Leaving a place that feels like home

The time has come, our project is almost finished and in just one week, all of us will leave Romania to go back to our home countries. After six months of being a volunteer in Arad, we saw more places than just the schools we carried out our activities. We have talked before on this blog about travelling and for me personally this was also one of the biggest advantages that came with being an EVS volunteer. Anyway, every time that you travel there will be a point that you have to come home. This made me think about what ‘’home’’ really means for me. I realised that it is not just the village I live in for a long time in the Netherlands. In these six months, Arad has started to feel like a second home for me and I am really grateful for that.

It will be weird to leave this place, after living my daily life here for a long time. I am thinking about the bridge I have to cross everyday to go home, KF (the bar we always meet together with all the volunteers), the river, my own apartment and a lot of other places that I got so used to. It is all small things, but it made me feel at home.

When other people ask me if Arad is a nice city, I always used to say that it’s not that special. I think, though, for me now this city will have a special place in my heart forever. 

- Coco

THE ART OF EXPRESSING, DANCE

You may or you may not acknowledge that dance is a universal language. Any language is a system of communication common to a specific area or culture. I never understood how important communication was until I came to Arad and became an Actress of Change. It is a fact that the world is moving forward to individualization, which means that everyone is changing into a more introverted and selfish individual. People care only about their own problems, and concepts like family or community are losing their significance. However, through our workshops I have understood that communication is the first step of understanding others. The more you know about a person, the more you can accept their true self and erase prejudices from your mind.

Personally, I think one of the main problems that people could have regarding communication would be the lack of confidence. That feeling you get when you feel like others will not listen to you or they will not care about your opinion, so you decide to stay silence. For that, we should do something to improve our own insecurities and here is when dance steps in. Have you ever realized that through dance you can express any emotion? Dancing ballet you can show your delicacy, dancing hip hop you can show your excitement and flow, dancing folklore like flamenco you can show your roots…there are infinite options and many that hasn’t been created yet. Dance is fitting body movements into music and feeling free to speak with your body. When I started dancing, I felt shy sometimes knowing that other people were looking at me doing something different as well as hard. With time, I feel much more comfortable and I put less pressure on myself, because as I said before what matters is that you are saying something with your body.

This picture is from the Festivalul Voluntarilor EVS that we did in Parcul Copiilor in Arad April 16. If you were there, you know how much I enjoyed creating a choreography and teaching it to the girls that were there following the steps gracefully. Do not forget that no one is never too bad to try to dance. Dance unifies people and creates a loving community.