Pentru Copiii (for the Children)

Disclaimer: The contents of this website are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. government or the Peace Corps. Any opinions or observations expressed about Romanian or U.S culture are my own and do not represent anyone else are have been made after 56 days in this country…

I haven’t had a chance to say much about the big part of Peace Corps training which isn’t language class. This part was our practicum project. We were put into groups with up to two other volunteers in our own sector (mine is institutional development) and have had six weeks to plan, implement and evaluate a project in partnership with a local nonprofit.

My group was assigned to Casa Eva, a local home for street children or children who have no parents, or for whatever reason don’t live with their parents. Children in Casa Eva range from age 9 to 22. They live in a house together, 36 children and 8 staff members alternating shifts.

Each floor in the house includes bedrooms with bunk beds, a kitchen, and a common area. Each floor houses a group of twelve kids that live in assigned “families” and the top floor is eight of the older people many of whom have jobs or attend night school. The idea is kids in each family look out for each other and encourage each other to follow the rules and teach each other to take care of themselves and each other. The older kids are supposed to take responsibility for and help the younger kids.

Casa Eva has three principal domains of instructions for the kids who live there; Personal Hygiene which is health and cleaning in general and extends to the cleaning of living spaces and clothes, Educational activities, and How to behave in Public.

On our first visit to the casa we were happy to find none of the stereotypes of the Romanian “orphanages” to be true here. We were wondering what we might do for a project because the house is neat and orderly and there were no apparent needs. The house is a pretty new building – two or three years old and very clean. The children who live there learn to care for it and I think every time I was there some cleaning was going on. It is also apparently well funded from outside of the country which is the case with Casa Austria, another “casa,” here in Ploieşti funded by Austrian Jesuits. Casa Austria worked with another practicum group on another project as well.

Initially member of the Peace Corps staff went with us to the casa – more than anything else to show us how to get there, but she ended up being our interpreter as the director and the educator we had the most contact with speak only Romanian and German. The educator told us that some of the kids when they arrive at Casa Eva are unable enter the Romanian public school system because they are so far behind in skills, and therefore not allowed to go to school yet. The staff tries to teach the kids enough so that they can get into the school, but their system of education works in cooperation with the emotional and psychological therapy the children receive. Rather than force the children to attend lessons in their own home, the learning takes place in the context of informal games and activities that are conducted in the common area. Kids participate if they’re interested. The educator expressed a need for more educational games and activities to do with the kids.

At our second visit we spoke with some of the older residents of Casa Eva who speak English very well. They told us whenever the kids are not doing homework they watch tv and on the weekends they perform their cleaning and laundry rituals and take walks. During the summer the kids take organized trips out of Ploieşti, even to Turkey, but during the school year and on weekends it didn’t sound like there were a lot of organized activities for them. They also mentioned that some of the kids in the house have friends at Casa Austria but outside of these big summer trips there is not much coordination between the two houses.

Our group decided to plan a joint “Activity Day” with the kids from Casa Eva and Casa Austria. We would meet in the park from 11 to 3 and have games in the morning and after sack lunches a little talent show where the kids could show off for the members of the other house. We even had another volunteer lined up to do some magic tricks. Our activity day was originally set for March 24th, a Saturday that Ploieşti was saturated by rain so we had to reschedule it for last Saturday April 14th.

While we planned our event our group continued to visit Casa Eva a couple of times a week. The third time we came back we asked in advance if we could observe one of the organized educational activities with the kids (it was arranging Rumikub tiles in ascending and descending order and by color.) The kids loved us, and they loved to show us their “homework” - little notebooks in which they practice writing lines and letters. We were surprised to learn that many of the kids look and act a lot younger than they are. Some of these were twelve and thirteen year olds beginning to learn the alphabet and how to write their letters and numbers. But they taught me to play Rumikub which I had never played, and a couple of the boys even played my teammates Brandon and Geoff in a couple games of chess.

The next time we went to Casa Eva we told them we’d bring a planned activity to do with the kids. I translated the game “train wreck” – a popular ice breaker from the Linking Up after school program - with the help of one of our language teachers. It was fun for a while and gave us volunteers a chance to practice our Romanian vocabulary, but after it wore off the kids wanted to play slaps with us. We taught them “Rock, Scissors, Paper” and “Thumb war”. After that we’d visit the kids and play games with them – rarely were they planned in advance – but with our limited Romanian vocabulary we taught them “Spoons,” “Go Fish”, and they taught us another form of “uno” that starts with an “m.”

Since our original event was canceled we had a lot more time to think about our project with Casa Eva and we decided to compile all the educational games and activities the six of us in the Casas Eva and Austria group could think of them, and translate them into Romanian for a book we would give each of the casas. This honestly might not have actually happened if we had been able to concentrate solely on pulling off the Activity Day. We divided our activities into Educational, (such as Around the World, BINGO and even coloring by number), Teamwork, Communication or Leadership building, (this was me translating many of the games I remembered from the Linking Up after school program I co-coordinated while I worked for Americorps), and Games that were just Fun (Ashley’s experience as a former camp counselor really came in handy here.)

We borrowed research translated by another practicum group and included a brief essay on how physical activity and increased serotonin levels can aid in the treatment of mental and emotional problems. We also wrote brief explanations of the social and mental benefit of engaging kids in leadership/teamwork activities, good sportsmanship, and the steps for planning the Activity Day so hopefully the two casas can arrange similar joint events in the future. We had our Language and Cultural Instructors (LCIs) proofread our Romanian and corrected our errors.

One happy side effect of our project is we now have a collection of activities for kids in Romanian. I’m now working on collecting the English instructions for each game from my teammates and putting together another book in English and Romanian for any volunteers in my training class who will be working with kids. It’s called “sharing resources or Laura makes more work for herself.” No, I’m very excited to pass along the work that me and my teammates did and hope it can benefit other people’s projects when we go off to our sites.

So Saturday arrived, a beautiful spring day, not a cloud in the sky. We decorated our area of the park with colored streamers and waited for the kids to arrive. Immediately we engaged them in a big game of train wreck which I called “Castron pentru Salata” or “Salad Bowl” another name for it, because there are trains here and they must crash sometimes and we didn’t want to be insensitive. After that we played an exciting game of “Cat and Mouse” before all of their attention was stolen from us by three soccer balls.

After that we basically had an unorganized day of fun in the park, interrupted briefly by random spurts of organized games. There was much wrestling with Justin, the biggest volunteer in our group whose tattoos were a major source of fascination for the kids. But we did manage a three legged race and a little bit of blob tag as well. It didn’t look like any kind of organized “talent show” was going to happen, or at least not the way we planned it, but the kids from Casa Austria who take karate lessons outside the casa were determined to display their skills. After that a couple of groups of girls bravely entered the circle to sing songs for those of us who were paying attention.

Someone told me they counted 15 volunteers from my training class out of 33 who had no obligation to the project. I was overwhelmed by the show of support whether people played games with the kids, took pictures, did a few card tricks or held up a garbage bag and helped us to encourage the kids to pick up their garbage off the ground.

I promise pictures for the blog as soon as I get them from the people who took them. As per usual I had my camera with me and I didn’t take it out of my bag all day.

Although the day didn’t go exactly as planned, I still think it went well. The kids all had a good time running around outside and there was a lot of friendly activity going on between the kids of both houses. The staff members from both casas sat together in the shade talking and looking at the books of activities we had given them while the kids ran wild. I took it as a good sign.

We can’t know if future collaborations with Casa Eva and Casa Austria will take place. If the teachers will use our books of activities (I think they’ll have better luck implementing them since they speak the same language as the kids) or if they’ll go on shelf and be ignored. We’ve had only six weeks to put a project together and there’s no knowing whether or not we’ll have any lasting impact, but based purely on the fact that the kids had fun I think I’ll call the project a success.

It was also a great opportunity for me and my fellow volunteers to do some cultural observation. I had never seen the game “horse” played before although I heard it described by Bill Cosby, I think. It’s where one person bends over and puts their head between the knees of the person in front of them. When you have a chain of four people bent over, other people run, jump and vault on to the backs of the bent over people. The goal is to try and see how many people the bent over people can support before you all fall over. I think every American’s reaction to that game was “that looks so dangerous!”

In general we found the games the Romanian children played on their own to be very violent (like the game where you stand in a circle and slap everybody’s hand in turn – the goal being to try and get someone to say “ouch” and then they’re out.) I think those of us from the U.S. would believe the Romanian kids are allowed much more freedom and opportunity to hurt themselves than we’re used to, and I’m sure Romanians would find kids in the States a bit overprotected and over analyzed.

We were given somewhere between 30 and 40 children for 4 hours and told to do whatever. The words “insurance,” “liability” and “first aid” were never mentioned.

At the end of the day candy was distributed to the kids courtesy of our two practicum groups. We picked up our garbage and made sure it was thrown away. We thanked the staff members from Casa Eva and they wished us Good luck. They decided to stay in the park with the kids and enjoy a sunny Saturday afternoon in the park and we left to explore a beautiful spring day in Ploieşti.


Geoff arm wrestling Marius
Gabi playing football

The boys playing football in the courtyard
Marius playing chess
Fun at Casa Eva
A chess game at Casa Eva
Geoff and Gabi play slaps