Dear guests,

It is a great pleasure to have you with us today, at a meaningful joint volunteering that will be of great support for us and our beneficiaries, families from Pata-Rât that moved or are in the process of moving in decent housing conditions.

We will only be together for three hours, but we are confident that we will build together memories for a lifetime during this time.

But let’s move on to the program of this action.

The first stop will be in the spatially and ethnically segregated area of Pata-Rât, on the outskirts of Cluj, the place that our beneficiaries called home for a long time, some for generations. The purpose of this short stop is two folded: to provide you with the necessary background for understanding the huge step forward that our hour beneficiaries are making by moving out of Pata-Rât in decent social housing and more broadly, to get in touch with a paradox: one of the poorest communities in Romania is in the vicinity of one of the country’s richest cities. How it came to this situation we will tell you right there.

For ten years, the Cluj Metropolitan Area has been carrying out an integrated intervention in Pata-Rât to desegregate the area. In these ten years, we’ve managed to relocate 108 families from the area, for a total of around 500 people. They now benefit from decent living conditions, in apartments spread in Cluj-Napoca and several communes in the metropolitan area.

We will leave Pata-Rât for Apahida commune, where there are two small blocks of flats (with six apartments each), where some beneficiaries have moved from Pata-Rât, and others are about to move. As the buildings are in two different locations we’ll split in two groups.

Here please give them and give us a helping hand, with the furniture assemblage (don’t get nervous, it’s IKEA) and arrangement of courtyards. You’ll receive all the needed details on site.

Throughout the activities, we encourage you to talk to the residents, while laying the table and making a barbecue to enjoy together, at the end.

We’ll also support you in offering a present for each family that was so kind to host us.

Then, we’ll return to the hotel… and we miss you already.