Volunteering Stories: First impressions on PLAY project – by Juliette and Alex

Changing environment can be always somehow complex, although having a blank page ready to be written on is exciting. We both chose to come to Romania without any expectations, ready to discover and to wide our horizons. We chose the PLAY project!

As soon as we arrived we had to get in self isolation. It didn’t seem the funniest thing ever, but with the help and support of the association we managed to get step by step into the project.

Team For Youth Association showed us its functioning and how they structure their projects with both meetings and activities. We also had the chance to learn about the current situation of the different communities we’ll work in, its people and their history by watching documentaries made by ex-volunteers. Thanks to it, we got to see an idea of what we can do as a personal project in the coming time. We then had interactions with our team to get to know better the main topics we’ll have to work on and how we’ll be able to do it, as well as some activity possibilities.

Local volunteers have also been an interesting part of our experience by sharing their lifestyle and knowledge about the country, giving us Romanian lessons and a direct view of the kind of people we’ll meet on our way, and even teaching us how to cook plăcinta !

For sure, the lock-down situation wasn’t the best to start with, but still, the learning chances we had until now were very useful to acquire a starting point of what will obviously be a wonderful, fulfilling experience.

The volunteers are hosted by T4UTH in PLAY (2019-3-RO01-ESC11-077836), on a 5 months European Solidarity Corps in Baia Mare. The content of this testimonial does not reflect the official opinion of the European Union. The responsibility for the information and views expressed in the article rests entirely with the authors.