Experiences; Learning another culture

After five months living here in Romania I believe I got to meet a lot of the country itself and its culture as well. Although I think there are still a lot of things I could learn, I’ve already caught a hint.

To be honest I didn’t expect it before, as I had in my mind just a post-communist image of the country, but Romania is really beautiful, the northerner you go the more beautiful it gets. The surrounding nature combined with the castles and the architecture seem resemble to a place described on a fairytale. I like traveling around Romania.

The people here are also very nice. I’ve traveled quite a lot just by hitchhiking and I’ve met some very helpful, kind and generous people. It worths mentioning that I could notice many similarities in the daily lives Romanians and Greeks . Maybe the bad economy that both countries had in the past few years have something to do with it, who knows.

My journey here is coming to an end , but one thing is certain; I liked living here and I’m glad that I could see more of România and break any stereotypes that I may had in the past.

- Michael

Romanian Travel Photo Diary

     Now that my stay in Romania is getting to its end, and after more tan 5 months living here, if I get to think about the best things that bring you the EVS experience one of the first things that comes to my mind is the opportunity to travel, and I think most of the volunteers would agree with me on that.

Traveling around Romania and the neighboring countries has not only allow me to get to know new places and people, but it has helped me to understand better romanian history and culture, and, as a volunteer, it has taught me how to travel with very little budget.

So here I would like to share a small collection of some photos I’ve been taking during those trips, hoping that they will inspire someone to travel and discover new places.

06.01.2019 Timisoara, Romania

08.02.2019 Bucharest, Romania

02.03.2018 Belgrad, Serbia

31.03.2019 Budapest, Hungary

13.04.2019 Oradea, Romania

28.04.2019 Istanbul, Turkey

30.05.2019 Vama Veche, Romania

09.05.2019 Brasov, Romania

18.05.2019 Cluj-Napoca, Romania

- Lucía

Educating with a language barrier

Hello everyone! Last week we finished our last classes in the schools, so the project is almost over. After almost six months of going to, in total, seven different schools, I have noticed some similarities. Some things are the same in different schools, in various classes of different grades. There is one thing that stands out for me. In every new class that we went to, we always had to see what was the level of English of the students. All of our activities are in English, because we are not really Romanian experts, so to say.

Sometimes it was hard for us to make the students understand, because we didn’t know if they would be able to understand what we were trying to teach them. For the subject of our workshops though, it’s really important that the information is passed on correctly.

We were lucky actually, for most of the classes there was at least one student that knew English well enough to understand us. He or she would then translate to the classmates, in Romanian, and this way they could still understand.  The situation is not ideal, of course, but at least it worked out like this. 

One time we were in a class of ninth grade. I was surprised to see, actually, that almost none of them knew the English language well enough to communicate with us. Maybe they were too shy to speak in English. When actually there is no need to be shy, because for us English is not our mother language either. The teacher told us that this is really a problem for some of them, because they have the desire to study or work abroad, later in life. For the third module we did, the students would have to answer some questions on a paper, in English. In this particular class, this activity turned out to be too advanced, because of the language. So in the end, the English teacher, who was with us in the classroom, translated all the questions that were on the paper,  in Romanian. This way, the students would understand. In the end we weren’t really able to properly discuss their answers together, like we always do, but at least they had the possibility to understand something from the activity.

In conclusion, in the end we always managed, somehow, to make our students understand at least the general idea of our workshops. I think we all have learned from this, how to make ourselves understandable for people with only a small knowledge of English. It was worth the challenge.

-          Coco