In the morning, we visited Taormina which was very old and beautiful town. There was marvellous antique - Roman theatre where we could see Mount Etna in a panoramic view. Later, we kept our way to reach one interesting civil organization for a visit. The purpose of this civil organization is to help the people who are not taken into consideration in a society as a normal citizen. Many of them are mental illness people or the woman working in the streets or the people using drugs...The name of this organization is Penelope Association.

The president; Giuseppe Bucalo gave a speech to introduce the mission of the civil organization. The interesting point of his speech indicated the certain philosophy as 'doing nothing'. Being stayed as doing nothing is not easy as an organization which means that every human being knows his or her own path to do something. There should be no need to say someone 'you have to obey this rule or that rule'. This organization never says anything to guests.

All participants in the roof of this organization can make contribution to create an unique environment whose rules can be set by these participants or guests who are hosted for a certain time in the house supported and funded by this organization. For example; as a case study, when cleaning lady came to clean the house early mornings, she found some of guest still sleeping. This situation made her annoyed. Later, guests and cleaning lady made an agreement that the cleaning lady started to come to the house late instead of coming early. She and guests became happy for this decision, because she had more free time in the morning to fix her daily and personal issue and guests were happy because they didn't need to get up early. How this organization can be funded? Mr. Giuseppe has many interesting ideas to attract the interest of other organizations and local people and famous artists. The financial support can be provided with some donations, or via some private companies or some social associations. He gave very interesting example; one company who produce lipstick or cosmetics can be volunteer to support one campaign who is executed by this organization. The campaign is to protect the women working in the streets as prostitute. He is a social initiative in terms of finding mutual and good matching between social problems and financial sources.

Closing ceremony and… last performance

The last evening spent together, we were first at CESV for the final evaluation. Mari made us a beautiful surprise asking all to draw and write whatever we felt about the workshop, with eyes closed. The result you can see it in the photo. Then in a wonderful musical atmosphere she gave each a red clown nose and a ladybug. (She volunteered herself in a program in Romania, with a clown troop, to make disabled children smile!)

The rest of the evening was spent at Salvatore’s association, Auser. Here we had dinner prepared by a Rroma Association from Kosovo and then…theatre. Salvatore is a great play director, with a rich activity in the theatre life and he wrote a short sketch for almost everybody. He and Vyaute presented the show. I was a little girl on a little yellow car asking for my weekly pay, Anna from Poland, a turtle wishing for freedom, Marjut - the turtle savior, Ufuk was Romeo and Felipa, Juliet, Muhsin - the blessing father, Dilek and so on, all with amusing roles we tried to perform as best as possible.

Rosario was the single volunteer for Karaoke, of course that is because he was the only one, besides Salvatore, with worthy voice. And he was really the surprise of the evening in this position. He deserved all our applause.

At the end, Mari, Rosario, and Salvatore gave us all participation certificates and a beautiful gift, a ceramics with the sign of volunteering and a relevant slogan: Volunteers, make a difference!

As a result, all staff of CESV, mainly Prof. Salvatore Ruggiano, the director Rosario Ceraolo, and the project coordinator Maria Angela Filocamo, the other people from other civil organizations in this activity and all participants had great effort to make this activity perfect during one week.

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Saturday, 15.10.2011	Report Day 6	77 Kb