Hi! I’m Patrícia from Portugal. Now I’m volunteering in A.C.T.O.R. in Bucharest since March in an EVS E+ project called Vitamin T17. Our job here is to work with kids. We go to schools and by non-formal education we teach them little things about our culture and a little about ourselves. By far, my favorite one is to go to hospitals and do clinical animation to kids who are there, sometimes in a very bad situation, very sick or just passing by.
We organize activities in hospitals every week! We start on Tuesday and we finish on Friday. Each afternoon in a different hospital we spend two hours. In these two hours is very important to be there for kids! We play with them, teach something to them, try to make them a little more happy and maybe try that they forget why they are there, even if it is just for a second or those few hours.
Our activities in hospitals starts since the day before, at home or a few hours before to go the hospital, when we prepare the activities to do there. We have a team of volunteers and we communicate between us what we want to do there. We also have a common meeting every Monday afternoon to organize us better. We have a lot of materials that the organization A.C.T.O.R provide us and through our knowledge or our skills in some practical areas we can prepare the activities we want to do with the kids. Some of us have theatre skills, like me, some have animation skills, some can draw very well and have skills in visual arts, some of us can play music and some of us are just very good to be there for the kids. Normally, we do with them a lot of visual arts because they can see a lot of colors and be nasty and paint themselves with a lot of inks or do some nice pretty drawings. Sometimes we teach them how to do origami and it is an activity that most of the kids find very interesting because we teach them how to make nice and beautiful figures with colored papers. Sometimes we just play games with them, mostly movement games that put the body in movement because they ask for it, probably because they spend a lot of hours without doing nothing closed in a room. We sing with them and we let them to try our instruments, we dance with them, we play with puppets for them to encourage some emotions and at the end, if we have the space for that and the proper atmosphere, we try to do a relaxing exercises.
Sometimes it’s a little exhausting for us, because we can see a lot of difficult situations there, but at the end, I’m sure this happens with all of us, we leave the place with our hearts full of love and compassion. This is about kids and it’s a pleasure for us to make them a little more happy; to make them understand that, no matter their situation, they can feel that they can have fun, too, that they can play and breath like the other kids that are in the streets having fun.
This clinical animation program is made with great support from United Way.
A.C.T.O.R. 