Third day, 16th March 2010
Irina came to my place to pick me up at noon and we drove to her office together where I had some time to prepare myself for holding the presentation about Global Footsteps and the conference in August. At 2pm Irina, some of her colleagues and I went to a conference room in the municipality building for installing the beamer and the laptop. The head of the Social Department, Simina, Carmen and other employees joined us. When I started giving the talk, Irina translated from English into Romanian. After I had finished the women had a quite long discussion about the subject – everyone was impressed and thought of it as a great idea, but, as I understood, there were also doubts about Romania’s role in this network. How helpful could be their community for the network, as they have so many difficulties to cope with themselves? And could they profit from their engagement in conference and the future cooperations? Although I only understood a bit of what they were saying and Irina could not translate everything for me, it became clear to me that the conference and the linking between the communities and projects means something different depending what the basis of the respective project is. For the project in Valcea, becoming active in the GF network and investing time and work into it, seems to mean investing much more than a project from e.g. Germany would, because they have such a great lack of funds and employees. Being part of the network can be a great chance for them, but becoming active only seems to make, if they can really profit from this.
Having come to an end, everybody thanked Irina and me for the presentation and I felt quite relieved that it had gone well.
After a short break and some cookies, Irina, Simina, Carmen and I drove to the outskirts of Valcea to visit the MARA centre for autistic children, another project realized by the Social Department. The centre offers therapy for children and advice for their parents. The children live with their families but come to the centre for their therapy every day. The MARA also is EU-funded and the only centre dealing with autism in the area of Ramnicu Valcea. Studying psychology, this visit was very intersting for me as I already had courses about autism but never had met autistic people before. A worker from the centre gave us a tour through different therapy rooms, presenting different groups of children to us, who ranged between 2 or 3 years up to about 11 years. The groups also differed in the children’s type of autism, and so did the therapy. Some therapists were working on the children’s concentration through drawing or making simple crafts, others focussed on language, as some autists hadrly ever speak. We also saw a gymnastics room where the children can play and move to music during their therapy. There we encountered a little boy having the svant-syndrom. According to our guide, he was very gifted doing all sorts of calculations. At the end of the tour we all were sad for leaving.
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