- 27 June 2016
- Posted by: Team for Youth Association
- Category: Volunteering Stories
Hello, my name is Jennifer! I am 26 years old. Before my volunteering I was a working. I was a social integrated French girl willing to discover the world but afraid of making the first step. One day I realized it was time to go and I started to look for volunteering that could make me rich of new culture and knowledge, and I fell in love with T4UTH project. It was exactly what I was looking for: working with children in Romania!
I was going to meet these Romanian people we judged so easily without having really meeting one of them… and what a surprise!
Now that I’m here for almost two months I can say that everything that I thought about this country was wrong. I discover more and more in every day how this country is beautiful with such friendly and open-minded people. I was expecting something different, but this experience is beyond my expectations. Romania is full of culture and traditions perfectly mixed with a modern way of life. It is a crossroads between Western and Eastern cultures that makes it amazing!
Besides all of this, volunteering allows us to learn more about the countries of the other volunteers. I am living with a Spanish girl and a Turkish boy, and we are sharing and learning a lot about each other, cooking, way of living and thinking, music, geography, language… As I discover the others I am discovering myself. Not being in our comfort zone pushes us to move forward, to surpass ourselves, to rethink our way of getting into things…
More than crossing physical frontiers, I am breaking my own stereotypes and barriers. Today, I feel so happy when Romanians come to me in the street to ask me something, thinking I’m one of them. Because I really feel now I am one of them. I know now more than ever, that I am not just a French girl, I am a citizen of this world.
This volunteering is the first step of a long travel… Thank you Baia Mare! Thank you T4UTH!
Jennifer Fousseret (France) is hosted by Team for Youth Association in Baia Mare, in the “ReAnimate” project, a European Voluntary Service, financed by the European Commission, through the Erasmus Plus Programme.
