Carnival of non-formal education – PHOTO VOICE – Veselka Kostova

I’m Vessie and I am responsible for the Photo Voice method as a part of the “Carnaval de nonformal” project with non-formal education.

The carnival itself took part in 7th to 13th of October in Baia Mare. There were many activities organized by the other volunteers like Forum Theatre, Living Library, Open Space Technology, Improvisation games, Street Animation, Flash mobs, Invisible Theater, World Cafe and Social and Educational games.

In my opinion the whole event went pretty well, there were many people involved and I actually think that it achieved its main goal – impact on the local community.

I personally attended some of them – Living Library, Forum Theatre, Street Animation, Flash mob and the Social and Educational Games and I was really impressed how good they worked. Everyone who was in charge in his method was working really hard and was giving his best to make things right.

I was impressed by the Forum theatre, where even if I didn’t understand the conversation in Romanian, I was able to catch the idea and understand the presented problem.

The Living library was also very impressive for me. I had never met someone who works in prison and surprising to me I had many questions and it was really interesting to “read” the book of “The woman who work in prison”.

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The other method I was involved was Social and Educational Games. There was a big football tournament for the children in primary school. There were four teams playing with each other, fighting for the first place. The children were really passionate about the tournament, you could easily see how big this event was for them. Even in the end they were so happy jumping and running around celebrating the winning. Seeing this was more than an evaluation for the performance of the method itself.

My method was PHOTOVOICE, it is mostly used in the field of community development, which combines photography with social action.

The idea was to present the life of the deaf people and whatever they would want to show to the society by the method of photo voice. For that reason I worked with the people from the Deaf People Association in Baia Mare. They were asked to represent their point of view by taking photographs in order to share their problems with the society.

I received 20 pictures with really impressive messages and I presented the exhibition in the city library, in one of the biggest parks in the city and in the old square of Baia Mare. There were many local people who saw the exhibition and who were impressed by the pictures and the messages they were sending. There were also many young people who saw the pictures, which in my opinion was the most important point of the exhibitions – to have an impact on the youngsters. It is good for them to realize that deaf people are not much more different from all the other people.

In my opinion my method also reached its main goal – to give publicity to deaf people’s problems and their way of life.

Veselka Kostova