Author: Esther Solanilla

There are always certain things in life that one would like to do, but that is not the right time for it on one side or another. I had always wanted to live a long period out of Spain (I have had other experiences abroad, but only for a few months).

After one of the strangest years of my life, I decided to go for a whole year to Romania. Yes, Romania. What I didn’t know at that time was that this country was going to welcome me with open arms and teach me so many things.

I arrived with zero expectations about the work I would do, the people I would live and work with, and the city in general. And there you are! From the first minute, I felt like it would be one of the best experiences and I would not regret the decision made.

If I had to define my volunteering year in one word, I would say intensity—intensity in every way. I enjoyed it, cried, had bad moments, was very excited, lost desire, and laughed (a lot).

There’s been something new to do every day, and I love that. I have got skills that I thought I would not have in my life, and I have done many things for the first time (the magic of first times). It is a frantic experience. There have been days of hard work that made me think about what was I doing there. (Yes, I have had a few moments to think about myself and my future -only sometimes 😉) and, in the end, it always wins the bright side of things, and in this case, there have been plenty of them.

Talking to a friend the other day, she said: are you aware of how many people you’ve met this year? It gets to the point where you get used to meeting new people every week/month and don’t realise the reality. And what a great people! One of the best things I have taken away from this experience is people.

It has been challenging to live with many people in the same apartment (we have been up to 16). Each one of different countries and with its ways of living. It is stunning thinking about people you probably would not know in other circumstances, who now live and work with you, and they are essential in your life (and how great to have houses around the world 😉).

The bonds created by being part of a European volunteering project, and in this case, being part of FITT, are so strong that few people understand what it feels like, and it’s hard to explain if you don’t live it.

When it is all over, you wonder if it has been worth it and, if you have left your mark on the project and others the same way they have left it on you. And in my case, I can’t be prouder of what we have created together all this time.

All the roads lead to Dorobantilor! More than 13 nationalities travelled to Timisoara, Romania. We came here ready to start and finish our project, meaning renovating the youth centre Dorobantilor. 

-Social activities were the first and most important thing that helped us integrate and get to know each other, their effect is understanding through teamwork and acceleration towards the goal.

-Boom, shaka, Laka are teams that create a kind of competition and vitality in our collective work.

-We have created social media accounts.

We are on our way to actually work and some obstacles that were not taken into account began to appear day after day. I love obstacles 😍

That changed and separated one group from the other and the beginning of a station that made us live successive stations.

It is the digital work week

The obstacles still did not give up our confrontation, but we learned a lot from the previous problem, and we were ready to work and focus on two objectives, which are to provide the centres and to work to collect information by speaking to the population close to the centre: Community engagement 📝

  And in the end, like a winning team, we are all ready and very excited to see the video that we have created. Our memories forever!

Here you have the lyrics of a song that we have invented:

DOROBANTILOR ROAD

Yeeeeaahhh…. We’re gonna take the pipes from Dorobantilor

We’re gonna work when they let us go

Can you come and take my flyer?

Please come and take my flyer

Can you come and take my flyer?

 Before the time expires We’re gonna scratch the walls

We’re gonna fix the holes

We’re gonna write about it and put it in a song (ASA!)

We’re gonna cut the wood

 We’re gonna make a stool

We’re gonna call Vasili to check over the tools

Can anybody tell me something?

Please tell me something Can anyone tell me something?

I didn’t come for nothing

Riding in the Logan

Walking down the river

I go take my langos

I think I have the fever (ASA!)

Eleven different counties

 working all together

 When I paint the ceiling

 can you hold my ladder?

Can you come and take my flyer?

Please come and take my flyer

Can you come and take my flyer?

 Before the time expires

We’re gonna take the pipes from Dorobantilor We’re gonna work when they let us go x 2 x 2

It was a week of getting ready and cheering each other on.

The first wing was a preparatory group work, part and the end of last week.  Week after week, we learn how to climb the mountains of adventure, our adventure is to jump in order to look into the far future.

It was only possible to encourage each other and pay attention to the smallest details that changed the course of our work and our psychology, which is the most important thing.

The second wing was full of surprises that are getting to know and talking to local people in order to get more information which is really a way to deliver young people a youth house in their neighbourhood (Dorobantilor).

Talking to people and getting to discover more about Romania, is a wonderful thing for me personally. This was the best of every team I was in, with all humility!

The most surprising thing I found out is that my name is love in Romanian, which, by chance, was told to me by a former FITT volunteer (thank you, Eliza!).

SURPRISES STATION

The beginning of the week was full of surprises that put us to the test of self-control and prudence to continue our work and reach the next stations.

It was a surprise with some of the things that we naturally encounter and how we should deal with them.

VIEWS STATION

It was the occasion, during this week, to live with different kinds of windows like points of view. We also shared time with the team through digital games and meetings. We had to confront the digital issue because we were not prepared and used to have 100% of our interactions online with the rest of the team.

The question was how to consider these new borders when we watched outside:

Positive sense > pay more attention outside, be attentive by observing the landscape, etc.

Negative sense > considered as impassible borders or obstacles that we can not reach, overtake.

The last window was the metaphysical window of time and liberty. It is a spiritual question. The question was how to be in peace with ourselves, how to be occupied and to be active in this period of time in a very limited physical space.

ASSIMILATION STATION

What is assimilation for me?

You have more time to sit down and talk to yourself, and it was an important station to move forward in the project and think about everything that could happen and how to deal with it or in the sense of being fully prepared for obstacles.

Also, meditating on nature and observing people’s behaviour from the window, when you see people waiting for the bus and the ascender helps the other to get off, this is part of nature.

This week has been one of the most wonderful parts of the project.

On my way to my first destination outside Morocco, It’s not easy to leave my beautiful country for a long time but Romania deserves it, especially for a volunteer project.

Can you imagine?

One of the most important stops was getting to know each other and discovering more about the organization FITT as well as Timisoara while gaining awareness of the meaning of teamwork in all its dimensions.

I was, am and will be proud to be part of the organization.

From the first week, I became aware of the importance of social activities to homogenize a group that will work in the long and short term.

We witnessed the work of ex-short-term volunteers on previously restored centres along with the long-term volunteers, who gave us their input from their previous experience restoring those centres.

The actual station is for activating the responsibilities of each person who likes to get up and take an adventure.

Show up and be ready for a station full of teamwork!

A new breath, a new stage with good energy.

On the 14th of December, the Youth Centre of Dacia exchanged the noise of construction work, with the sound of a guitar and a beautiful voice. Helped by the youth workers from FITT, the place changed its atmosphere. The opening was on! A little buffet, a workshop area, a lot of welcoming puff, and some thankful speeches.

The latest details were made the same day: to embellish the place and put the furniture. What a relief for us to see that big day coming! We were now able to say: we did it! The challenge of renovating a formerly industrial place to a welcoming one in a month is completed. Time was definitely our worst enemy here. But in the end, we achieved to make the list of the Youth Centres growing.

Now, the association CoderDojo will make it its own. This building provides them with a place for their activities as a “general quarter”. Until 2023, as the year of Timișoara European Capital of Culture, other Youth Centres will rise with FITT and hopefully provide local associations places for their work and activities.

2022 will then be a year of hard work for the FITT team. Months after months, the experience will be improved. Other volunteers will come and join this enriching movement. This volunteering was for me a unique, multicultural and most of all intense experience. Full of dust but also full of friendships. And I wish the next ones to enjoy it as much as I did.

The fourth week began as the third had ended: with a lot of paint. Walls turned yellow, ladders were
carried around and brushes were dipped into buckets until even the last corner of the building had
the colour of our imagination. A little later, we slowly reached a point where things we hadn’t cared
about before suddenly became relevant. That means, among other things, that we cleaned the
bathroom, which was full of paint, went hunting for tape remnants and tried to remove dirt and
paint from the floor. At the same time, we were able to give the youth centre more character by
means of a sofa that had been donated to us, a carpet and other furniture. In this way, we drove the
spirit of the construction work out of the building.

The opening followed. We had prepared the neighbourhood for this beforehand by putting up posters
in the streets with invitations to it. Walking around in clean clothes and without paint or dust in our
hair in the spaces we had spent weeks tinkering with was strange, of course, but added mostly to the
sense of closure. The opening included games, live music, speeches and food, as well as visiting from
the neighbourhood, which made our work seem more relevant than ever.

While perhaps not everything went perfectly and still isn’t perfect, we did our best for a month, and
certainly laid the groundwork for a place for the neighbourhood’s youth that now only needs to be put
to good use. In conclusion, all we can say is that we can look back with pride and wish the next 9
teams an equally beautiful and successful time!

We have been working now directly and indirectly on the realisation of a youth centre for three weeks. The tasks of the second week often coincided with those of the first. In concrete terms, this means that we still mainly scraped and sealed walls and removed graffiti to prepare them to be painted. At the same time, we repaired and painted furniture.

So we created a foundation on which we could build the youth centre. While the tasks themselves resembled each other, it changed how we dealt with them and their surroundings; so as we wall-scratched our way through the indoor and outdoor spaces, we became more routinised, more attuned as a team, discovering strengths and learning how to use them. We scratched problems free, then scratched our heads while swearing, but always found solutions in the end.

From the third week on, everything started to come together relatively suddenly. Within a day, a rather drab -but of course excellently prepared- facade became a colourful one, its appearance resembling that of a Rubix cube. Over the course of the week, this wave of colour continued to spill through the interiors and exteriors: we painted walls, ceilings, window frames, doors, and now and then accidentally floors and ourselves in all the colours the rainbow has to offer. At the same time, a carpet of tiles spread in one of the rooms, turning some of us into true experts in the field of tiling.

This change was also noticed by the community. Suddenly we were no longer perceived as the gang that made a shabby building even uglier than it already was, but as the ones trying to change something for the better. Our work was appreciated more than ever, with more and more residents stopping to comment on our work and ask questions.

In the past two weeks, we also continued to take time every day to actively reach out to the community. In addition to the usual engaging people by asking questions, we added active promotion by distributing flyers. This was supplemented by the help that the community offered us. This included local volunteers helping us with crafts and donating furniture for the youth centre. This kind of response was very motivating and encouraged us to continue to do our best every day at the youth centre.

At the end of the third week, we are now close to the completion of the youth centre. We have now reached a point where a coherent picture emerges from a construction site and can hardly wait to finally complete the project and declare the youth centre opened!

The first week of the Youth Centres UP 2 project (first team of international volunteers for 30 days), in which an unused heating building is turned into a centre for the youth of a neighbourhood within about a month, started with team building activities.
This was followed by a shallow transition to the actual work on the centre, which, if one disregards the two-meter-deep hole in the entrance area, is a good starting point. So, initially divided into three teams with their own areas of responsibility, but ultimately as one team, we set to work.

Within three days, we performed the following tasks:

• Cleaning the garden and the building
• Scraping the walls
• Removing holes from the walls, leveling them and preparing them for painting
• Cutting trees
• Redesigning and making furniture

In parallel, we made a constant effort to involve the community by ending each of the days at the future youth centre with a joint community engagement. We talked to as many people as possible and collected opinions and ideas in order to design the place according to the wishes of the neighbourhood.
So, in conclusion, all we can say is that if we have been able to learn and create so much in such a short time, we can only look forward to the coming period with joy!

This year started out as one of the weirdest of my life. If someone told me six months ago everything I was going to live, I would have said, without thinking, that it was not possible to happen.

Going out of the comfort zone

This is the first thing you experience when you decide to be a volunteer. I arrived in Timisoara 6 months ago without expectations at all. Then, all of a sudden, I saw myself sharing a flat with nine other people from other countries around Europe.  

Since your first week of volunteering, you can realise you are living with people who are very different from you, have other traditions and ways of thinking. This experience makes you be able to respect everyone and adapt yourself to them. Being more open-minded is something that you learn even without noticing it. 

An intense experience

We all agreed that time flies when enjoying it. Anyone who has ever lived something like this before, might have lost track of time for sure. How can time go that fast and, at the same time, be full of emotions, discoveries and learning? 

So many new people in my life (most of them will stay forever) who I spent time with (living, working, going out, …). There are things that bring people together, experiences that create such strong bonds that they will never be broken. People who are with you through this personal and professional learning process. The personal change is great, but also the one related to work. Your development increases day by day. 

Sharing this adventure with young people like me, doing something new for other young people in a country which is not yours, is one of the best things when it comes to be a volunteer, even though it is hard sometimes. 

I still have other 6 months to continue making the most of them, adding new people and lived experiences to my life. Let’s see what the future has to offer!