English teaching and founding a Leo Club in Romania almost 25 years ago; fond memories awoken

Allstars members, all from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds themselves, gained many things from their involvement in the internet projects; the confidence to present their work to an audience of adults was one. Here an Allstar/Leo presents to an annual conference of Lions Clubs

I have many fond memories from my time – 11.1/2 years – in Romania but none more fond than my time ‘teaching English’ to a class in an industrial high school in an industrial area of the city of Suceava, an area therefore depressed after the destruction of industry following the collapse of Communism.

A few days ago someone from this class contacted me, see below. I cannot begin to write how exciting this is but I just had to blog about it.

Not the Mafia

The story behind moving to Suceava to teach was all due to my misunderstanding of a Romanian word – ‘Marfă’. I began in a ‘top’ high school, Liceul Ștefan cel Mare, when my intended 6 months stay working in a voluntary humanitarian project in nearby Siret ended. How this happened has been documented on this blog in the past. However when I suggested I wanted to teach less advantaged students there was considerable opposition from the authorities. The overall view was ‘why bother with them, you’re wasting your time, concentrate on the best schools and the brightest students’, an attitude I met in Romania many times then, to the point of causing me many personal problems at the time. Foreigners could then be given a hard time. That is changed now and followers of this blog will know I have spent substantial periods in Romania most years since I left in 2004 and have many friends there.

However, the problems were a contributing factor in my moving to Iași, where I then taught in an ‘industrial high school’ and a couple of ‘top’ schools.

A different way of ‘teaching English’

I didn’t ‘teach English’ in a conventional way; I tried to do it in a way from which my students would not only learn some English, enthusiastically, but build confidence to believe they could achieve anything they wished. This was by involving them in projects with classes in English-speaking countries, UK and Canada if I remember correctly, and subsequently helping them to get involved in volunteering, leading eventually to formation of the third Leo Club in Romania. The projects were on email, beginning with one donated ‘obsolete’ IBM laptop. No Windows – everything was done with MsDos; does anyone remember that? Eventually the class involved in the email projects called themselves the ‘Allstars‘ and went on to form what was the third Leo club in Romania and probably among those with the youngest membership anywhere – the Suceava Burdujeni Leos were then 12-14 years old. Late teens early twenties is more usual.

A ‘Messenger’ request answered

A few days ago I had a request on Messenger from Anca … (the family name I did not recognise). Usually I ignore such requests (my dislike of Facebook except in small closed groups has been well documented) but for some reason I opened the message and was delighted to see it was from my former student in the industrial high school mentioned above. The class have a Facebook closed group and Anca posted that she had ‘found’ me and asked if anyone else from that class remembered me.

What happened as a result was humbling. The general response was “How can we possibly forget?” accompanied in some cases by thanks to me for what they had achieved since, eg a lawyer, an IT specialist, an English teacher, even a tattoo artist! (I didn’t tattoo them, honest!). One was particularly amazing; she said that only a day or so previously she had been teaching her daughter a limerick I wrote for her almost a quarter of a century ago. I didn’t remember it but she had and sent it to me. I remember all the names though I knew them only by their given names (I’ve generally not put them in the photograph captions).

The speed with which the Allstars learned English through the email projects was quite astounding. Within a year, starting with a very rudimentary knowledge, they were able to write full-length stories for a competition to write a ’20th Century Fairy Tale’

The presentation poster for another Allstars internet project

The confidence to present in public was mentioned in the post; here the Allstars/Leos present their project on local radio

No Powerpoint for us; the projects were presented on large posters, the emailing with the school in another country being supplemented by exchange of photographs, etc, by airmail. On this project the Allstars were working with a school in Northumbria comparing the history of that region with their own – Suceava

The special ‘Allstars’ project room from which we did internet teaching projects using first one, later (here) two, ‘obsolete’ laptops, supplementing work in the classroom. This is one ‘Allstar’ with me, 1994

The Allstars also formed themselves into a Leo Club, ‘adopting’ a special needs class (the Bunnies) in another school. Here they are shown on a picnic the Allstars organised for the Bunnies

The Leos not only took on children (even) more disadvantaged than themselves, they took on projects like cleaning up a large local park, on Earth Day (for which they got T shirts for the job)

Members of the newly formed Leo Club also had the opportunity to see a British volunteer physiotherapist – Dianne/Diana (Di) – working with severely disabled children and teenagers at a ‘hostel/hospital for severely disabled children

The Leos bed down for the night at the hostel/hospital – on the floor

The Leos stayed with the resident children (and teenagers) for a whole day, not only eating with them but serving them too.

Here the Leos arrive, with ‘presents’, at the hostel/hospital for orphaned (all with a disability, mostly mental) children.

The Allstars were not only introduced to the wider world through internet, they became volunteers (here playing with disabled children at the ‘camin’ (hostel)

Last year during a short visit to Suceava I did try to find some of these former students but without success. In a way not surprising as I’ve now learnt that many of them are now in other parts of Romania and it’s quite likely some have moved abroad – so many Romanians have. Now I’m hoping that my health will allow me at least one more visit to Romania, when I’ll do my best to meet as many as possible of them in person. Meanwhile, somewhere I have the documentation for the Leo club and will try to find it, together with more of the photographs taken during activities of this wonderful group of youngsters.

 

St Mary’s Menston high school pupils take some Bambisanani to South Africa

I consider myself very lucky as through things I do, day to day including my work, I learn of some of the amazing things our oft derided youngsters do. 

The latest is about 14 lower sixth formers from the excellent high school within our village boundary – St Mary’s Menston.

Hannah Smith, pupil at St Mary’s Menston, reads Frank Lampard to Zulu children

St Mary’s pupil Kavindu Appuhamy gives an African child a lesson about rhinos, or is it the other way round?

I mentioned in an earlier post that I recently created a blog/website for the Wharfedale, Yorkshire, village in which I live – Menston. Looking around for news as the schools started up again after the summer break I found out about the latest phase in a project in which St Mary’s is involved, now in its seventh year.

Bambisanani

 

Menu and page working at last

Volunteering and egg decorating in Romania

Thanks again to members on the forum, I seem at last to have cracked the menu and pages thing. So now I’ve managed to put up an article I wrote in 1998 for a Romanian magazine on my experiences as a volunteer in Romania for, at the time, five years. I went on to stay another 6.1/2 years before returning to the UK in 2004.

Another project I worked on was helping the women in Bucovina who decorate eggs with their marketing. As result I wrote a few articles about egg decorating and will be putting some of these up soon. I did quite a lot of interesting research on the tradition so it seems to me that it is worth having them on record, especially as I haven’t seen much of what I wrote recorded elsewhere. I don’t any longer have electronic versions of them (some, for a mag I was editing, were done in Quark) so I’m having to type them all in again from paper drafts which fortunately I kept, but at the same time translating them to English. I may eventually be able to find the pictures which were in the articles, or at least some of them but that might take a while so I’ll be putting them up without the pictures pretty soon and hope to find the films/prints eventually.

I’ll be back in Bucovina and Iasi for a short time in August and meeting some of the egg decorators mentioned, so it’ll be interesting to see what has happened since the time I was writing, 2002.