This year ADRA Albania in collaboration with the Volunteers from the Mission Trip decided to organize a summer camp in order to motivate and prepare the Roma children for the upcoming school year. This summer camp gave to the Roma children an opportunity to learn on their own terms and to normalize the school behavior while adressing all the deficits that had trubeled until now the children in school.
Despite the academic topic ADRA staff decided that children learn and explore more about the country where they live in. Thus the topic of this summer camp was “Exploring Albania”.
In this summer camp were present 59 Roma children and girls and 2 non-Roma children from Fushe Kruja, 21 volunteers from United Kingdom, USA and Finland who provided a great deal of support to ADRA´s team and together they successfully implemented this summer camp.
The goal of the summer camp was to invite, teach and entertain two separate groups of children and girls in two different weeks. The first group was composed by children and girls who have attended ADRA´s community Centre in Fushe Kruja and the second group was composed of children and girls who are attending and have dropped out from the public school. Beside the educational purpose of this camp, ADRA team organized different recreational activities for developing children’s and girl’s social and motor skills such as gym, social games, colouring and crafting activities, and visiting different places close to Tirana.
During the first week, the summer camp was attended by children aged 4-8 years old and girls aged 13-16 years old. They participated in different games and activities such as painting, drawing, playing football, singing, dancing, performing in role play etc. A family of artists from Germany visited the summer camp for two days. They explained and showed to the children how to paint beautiful pictures with acrylic colours on little wooden boards and how to create their own necklaces out of soapstone. The children had a lot of fun and were very creative. At the end, every child had a finished artwork which they proudly showed to their families once they were backing home.
During the second week, children aged from 8 to 12 attended the summer camp. They also participated in various activities as the previous group. During their stay at ADRA’s compound, the children and girls learned to sing a song in English language titled “Head and shoulders, knees and toes“. The children were really excited at the end.
This summer camp was concluded with small show that the Roma children and girls organized in collaboration with ADRA team in order to say “Thank you” to all the foreign volunteers who worked hard during these two weeks. In the opening three little Roma girls and one little non-Roma girl performed in a ballet show. After the ballet performance, the grown up Roma girls danced some traditional Roma music. Afterward, two young Roma boys sang traditional Roma music. In the last part of this all the children danced together in a traditional Roma dance. This amazing show was applauded by the volunteers.
Happy and satisfied the children drove back to their Roma community where they shared their beautiful experiences with their families.
