The children played the performance MY STORY ROMANIA in Bucharest, at the Act Theater. A long list of important guests were in the audience last night and we succeeded telling them our stories and give them our message!
The children keep asking for opportunities to play the performance and World Vision is helping them to make that wish come true. The hearts go warm from theater and the joy is spread all over. Mission accomplished!
Here we have a photo sent from the rehearsals before a new performance. A lot of love to you too, kids!
I am very happy to tell you that the performance keeps on living even after I left Romania. With the help of Petrisor, the children had one more performance at the school, for their teachers. Hopefully, the performance will go on even more! I will keep you updated here. Here are some photos from yesterday.
I want to begin my letter to you by thanking for the opportunity you gave to me through your donations. You made a dream come true: I did my first theater project in Romania that focused on the children from my home country. For me, this has been a very important step. I have proved to myself that I can do this and that I can have an impact on the future of Romania. This is my way of contributing to a better tomorrow for the ones I left home, by building strong children that can wash the poverty away later.
I met with the children 3 times a week. We started with theater workshops that focused on developing their personalities and their skills. I gave a special attention to teaching them how to accept eachother, no matter the differences between them. At the beginning of our project I noticed that the children were very mean to eachother. Poverty, appearance and their different backgrounds were issues of argue all the time. They have been raised with the shame of poverty and with an intense hate towards the rroma children. It has been an intense fight at this chapter but my heart was filled with joy when, towards the end of the project, I heard them defending eachother and saying to children outside our project that we shouldn’t discriminate, no matter how different we are. When it comes to getting their stories, I realised that I need more time when it comes to gaining their trust. The children of Romania believe that it is a shame to be poor so they weren’t very excited about telling what’s happenig in their homes.
Slowly, the stories started to arrive and I was able to write a play about these children. The performance talked about their dreams, what they want to be when they grow up and what is stopping them to fulfill their goals. It was a play about the violence they face at home and at school, about the poverty that surrounds them and about the importance they give to a family that supports them to go to school. A big problem that the children from the country side face is that their parents force them to stay at home and work the fields instead of letting them go to school. When they are allowed to go to classes, they walk by foot miles and miles to the nearest school, no matter the weather condition.
In certain moments we used puppets in the performance that helped us build a certain distance to the characters and the story that they were telling. Plus, for keeping the children safe, nobody played their own character in the play. We made it clear to the audience and their parents that these children are the voice of all children and that we are not talking on stage about their families.
With the money we succeeded to raise, we were aible to offer these kids sandwiches, juice and fruits everytime we met. We even baked cakes for them. The money helped us to offer the children presents at the end of the project, plus a pizza party to say good-bye. We payed for the transport when needed. We bought food bags for families in need around us.
We had a dentist that came and made a hygiene workshop with them, offering the kids toothbrushes and toothpaste. We bought them soaps to complete the kit.
We had 3 hair stylists that came and gave our children free haircuts. We had juice, cakes and crackers to mark that special day in their lives with a party.
All in all, without your help, this project wouldn’t have been possible the way it has been done - with professionalism, putting the children first and not leting the economical problem to stay in front of what we want to do. It has been an ideal situation where we had the power to offer the children what they needed in order to focus on the final product: the performance My Story Romania, a performance with and about the children of Romania. Thank you!
After two months of working together, our project reached it's end destination. It has been a pleasure to work together, nothing is better than watching 25 children grow in front of your eyes. We are now stronger and ready to build a better future for ourselves!
A note from the kids saying thank you for the past two months
As a reward for out talented little actors and also as a goodbye party, we went out and had a pizza party! It was so yummy that it lasted only 15 minutes on the table!
The kids never performed in front of such a big audience, but they did great! No one could tell how nervous they actually were. We are very proud of them! This was not the last performance for them. World Vision will use this performance in later projects to show the other communities the result of our work.
We are happy! We did good! We received a lot of applause at our first performances, plus flowers, diplomas, cakes from Alina and a theater book from Luiza and Petrisor. Even the press was present to film our activity! We had a wonderful day! Stay tuned for our next performance, tomorrow we will spark!
Hi! My name is Luiza Stanescu and I am a Romanian actress that lives in Sweden. Right now I am focused on combining theater with social work and "My Story Romania" is one of my projects. It will focus on the poor kids from Romania and how their lives look like.
If you want to contact me outside this blog, please write an email to: