Ceva de Vară- New vision of Mirakolix

Mirakolix has new plans! ONE big plan- a festival called “Ceva de vară” which will take place in Întorsura Buzăului on the 19th of July 2014. The idea came up to our minds a long time ago, while we were already working in different schools and an orphanage in Întorsura Buzăului, we also organized a board game evening in a bar there, so we already knew a lot of people in this community. To give a good final to the two European projects “PlayRide” and “Science Playground”, which hosted us 7 international volunteers for one year/ 7 months here in Romania, we thought a one day festival with people we worked with would be perfect. As we love to play with children and organize activities with teenagers we thought about different workshop areas where people can spend the afternoon, doing sports/ trying new sports, playing theater and music, trying bow shooting and other things. These areas we planned to build up as parts of a village, so to name for example the theater area “Square of curiosity” and the food area “market” and the playing area “Playground”. Also there would be a theater play performed by the children of the Casa Familiale of Întorsura. In the evening we planned the music part to start, so to have concerts of some local bands but also bands from Brasov or the EVS community who are willing to play for free to introduce different styles of music to the people. The music part would be moved later around small campfires with acoustic music.


We had a lot of discussions and came to the conclusion that if a lot of people would come to the festival we could not keep them busy with our activities for the afternoon until the music part starts. How should we do it then? We are only 9 people working on this! Of course by asking our amazing Romanian friends and local volunteers to help us a little bit with preparation. We changed the concept a bit, found and are still trying to find more big and easy activities like a water fight and a belly slide planned a relaxation area to be able to make more people enjoy the afternoon.


Organizing a festival- until now it seems already quite complicated, even just to agree on a name! Really, this was the hardest part and we where on the lowest level of our creativity, from “Hai la țară” over “Gratar extraordinar” and “Mirakomania” we ended up in just “Gata Festival” or “Mai Departe”. At this point we decided to ask our local volunteers at the first meeting with them for some creative help, a good idea also because they are Romanian speaking experts and very fast we came to the name that really everybody liked and that sounds really nice in Romanian- “Ceva de Vară” ("Something summery"). After having a name the motivation of everybody raised a lot actually! Also having fun with the local volunteers is motivating a lot. We found people that are willing to help us in anything we need for the festival, before and during. These people are helping us to find more or new activities and to improve the ones we already have. Without help it would be a lot harder for us organizing something big like this. It is great to see that we can fill other people with enthusiasm about our ideas and we also get a kind of confirmation that our ideas are not completely dumb. Thank you a lot for your help guys!


Now we are concentrating on finding sponsors for the event, motivating different musicians to play at the festival, finding more afternoon activities, practicing the theater with the children. We changed the idea of a theater play with the children from the Casa Familiale to smaller sketches or commercials that we will perform in the breaks of the bands in the evening. We will still have campfire music and also star gazing in the dark and story telling activities at the campfires.


Just now we are having the last activities in all the schools we worked in, because the holidays are coming. So afterwards our days will be only concentrated on the festival, we hope we will not get to frustrated by working at home most of the time and not to fall into another creative hole. But we will keep our motivation up and this festival will be amazing! Let´s do it ;) !!