretty confident, or
at least I hope, that action will be taken in the next future to remove some of the things and also made the community
aware of these issues.
In any case it has been a pleasure and a privilege to participate in this project, to visit the country of Romania and
meet nice people, and I’m glad to have been a volunteer.
Leonardo