Arts Lab Report: My second month in Târgu Frumos

The second month of volunteering in Târgu Frumos has just passed, spring has finally began and the hills around the city have changed their color to green. We also spent this month at home in quarantine, but according to the rules we finally started going to work in the youth center. As I started quarantine when I arrived here, to have the possibility to work in the center has been a good change and it helped me to concentrate better in the work. This month we also continued our Romanian lessons in which we learnt some new basic and useful sentences, verbs and words. Since some time we are also hosting a cat, we called her Lisa and every day she comes to our home to eat and stay a bit with us.

During this second month, with the other volunteers, we wrote the text for a song about the corona-virus. We made a rap song which deals about this period of quarantine and some basic measures we should adopt to avoid contagion. We recorded our voices singing and we made a video-clip using what we have in our home; making this song has been a good opportunity to work together and include different skills, from each of us.

Beginning from the last week of the month, we started to go to the youth center. During the first two days we worked to clean the garden from the waste left by the construction works, in order to arrange the garden to plant fruits and vegetable trees and to paint the walls with drawings that tell about each one of us and our country.

With the other volunteers I also tried to write the application for a youth exchange project directed to young artists who want to gain new skills in the presentation of their works and themselves as artists, in order to found a job related to their interests. As It was a new experience and the available time was limited, it has not been not a simple job but we managed to send it on schedule, in order to receive feedback. Writing the projects has been a good way to learn something in this field and also to get better in writing in English. 

As I love walking in the nature in this last days I went to walk in the hills, this helped me to appreciate and to know better the city and its surroundings. This month I also had the opportunity to meet my mentor in person and also some of the others volunteers who come at the youth center. Now we are finally moving towards the end of the quarantine and I hope in the next months to be able to explore new places and of course to meet other people!

Written by Eliana Colzani

Eliana is European volunteer for 8 months, in Arts Lab 2.0 project,  funded by European Solidarity Corps, with the support of European Union.