Provide Summer Camps for 500 Youth in Transylvania

Dear Friend,

We would like to thank you for all your support during these trying times.

Covid cases have been slowly declining and as of writing this article, there are no restrictions in place. This means we could finally organize two spring camps! The children attending these camps were all from town or from neighboring villages. It was a lot of fun together with games and learning equally fun for children and volunteers alike. During the camps, we did activities such as arts & crafts, vocabulary expansion, games & non-formal activities both inside and outside. Not even the rain we had could stop us. A personal favorite of the kids was a game called Ship/Shore which I’m sure most of you are familiar with. Some of the children also told us that they would like to come back to our summer camps!

For this report we asked one of our teaching volunteers, Anne, to give us a testimonial about her time at the camp she volunteered in. She kindly agreed and we thank her for her kind words. 

‘The spring camp was a nice and informal way of teaching the children English. We played all kinds of games, some that helped strengthen their English language and some that were just for fun, both for the children and volunteers. It was a nice change from the otherwise very structured daily routine they have in school, and you could feel that they enjoyed it. The competition aspect of the camp also helped them to remain engaged and do their best. You could also see them develop their teamwork skills, and everyone had the opportunity to excel in the many different forms of games and learning activities. All in all, a great time both for children and volunteers!’

Anne Louise Bank Hornung

Care2Travel Volunteer

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

We would like to express our gratitude for all your support in 2021 and wish you a healthy and prosperous 2022. May it be filled with happiness, joy, and success.

We hope our new year will be filled with lots of summer camps and children's laughter. In the months leading up to the summer, we are busy putting together all the necessary ingredients for the successful season, one of the main ingredients being the VOLUNTEERS. Our local volunteers help us enormously in planning, animating, and translating in our camps. They provide support for our foreign volunteers, who would be lost without them, the language barrier is the biggest challenge they face in our country. The local volunteers help translate between the children and the foreigners, but always know the right time when they should translate so the kids communicate more and more in English without relying on translators.

In October and November last year we had a very intensive promotional campaign in the local schools when we spoke about local and international volunteering and were trying to recruit new local volunteers for our summer camps. It was a very intense time for us when we presented our presentation 36 times in front of around 900 young people. We went to the Marton Aron High School and the Segito Maria High School and visited their nine to twelve graders for an hour each. We also went to a dormitory for the Csángó minority students in Csíkszereda.
During our presentation we talked about our projects, about Care2Travel as an association, which was founded in 2011, and about the opportunities international volunteers come here to work on as well as the opportunities for local volunteers. We also introduced them to other events that are organized by Care2Travel like Game Nights or Language Clubs, although sadly there are no cooking camps organized by Care2Travel.

We explained that being a local volunteer with Care2Travel is a great opportunity to meet people from all over the world and there is no experience required for it, it’s completely free and they can choose yourself how much time they want to invest. We hoped to motivate a lot of young people to volunteer locally as well as abroad.

The promotional campaign was a huge success, a lot of people showed interest in both local or international volunteering and more than 40 youngsters signed up to help this year in local projects, like summer camps, city tours, events, or office help. We are very happy with this outcome and wish to continue promoting volunteering in our region, this being one of the most important missions of Care2Travel.

Dear Donors,

Summer is over in Csíkszereda, school is starting on Monday and as usually, also the first frosty mornings arrived. I cannot say we were glad to welcome them, there are still tens of tomatoes still green in our little community garden behind the volunteer accommodation. But rest assured we have a nice and busy summer period behind us with lots of sunshine and laughter. We can look back happy because, despite the pandemia still lingering around, we could reach out to around 400 local children during the vacation and keep them entertained with non-formal playful activities in English. 

In the first weeks of this summer, we were busy with setting up a little playground in the backyard, we bought a swing and slide set, a climbing wall, and a climbing rope. Big thanks to our volunteers, Linda and Simon, for helping Peter with this huge task. Now the families who take care of the raised beds of the community can bring their children with them to play. They were not the only children benefiting from the playground. We were able to organize 11 English camps in the backyard this summer! Until now we could organize camps only in the surrounding village schools, but we had the request from the local parents of Csíkszereda for a long time to do camps in the city. By arranging the yard to accommodate 20-30 children, we were finally able to answer this request. We can say that it was a huge success, 20-18 children participated in each camp and the feedback was all positive. 

Parallel to the camps in the backyard, we also organized 5 separate camps in 3 surrounding villages, with 20-25 kids participating in each. 

We would like to say a huge thank you to all our donors and our volunteers who made this amazing summer possible! Here's to the next one! 

Dear Care2Travel Supporter,

We hope that you and your loved ones are doing well and staying healthy!

After months and months of quarantine and restrictions, Care2Travel was able to organize 6 camps at the end of the summer vacation. These camps were all open-air and with a maximum of 20 kids, so most of the time we organized 2 consecutive camps in the same location. The demand from the communities for these camps is still huge and the need of the children for group activities didn't decrease with the pandemic. 

From Bànkfalva to Delne and Domokos. From age 6 to age 15. We got the chance to meet a lot of different kids in different stages of life and different towns. They were all unique and special in their own way and I hope we taught them more than just English. We taught them teamwork by separating the big group of kids into smaller teams, then letting them choose a team name and making a group flag. We gave them responsibilities by letting them take the flag home and insuring they bring it back to the camp the next day.

Most days we started with a fun warm-up that ended with a fitness challenge. After that, we had an English writing quiz which had words that they learned from the previous day. The quizzes were scored in a way that was fair towards all kids, so spelling mistakes didn’t count, the word just had to be recognizable. We also taught them fair play by making sure each team had an equal chance of winning at the end of the week.

That being said we also taught them kindness by giving all the kids prizes at the end of the week. We hope they know how much they taught us, for example, they have taught us to value time and live in the now, that saying it and doing it are two different things. They have taught us acceptance of others and have reminded us that we can dream and achieve our goals. 

Thank you again for all your support and best wishes!