My Volunteering Experience in Baia Mare
Emirhan Topcu
My volunteering experience in Romania has been controversial in my first days. When I first arrived and started doing activities, the environment felt so different to me. I had some hard times while trying to adapt. By hard times, I don’t mean anything bad but the change in my life and environment. For the first two weeks, I was mostly observing and trying to understand how things worked while at the same time helping with the activities and being involved with what we were doing. After some time, I understood all the basics and even more and I started to take more and more responsibilities and initiative. Because I had past volunteering experiences, this project has always been so meaningful for me because this time the people that I was volunteering for were different than before. They were from a very different community with very different backgrounds. Every time I had to think more than usual to understand their needs, their way of communication and how to help them or how to meet with them in the common ground. I’ve always loved how we were interacting with the students in the schools. They were always so interested in our activities and also interested in the volunteers themselves. If they weren’t shy or timid, they were asking us lots of questions to get to know us and try to understand us. Even those that didn’t speak English they were trying to communicate with the best that they have to interact with us. With some of our activities we couldn’t really see the impact because in some topics you can only see the impact in the long term, years after. But with some of our activities we could really see the impacts and the feeling that this gives is priceless. To help some communities that are in need of help gives you so many good feelings. The way that they accept to communicate with you, open themselves to you and interact with you; and then the way that they use the information that we exchanged always showed us that the work we did was not for nothing and it actually helped a lot of people. I will always remember the students I interacted with. Our goal and if we could achieve this or not could be very visible only in the future. So, at some point in my life, I would love to visit Baia Mare again to see if we could make a change and to refresh my memories with the people here.
Apart from the interactions with the students and our activities, I feel that I developed myself on the personal side as well. And this development is huge. By interacting with so many people from different countries, cultures and backgrounds, my view of the world was even wider. I met with all kinds of different characters and this goes in both ways: people that I liked and disliked. In both ways I learned how to handle different situations even more. I developed myself in communicating, I learned to be more patient, I learned to be more accepting and tolerating. I also learned how to draw my lines and limits and protects even more than before. In my life, before, I never lived with another person in the same room. Here in Romania, I experienced this and learned how to adapt and behave according to this. I learned to apply some things in my life without the help of my family or friends.
As a conclusion I can easily say that this experience was really positive for me in terms of developing and helping people develop. This is something that I will always remember in my life and appreciate.
Here are my favorite photos from my volunteering stage:
