Alannah romania 03

Redeeming Romania Nicole Shaw narrowed her eyes at the boy standing in front of her, ignoring his taunting friends standing behind him. Nicole’s fellow interns grabbed at her shirt from behind, attempting to pull her away, afraid she might lose control. The boys had been harassing the interns, and Nicole had had enough.

Nicole had first arrived in Iasi, Romania, for an internship a month before.

She came to work in an orphanage by day and a children’s hospital by night. She was among the fourteen female students selected to help in Iasi. At first, the boys hadn’t seemed threatening to Nicole: “When I first got there I was a little flattered with the fact that they were always staring at us. Then as the time went on, it was just getting old super fast.” Nicole had never been told that Romanian men could be dangerous, so she was surprised when multiple teenage boys surrounded the group of interns and began taunting them: “One day we were coming back from the hospital and we went down a road where some teenagers were. They wouldn’t stop harassing us; they wouldn’t leave us alone and I got angry and got in the face of one of the guys because I was just really overwhelmed.” A few days later, it happened again. This was the last straw for Nicole. She had been working in Romania for only a short time and found that being in this country was harder than she had expected. Her journal became her confidant: “Lately, I have been struggling emotionally. I spent thousands of dollars for this internship, donated an entire summer of my time to try and help others, to give as much as I possibly could. But my emotions have been dwelling on how I am seen here—by many Romanians and especially teenage boys. To many of them I am a stupid American or a sexual object. It has made me feel so disgusting. I have been consumed by those negative emotions, allowing them to eat away at me until I am left wondering why I am here in the first place.”

But it wasn’t only the Romanian boys that were affecting Nicole. She felt like the full-time orphanage workers didn’t understand the interns either. “They appreciated our help, but they didn’t understand why we were there. Someone would ask, ‘Why are you spending thousands of dollars just to take care of these kids that no one cares about?’” As a BYU student studying Psychology, Nicole had decided to go to Romania when she learned how important nourishing and interacting with children was to the children’s well-being;she wanted to help the children in the orphanages who were not receiving that love. However, the Romanians didn’t seem to agree with Nicole’s mission. “When I explained it to someone, they just didn’t understand.”

So when Nicole experienced two scary encounters with Romanian men, she knew that she wanted to go home. “At that point I just was done with Romania. I didn’t want anything to do with the people. I felt like we were just objects to the men there. I felt like I was doing so much work and it wasn’t being recognized. It was just a bad month.”

“How am I going to survive two more months of this?” she asked herself.

Fortunately, Nicole was surrounded by people who wanted to help. Her fellow interns tried to explain that not all Romanians were like the few who made the internship difficult. Her internship facilitator, Aislynn, also gave Nicole strength.

Comment [hillary1]: This article title could be slightly misleading. Without having read the article, it seems as if the article will talk about a person or people who redeem Romania. Having read the article, the title makes sense, but I would suggest considering different wording or word order here or changing the title altogether.

Comment [hillary2]: Alannah, I really love your article. It’s a much more personal approach to an article about international study programs.

You’ve done a great job with it! Thank you!

Deleted: fists of Comment [hillary3]: Where had she been selected from? Was she selected from among other female students at her school? From her country? Let’s try to make that clear.

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She explained that all interns experience difficulties in foreign countries. *Ask Nicole to describe more about her experience with Aislynn*Nicole realized that with time she would be able to accept Romania’s culture into her daily life. Soon, Nicole met Romanians that began to change her perspective of the country.

“A couple days after that second incident with the boys, we went to a store to pick up some things before taking the train ride back to Iasi, and there was a young man and his mother who owned the ice cream shop. As soon as they found out we were Americans, they got all fourteen of us free ice cream Sundaes,” Nicole remembers. Nicole was grateful for their generosity. “They just sat with us. It was comforting to me to know that there were people out there who were very loving and very kind. They want to genuinely get to know you and they appreciate you for who you are. That rekindled my appreciation for where I was and for the Romanian people.”

Nicole says that there wasn’t one singular experience that experience that helped her to completely accept her life in Romania, but she describes it as a gradual process. Along with being willing to understand new people, Nicole learned to appreciate her everyday life in Romania: “I found value in everyday things I was doing. Three hours in the morning with the kids, three hours in the afternoon in the hospital, exploring the churches. I loved taking walks, I loved the train rides, I loved the old architecture, I loved learning about the history.”

One day Nicole and the other interns decided to explore the church they often passed on their way to work. What they found, though, was more than an empty cathedral. She and the other interns found themselves opening the doors on a wedding ceremony taking place. They decided to quietly move to the back corner of the church, hoping to observe the ceremony unnoticed. They were worried that they would seem out of place but were also enchanted by the beauty of the ceremony.

“There were these chanters. It was a beautiful sound. They would chant and their voices just echoed off the walls,” Nicole remembers.

But even though the interns may have forgotten that they didn’t belong, they were soon reminded that they hadn’t gone unnoticed. While watching the ceremony, the interns saw that the well-dressed Romanians glanced behind them periodically to see the girls dressed in jeans and T-shirts. “We obviously didn’t belong there,” Nicole says. But after a while, “some of the guests kept going back there and giving us candy or bread or fruit and cake”. After the ceremony, the entire wedding party gathered on the front steps on the church and they invited the interns to take pictures with them. Nicole remembers being embarrassed by the offer to join in the pictures since she was so underdressed. But even while feeling embarrassed, she felt accepted by these Romanians she had never met before. After taking pictures, the wedding party released doves to celebrate the new marriage.

Within the next two months in Romania, Nicole saw the kindness in the people of the country she once wanted to leave. But it was ultimately one little girl in the orphanage who helped her to love Romania. “Demi. That child was like medicine for me. If I was having a bad week, all I needed was to go back to the orphanage and give her a hug. Demi was a child with autism. “She was way too serious for a two year old. She was always so sad. She couldn’t talk. She couldn’t walk and that was something I worked on with her and by the end she was taking twelve steps.” Nicole

Comment [hillary4]: Since this is a previously unpublished interview, we can make minor changes, such as correcting spelling mistakes.

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Comment [hillary5]: Since the word everyday is used just a few words later in Nicole’s quote, I would suggest deleting it here so as not to be too repetitive.

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Deleted: , Comment [hillary6]: I really like the idea of them getting lost in the beauty of the ceremony.

However, this transition feels a bit abrupt to me.

Maybe we could make it a little smoother by saying something like the following: “The interns soon lost themselves in the beauty of the moment being witnessed, but they were soon reminded that they didn’t belong there.”

Deleted: t Deleted: id Deleted: met Comment [hillary7]: I would suggest switching the order of the last two sentences in this paragraph. The second to last sentence does a good job of describing Nicole’s reaction to the overall experience. This last sentence gives one last piece of information and feels isolated. If you were to switch the order, you could change the wording of the last sentence to say something like, “Despite her initial embarrassment, Nicole felt accepted by these Romanians she had never met before.”

Comment [hillary8]: Where does this quote end? There are no close quotes, and a new quote begins two lines down.

found joy in helping those children and especially in helping Demi. “I think that she’s a great example of the amazing work the interns do out there, just giving them the love that they deserve and that they need. She’s one of the many. The way that they’ve changed and developed, it’s just phenomenal.”

But those children aren’t the only ones who have grown from those three months. Even after she returned to the United States, Nicole didn’t realize that she herself had changed until her family began noticing differences in her character. Her stepmother told her she noticed a difference in how she looked at the world: “She told me that I appreciate things more. I realized how many people in the world don’t have anything or have way less than I do and there’s no reason for me to complain or expect anything more than what I already have. The fact that children who deserve love more than anybody don’t get it in parts of the world is just the saddest thing. So being in Romania has helped me to come back to the States and appreciate even the smallest things.”

It was a difficult process for Nicole to learn what she has, but what she learned can be helpful to anyone traveling abroad,—whether it be for an internship or for personal travel: “Go with an open mind. Ask lots of questions. People want you to learn from them. They’re grateful when you speak their language, when you ask them questions about their culture, about their religion, about their dress.

They’re grateful if you make an effort to get to know them and their way of life.”

Sidebar: The stages interns go through while abroad (Need to interview Aislynn for actual names and descriptions)  The Honeymoon Stage  The I-want-to-go-home Stage  The Adjustment Stage  The Preparation for Home Stage

Comment [hillary9]: We’ve never previously said that the internship lasted three months.

Consider saying something like, “But the children aren’t the only ones who grew during the three months with the interns.”

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Comment [hillary10]: This is a great conclusion. This final quote might also make a really good pull quote if you are going to include one in this feature article.

Comment [hillary11]: The sidebar is an great idea! It will take this experience specific to Nicole in Romania and make it applicable to our readers interested in doing internships or living abroad.