EVS Stories: The best moments of the project (IV) – by Martina Lolini

When I finished my activities in the school, I started thinking about the summer camps because the last part of my project consisted of that. The last volunteers told me a lot about their experience in the summer camps, they remembered the summer period as the best time spent here in Romania. So, I was very excited, especially because the first summer camp took place in the village in which I spent all the year teaching the children English. We started organizing everything for the last week of June to be able to start.

At the beginning, I didn’t think that the summer camps were so hard and difficult, both physical and mental. Speaking about me, when we’ve started, I have to say that I was not prepared at all for the amount of work that was coming. When you think about a summer camp you can imagine every kind of scenery, but nothing is similar to the reality. It is not easy at all to spend all day long with 25/30 kids who can speak only Romanian. In the first summer camps we had several difficulties. We discovered that all our work to prepare activities and also ourselves to manage the situations was not enough. All kids are different so also the way in which you have to relate with them has to change, our Romanian is not so advanced, a lot of activities had to be changed because of the place or the people involved in the camps, we had to adapt the schedule according to the weather. All these problems sometimes made us nervous and sometimes happened some disagreements, but, at the end, helped us to be more reactive to the situations.

After 2 months of summer camps, I can manage better with the kids, I know how to take initiative in unpredictable moments and my level of Romanian developed a lot.

Now, at the end of the experience, I understand the last volunteers when they described me these moments as the best of the project.

Spending all day long in little villages of Romania let me know deeper the culture, the people and made me feel part of a new environment, that in every moment supported me and helped me.

I became more confident about my skills and I learned how to manage in different (and sometimes uncommon) situations. All the people from this experience were part of my development and it’s difficult for me make a list of moments or special people. The only thing I can say is a big “MULTUMESC” for the opportunity I was given.

Martina Lolini (Italy) is hosted in Baia Mare by Team for Youth Association, in the “Life Skills for Rural Education” project, a European Voluntary Service, financed by the European Commission, through the Erasmus Plus Program.