Fran´s experience
Hola, my name is Fran, I´m 22 years old and I´m from Spain. Almost 4 months ago, I decided to start this new adventure about 3500 km from home, in Focsani (Romania), with the purpose ofliving a new experience and to improve my knowledges about Social Education.
If the people ask me why I like my job, I could not find words to describe it, but I love seeing how people with special needs are able to reach tasks with our help like being more autonomous. So we can make their life easier in this world which is full of obstacles and barriers. I feel a really big gratitude and personal satisfaction when I see how a person can improve his life. For that, I realize that I love my profession.
In Spain, I have been volunteering for more than two years in different projects, all related to people with intellectual disabilities. It has made me open my mind even more and feel how wonderful it is to share moments with these people. The opportunity to be part of an EVS is a way to feel all that far from your country, and I needed to live it.
People often ask: – why Romania? Are you crazy? But the answer is very easy: -why not Romania? Have you been there? The answer is always the same: -NO. When you live here, you realize that the crazy ones are them for to think negative things of a country that surely they do not know to locate in a map. This country is full of negative stereotypes because the people has a lot of prejudices, but also is full of incredible people that welcome you with open arms.
Thanks to these experiences and all what I am learning in this country, about other culture and other people, it will be something that I will remember all my life, and within 5 months when I return to Spain, I will continue to train for being able to continue helping others and to feel what I felt the first day that I decided to be volunteer.
Maria´s experience
I get off the bus ant that´s what I see. A white snowy landscape that doesn´t let nature grow. That doesn´t let the man´s hand move forward. The branches of the smallest trees hardly standing out from the snow, hardly they appear asking for help.
The cars are skeletons whitened, arrested, immobilized on both sides of the road. The snow has turned the landscape into a desert that does not know the heat but that causes the same effect in the people, looking for the comfort at home.
However, the most daring bystanders risk, they put their lives at stake when they leave at minus twenty degrees below zero. I do not know anyone, maybe because of the clothes, that covers them and enlarges them. Meanwhile, I continue walking through that cold desert, with that silence that only lets speak to my mind. . She, who has too much noise inside, thinks about going and coming.
Probably what she does not know is that in the discordance of her thoughts is the thorn of that pretty and mournful rose. My mind goes by the snow faster than my suitcase and I can do it and despite the heat that can provoke the click of her reflections, it is also cold. My body and her melt, trying to create fire between the two. And that is how united, the ear sense begins to work. I hear a: Mary.
What strange, where I say I do not know anyone, where I say I do not find affection, there is someone calling me. My mind sends the impulse to the brain and my eyelids rise. I see now the white of hope that one day was green. And there she is, Andrea, a girl from the social apartment who does not stop saying my name with her arms opened, rejoices at my return. Although we can´t understand each other with the language of the vowels and the consonants, the one of the glances betray us.
She, happy for my return, I, happy to find the warmth of refuge in such a pure heart. He saved me, at least for that day.
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