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In October 2019, at a football game in the school yard in Bucovăț, Timiș County, Cătălin, a fifth grader back then, broke his leg. After undertaking two surgeries in Timișoara and spending nearly nine months in bed, Cătălin returned to school this year. In his own words, he could no longer bear doing nothing and missed his classmates – especially Fernando and Mihaela, his best friends.
Laura is the single parent of Cătălin and two daughters: Ileana, who entered prep grade this year, and Monica, a fifth grader, as well as a child with SEN (Special Educational Needs), who has speech and memory deficiencies. They live in a small house, built with the help of Laura’s parents; in winter, its walls are addled with humidity and mold. All three children have asthma or breathing difficulties.
Cătălin’s accident increased the pressure put on Laura, beyond her preexistent daily problems. She had to find solutions to cover for his hospitalization expenses, as well as for taking the child to Timișoara and back and to spend time with him there, while also caring for the two girls.
There are 107 students at Cătălin’s school. Many of them are enrolled in the “Nesting a brighter future for children” program that Ada Gabor, project coordinator, tells me about. “Our project started from the notion that the community has a great need for non-formal activities. But, what’s more, we also understood that it’s not just the children who face challenges and that they need the adults around them to overcome them. So, we don’t only work with children, but also with parents, teachers, volunteers, public authorities – wherever we have that chance – in order to ensure support for the children.
Our goal is to keep the kids in school. The classic approach is to help the child with their homework or keep them in an afterschool program, but it’s not enough. Once the child gets home, they encounter the problems there. The teachers in school might have no idea about the child’s problems back home. For instance, there’s one teacher who told me, after a workshop on vulnerable environments on children, ‘With all my 25 years of teaching experience, I’ve never thought about these aspects.’
We selected the villages in the program based on a few criteria. For instance, one was for them to have over 50 children from underprivileged environments. Then, the availability of the local school’s for getting involved in the project. We tried to reach a balance, to have someone outside the school and someone from within the school involved in the project. But different models are employed, based on the school’s profile. There are schools where they didn’t offer us any space to carry out our activities and the teachers didn’t want to get involved either.
The families are selected based on economic (income per family member) and social criteria (the number of people in each family, their habitation situation, their health condition, whether they suffer from any chronic illnesses, whether the parents are off working abroad, while the children are being cared for by the grandparents, etc.). Each situation is awarded a number of points and that’s the basis for our selection.
It’s important to us that the program beneficiaries also give something back, instead of just receiving. With the children, for instance, we run a tutoring program, where the older ones provide their knowledge to their younger schoolmates and learn that we give and receive, instead of just expecting to receive. We encourage the parents to become involved in the issues at the center – for instance, that they come in to lend a hand with gardening, renovation, cleaning or organizing the events.”
While Cătălin and his mates are in class, Andreea Iștoc, the Bucovăț program coordinator, together with Ms. Mia, a school employee and United Way collaborator, is preparing the materials for the activities the children will undertake. Once their regular classes are over, the kids gather outside, in the tents the school set up, so they can observe social distancing rules, and receive the warm meal the foundation provides to them on a daily basis. Then, they start the activities and have fun with their successes and mistakes, as they try to build paper characters. Two hours later, they disband, and Cătălin gets back home. He tells me he’s feeling happy for having spent yet another day with his friends.
*the names of children pictured in this story have been changed, to protect their identity
Documenting this material was made possible through the help of the United Way Foundation and the financial support of the Globalworth Foundation.
“Nesting a brighter future for children” is one of the main educational programmes undertaken by United Way România. Its core goal is to support 12 day centers founded by United Way România, which work as community hubs.
The program, funded by the Globalworth Foundation, prevents school dropouts in poor urban and rural communities, where the children’s education is not the top priority, but rather the daily struggle to find the necessary resources for survival. Its integrated approach consists of actions focusing on the child’s needs. Parents, teachers, volunteers, and local NGOs work together to solve the issue of school dropouts, which is not the child’s problem, but the problem of the entire community.
The 12 community centers in Urlați, Fundulea, Băicoi, Jilava, Pădureni, Cluj-Napoca (Pata-Rât), Timișoara (School no. 20) and 5 communes in county Timiș (Sânandrei, Mașloc, Carani, Șemlacu Mare and Bucovăț), have benefitted 2,700 children, 2,160 parents and 540 teachers, throughout the program’s five-year span, in over 1,700 educational activities.
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