Provide Summer Camps for 500 Youth in Transylvania

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.