An international team of more than 25 volunteers from 3 continents is waiting for you in the beautiful town of Baia Mare, in Romania. The intercultural environment around Team for Youth Association has a lot of potential when it comes to your personal development.
Details about the project
Name of the project: Eye Care / Day Care
Service: April 2015, 2015 – February the 29th, 2016
Location: Baia Mare, Romania
Number of volunteers in the project: 8*
Places (still available): 1 for Poles OR Estonians
*) The eight volunteers will come from Estonia, Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. The volunteers from Ukraine and Belarus have already been selected.
The hosting association – Team for Youth Association
Team for Youth Association was born in 2009, and since then has developed activities concentrating on three main topics: voluntarism (we also work as a center for recruiting and placing volunteers in different activities in the community), non-formal education (every year we organize a Carnival of non-formal education that promotes different instruments for experiential learning), intercultural learning (we bring together the local community with volunteers from different parts of the world, including other continents, like South America or Africa.
Activities at Team for Youth (T4UTH) revolve around a set of values that have formed in time and have grown together with the experience of our team: intercultural learning, volunteerism, tolerance, team spirit, and excellence. Based on these beliefs, our assumed mission is to stimulate the youngsters to develop themselves through volunteering activities, international mobility and non-formal education.
The tools used to achieve our team’s vision include international voluntary activities and other projects that facilitate youth mobility beyond borders. The partnerships we have built locally and internationally offer us a proper environment for recruiting, training and placing volunteers in projects with a variety of themes.
The hosting community – Baia Mare, Romania
Located about 600 km away from Bucharest (the capital city of Romania), close to the Ukrainian and the Hungarian borders, home to 115,000 inhabitants, Baia Mare, the capital city of Maramureş County, hosts a mixture of cultural and ethnic variety. A history of more than 2000 years of gold, silver and other nonferrous metals extraction has carved its landscapes and culture, with many architectural remaining from the medieval time.
The city itself has a number of cultural attractions, several parks and one of the best public libraries in Romania. Being surrounded by hills and mountains makes it perfect for all sorts of activities throughout all the four seasons, with spectacular hiking tracks like Creasta Cocoșului, Vârful Igniș or Vârful Pietrosu, a beautiful lake to cool you in the summer and many ski resorts for winter sports.
Not to mention that Maramureş itself gives you the opportunity to dive into one of the last places where rural European medieval life still thrives, with hand-built ancient wooden churches, traditional music, colorful costumes and festivals. Widely known for their hospitality, people living in Maramureş are always ready to give a helping hand.
The activities of the project
The project includes two different types of main activities. The volunteers will work, twice a week with a group of visually impaired adults and three times a week they will organize educational workshops for groups of children aged between 7 and 12.
The activities for visually impaired people include the following: music and singing, dancing, clay modeling, theater and English lessons. The volunteers will work in teams of 4 and will lead workshops for not more than 8 blind adults. In this way, they can pay specific attention to each of them during the activity. For the work with visually impaired persons, the volunteers will also have to prepare specific activities during their service: a blind exhibition, in which people without seeing disabilities can join, blindfolded and experience a world of smell, sound and touch. Also, the volunteers will organize, together with the blind participants, a living library that includes people with disability or health problems. During their stay in Romania, they will have to prepare a presentation of their country, adapted for the people who cannot see.
The activities with children include workshops that have educational objectives for the children. The workshops will have different topics, according to the moment when they are taking place: seasons, 8th of March, 1st of June, Easter, Christmas, etc. And they will also be organized according to themes of interest for children: animals, plants, science, biology, geography, culture, language and so on. The volunteers will have to prepare a schedule for workshops for every two months of their stay. Some workshops can be done several times, as every two months, the group of children will change. The volunteers are responsible of preparing their workshops, researching and implementing them. The HO will offer support and training to help them organize things better. In the end of their service, the volunteers will have to collect the workshop idea and put them in a booklet, in order to help other volunteers that are working with children, already. During summer holida ys, the workshops will be moved from Baia Mare to villages around our city, for a period of two months.
The profile of the volunteer we are looking for
Team for Youth Association sketched the general features for the profile of the candidates, according to the activities proposed. The candidate should be between 18 to 30 years and willing to know other cultures, to work with people from disadvantaged backgrounds (economically and socially), to be trained to grow personally and to learn and teach non-formal methods. It is preferable that the potential candidate can motivate themselves to get involved with T4UTH and have the initiative to organize new activities individually or with an international team.
- feeling comfortable with the idea of being the center of attention, comfortable to answer the curiosity of others about them;
- being an ambassador of their culture, willing to talk and make presentation about their country;
- being decided to analyze situations, communicate about problems and seek solutions to make things work better, both for themselves and the others, being proactive and confident;
- being willing to learn and develop themselves, in an intercultural team;
- willing to attend and organize activities for visually impaired youngsters and adults;
- being comfortable to work with very small children, in big groups.
Practical arrangements
The volunteers will benefit from the full support of the T4UTH staff and local volunteers in promoting, preparing and implementing the activities. T4UTH will also provide the volunteers with a mentor, a Romanian teacher, and, if needed, an English teacher as well.
The travelling costs to the hosting community and back are covered by the project budget, up to a maximum 275 Euros / volunteer.
The volunteers will share a flat with other long-term volunteers and there might also be the case of sharing one room with two beds. The volunteers will receive 450 RON (around 100 €) for food and 60 € pocket money. To avoid lack of budget management, Team for Youth decided to give the food money in the beginning of each month and the pocket money in the middle of the same month. T4UTH will also provide the volunteers with a Romanian sim card, charged monthly, wi-fi in the flats and the office and bicycles for commuting.
How to apply
There’s only one thing you have to do in order to apply for this project. Please send your CV and Motivation Letter (both in English), by email to solvita@t4uth.ro, mentioning “Eye Care / Day Care application” in the subject of the email.