Romanias Apuseni Mountains offer a unique natural landscape, that hosts very old villages, where live and tradition still survive. The "LONG AGO" camp for children, situated in this special cultural surrounding, connects kids from all kind of backgrounds to the few people living in these areas. Besides creating a beautiful bond between the generations, our activities aim to also transmit the archaic handcrafts and the ecological values of rural life to the future generations.
Local
Romania
Intregalde village, Alba county, Apuseni Mountains
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): Asociatia Scoala Trimitoare Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Paul Last name of representative: Darasteanu Gender: Male Nationality: Romania Function: Chairman Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Octavian Goga, 1520 Town: Rasinari Postal code: 557200 Country: Romania Direct Tel:+40 728 056 985 E-mail:scoala.trimitoare@gmail.com Website:https://scoalatrimitoare.ro/
URL:https://www.facebook.com/satuldemult/ Social media handle and associated hashtag(s): #tabarasatuldemult #outdoorkids #rezervatiaculturala #scoalatrimitoare
Yes
New European Bauhaus or European Commission websites
The "LONG AGO" kids camp is a simple, yet complex project, that aims to solve more local and global challenges, in one of the most beautiful landscapes of Romania. First of all, the site now hosts two traditional buildings which were totally or partially restored by young people from all over the world. This is the result of years of learning about straw roofs and sustainable life and agriculture in the Apuseni Mountains. This exchange between the villagers and volunteers brings a wonderful charm of diversity and inclusion, in a country where there is a huge social gap between rural and urban environments. People learn here together about simplicity, technology, tradition and much more, all in the initiative of actually preparing an outdoor education facility for children. We all speak the same language after a long day of restoration work. The locals sell their food and drinks and understand the importance of developing a sustainable tourism in an area that is economically not very active. The most positive outcome is that the traditional architecture is conserved and villagers pass on their knowledge, regaining there sense of belonging.
Secondly, when kids arrive at the camp site, the simple life, in harmony with nature, is reenacted through the activities our specialized educators create for the young ones. Although everything seems to be a game, children learn about working with natural materials, working with hand tools, preparing food from their own crop and, actually, about the early history of man kind. This sustainable life style still exists in the Apuseni Mountains, especially in our camp and the experience there, in a very natural and beautiful environment, has a positive impact over the children, used to urban lanscapes and the use of multiple electrical devices, that make our life better. But do they always? This is the question we hope kids take away after a few days at the "LONG AGO" camp.
tradition
sustainability
intergenerational
hands-on
non-formal
Sustainability is a concept that should transcend from the present generation to the future one. In our kids camp we address the need of today’s children to go outdoors and practice practical skills, beyond the digital activities they are usually occupied with, by inspiring ourselves from the knowledge and lifestyle of past generations. By doing this, we also maintain traditional crafts and culture, for the generations to come.
By itself, the archaic rural life was very sustainable. Peasants reused as much as possible, lived in harmony with nature and didn’t leave negative traces. The landscapes that they created in these villages, are a proof of constructions with natural materials, adapted to the conditions on site, without use of motorized equipment and air pollution.
Although these unique villages from the Apuseni Mountains can be inspiring for the kids participating in the “LONG AGO” camp, the places are still inhabited by people who feel like living in a dying world, apart from the modern society, where electricity or opportunities for economical evolution are almost a normality. The activities in the camp, consisting of reviving some traditional crafts like building straw roofs, aim at also recognizing the value of the villagers knowledge, which, from a sustainable point of view, are very important to pass on. By doing this, the locals increase their social well being and also see the possibility of economical growth in their environment. People from all over the world visited our camp site, met these people, bought their products or even land and traditional buildings.
In all our activities we limit the use of plastic and fossil fuels, by using traditional wooden hand tools. The food and straw leftovers are used in a permaculture garden. Although this method of agriculture is newer, we love its concept.
We hope that our project will demonstrate that sustainable tourism is possible in the Apuseni Mountains, with respect for nature and local culture.
Rocky mountains and high hills are beautiful, but the uniqueness of Apuseni is given by the integration of traditional architecture in the landscape: houses and barns are build out of stone, wood, straw and clay; rivers run through whirlpools or mills; churches on hill tops are classified as historical monuments. Hay piles, cows and sheep cover the hills, while steers pull wooden cars.
The area is also valued for its flora and fauna, as natural reservations.
The described scenery is picturesque, but, going further from admiration, you start asking yourself about the cultural and historical value of this living museum. Following their curiosity, founders of the “LONG AGO” camp found out a lot about the initial utility of the rural architecture, right from the old villagers.
This urban-rural interaction creates many positive emotions and cultural benefits and it was our motivation to start the camp in Intregalde. Our objectives are to conserve the beautiful architecture, by learning and teaching about traditional crafts and building techniques, in a place where you can not only admire, but also experience, hands on, the way people used to live without electricity. We already met these objectives in the construction of the camp site, located next to a traditional barn. The straw roof was restored in 2021, with volunteers from all Romania, alongside villagers. In the 2022 we saved and moved a cottage, with the help of Belgian scouts. The project was also funded with organized day trips to the “LONG AGO” camp, which resulted in donations.
For 2023 we plan to finish the tent camp for kids, show them the construction techniques at smaller scales and finish our traditional bread oven, so we can bake with the wheat we grow. Washing at whirlpools or singing at shepherds pipes are also quality experiences of the camp.
Although the remoteness of the Intregalde village, home of our camp, favored the conservation of traditional architecture and life style, it is also the cause of bad social integration for the villagers. The situation is similar in most rural areas of Romania, creating a social gap between people from the city and those in the country sides; our project aims to narrow this gap through our activities and empower the locals. In numerous occasions we visited and helped the villagers with their work or even with using their newer gadgets. The help returned often and our neighbors, some traveling over 5 km, came to help us with restoring the straw roof. This also made us feel included in their village.
On the other hand, as in most oft the activities of our NGO, there were always 2-3 children from disadvantaged backgrounds participating in our camps. Although they usually come from villages and are used to what rural life has to offer, the experience of being in a kids camp is something they couldn’t afford otherwise. As soon as the tent camp will be ready in 2023, we will also have special offers for entire classes from schools of the county.
The access to the camp is unique, made on foot. We never encouraged our visitors to come with off road vehicles or other means of transportation; when climbing to the “LONG AGO” camp, we all walk and spend time together, no matter what car one has left in the parking. It happened a couple of times to ask villagers to drive people that are not physically capable to climb, but were looking for other solutions. This way we found the "Acces Natura" NGO and we plan to work with them in the future, in order to help people with motor disabilities enjoy the beautiful path that takes to the restored barn of the "LONG AGO" camp.
Our initiative benefits citizens at local level, with the exemplary approach towards conservation of traditional architecture and capitalizing on the rural values. Villagers were very skeptical about our idea of saving old buildings, learning old techniques and bringing a sustainable tourism in the Apuseni Mountains, without huge investments and lots of motorized vehicles. Starting 2012, when the founders of “LONG AGO” chose Intregalde as a location for their project, locals slowly changed their opinion about the activities proposed by our NGO. Although we can not measure the exact impact of our influence, we know the villagers profited of selling food and services to our tourists and we hear more often that young people who moved from there, think about using their abandoned properties for tourism.
An important aspect of this probably was the media attention our project caught online and on TV. This recognition meant unexpectedly much for our neighbors. Other people organized themselves later, through social media, and donated products directly to the locals, showing their support for these isolated villages and their inhabitants.
Our work continues to be presented online and people support our idea through donations. Beside this help, all our bigger construction projects benefited of the help of volunteers from important cities and architecture universities. There is a rising trend in Romania’s civil society for going back to the roots and conserving our traditions. People contact us for information about the straw roofs, because they also have barns covered with this material and think they might want to keep it. This is a completely new mindset, compared to the year 2012, when locals were trying to convince us to use modern materials for our barn and hut. With our project we already documented and posted videos of the straw roof building craft; this typical technique from the Apuseni Mountains was not presented online until we made our first videos.
Our partners support the “LONG AGO” camp in different ways. At local level, the town hall helped us with promoting our initiative and visiting our construction site with the counties council President, representing the regional authority. After this exchange, the whole village profited of a better road to the hill, which we needed to transport the straw bales. Our project and NGO was also present in the main event of the village “Drag de Intregalde”, a festival for locals and tourists. Adding to this, we have a promise from the mayor of giving us the old school building in administration. Our plan is to save it too and turn it into a hostel for volunteers. The current situation of the school is bad, it`s missing half of the roof.
Although we payed for the straw bales, we are happy we found that the sellers of the neighboring village understood our needs of picking up the best material for our project and were supportive.
At national level, the whole project of the hut was sponsored by the Colt Technologies Company from Sibiu. The University of Cluj also visited us and discussed about the possibility of choosing Intregalde as a pilot program for sustainable tourism. Following this meeting, the National Radio in Cluj interviewed us live in the spring of 2022.
At European level we partnered with a boys scout group from Belgium, which literally helped moving things in the summer of 2022. The teenagers worked a whole year to fund their trip to Romania and help us move a traditional hut, that was 500 meters far away. We also visited and helped the villagers and spend an evening with traditional Romanian food and music. At the end of 2022, we started the collaboration wit an NGO from Germany, Kukuk Kultur e.V. and the town hall. We planned to build a playground in Intregalde, next to the only still functioning school of the commune. Camp visitors will be glad to have a place to play, after 40 minutes of bus drive.
The “LONG AGO” camp combines the knowledge fields of education and heritage conservation. The founder of our NGO, Paul Darasteanu, is a qualified preschool and school teacher, specialized in foreign languages (especially German) and hired special educator for outdoor activities. At a personal level, he was passionate about traditional architecture from an early age, participating in numerous restoration projects. He managed to learn the technique of traditional log buildings and straw roofs. With his skills and help from volunteers, we actually prepared the whole camp site. There is and will be work to do, but this also backs up as a wonderful opportunity of teaching crafts to people interested. Volunteers are often architecture students, so their knowledge is valuable.
Working on roofs needs safety measures, so children can not take part. Kids will learn about the process on a scaled down house. When pupils visit our camp with their teachers, there is a positive exchange in the pedagogical field, between formal and non-formal education.
For this topic we will also mention another aspect, that maybe goes unnoticed, in the interaction with the locals. They help us with their knowledge about the lands and best timing for constructing or transportation and traditional food. As mentioned before, although they live in a village with no electricity, the installation of solar panels opened a different world for them, especially with the access to information through tablets and smart phones. NGO members always as “IT specialists” with simple tasks like creating or recovering email addresses, changing settings or even donating gadgets. Some basic knowledge for young generations is new information for the locals and we are happy that some of them are interested of being up to date.
In the future, if the discussions with the Cluj University will lead to a collaboration, the exchange with the scientific field will benefit the villagers and our project.
A camp is usually expensive and offers accommodation conditions similar to what kids have back home. The outdoor program consists of the common touristic offer in the area, which can be or has already been visited by the kids with their families. Of course, spending time with your peers in any camp is valuable for the participants, but we try to offer more than typical tourism. By reenacting the life of a traditional Romanian mountain village, the whole experience in our camp becomes unique and authentic.
But how can authenticity be innovative? We believe it is the way we offer the authenticity as a learning process. Children not only see the old roof and a tool, they use it to make a new roof in an old style. Kids don’t only learn about natural and sustainable materials, they work with them, when cutting the wheat and using the straw; they see how the archaic architecture survived with the use of simple techniques. Participants not only do a workshop and drive back home, they eat there, sleep there, breathe there and listen to the silence there. Impressions are much more powerful this way and we hope that they can give birth to an alternative view on modern life, gadgets and complicated systems.
As founders of the “LONG AGO” camp, we found these experiences very useful for ourselves and, having a pedagogical background, wanted to share them. It is not about going back to a medieval life or blaming technology, it is about taking a peek at where humanity came from and analyze where we are heading to. This is a lesson you cannot learn in any other camp we know of and parents appreciate it and send their children to our events.
The brainstorming sessions we had before even starting the “LONG AGO” camp, came up with a concept of a “cultural reservation”. We thought that conserving a typical lifestyle, culture and architecture is very similar to conserving unique natural habitats. We hope that one day, when our project will become better known, it will inspire people or authorities in other regions of Romania to restore villages and reenact the rural life there. We can think of a few places with specific culture, architecture and landscape, that would deserve this kind of attention, before the buildings and craftsmen disappear: the Danube Delta, Wallachia, Moldavia, Maramures and the Saxon or Hungarian villages of Transilvania.
As a starting point, finding a location which maintains as much architecture and as many locals as possible, is easy to replicate. The team of the new project must be willing to learn building techniques from specialists or villagers and start preparing the camp site, that should look just like a traditional village of that region. It is necessary to involve other partners in this process, because it will need man power and financing. A good PR is very important at this stage. With the location prepared, the “LONG AGO” team would be highly motivated to visit the new camp, present and adapt their pedagogical approach for children activities. In a good collaboration, groups of pupils could visit all these camps, get to know a big part of their country and support the local economy. From a European and historical point of view, these initiatives would conserve a very important and diverse cultural heritage of Romania
The main starting idea of our project was to find a place that offers the complete opposite touristic and learning experience to an urban area. In our search we discovered that there is little to no non-formal education in villages and that traditional architecture is under a continuous attack of renovations or demolitions. By facing our expectations to the situation in the field, we came up with the idea of combining education with conserving architecture. We found a property and a building that best fitted our needs and started there. In order to realize our ambition we had to go our selves through a learning process, some restorations and organizing short day trips to the Intregalde village. We continue preparing better camping conditions in the mountain village, without compromising the authentic look, we are constantly on the lookout for other buildings in the village that could be saved and would serve our purposes and we always plan new activities, that should be fun for children, but also authentic.
According to the United Nations classification of global issues, we think that our project provides a local solution on the topic of children’s right to education. Having an inclusive approach to organizing kids camps, we aim at offering a high quality of outdoor education to children from any background. This means that urban and rural citizens are very often in contact through our project, encouraging diversity and tolerance. By explaining historical and cultural topics in our camp and having an international work environment on our restoration sites, we work on a healthy feeling of belonging, that leads to less frustration. We believe that frustration is a big reason for violence; disarming and peace keeping is another global challenge we address this way.
Our concept is based on the admiration of the traditional rural life, in harmony with nature. We believe that experiencing the “LONG AGO” camp, encourages kids to live more sustainable and try to have the smallest influence over climate changes.
The fact that our project brought new life in a village with currently only other three living locals, because of advanced ageing in rural areas, could also be seen as saving the functionality of a living environment, where people were able to survive for centuries. In the context of the global challenge with growing population, keeping the more remote villages alive and their fields capable for agriculture is not such a bad idea.
Our evolution with teaching values of sustainability and heritage conservation took us from staff members learning crafts by them selves to volunteers organizing entire restoration sites and, in the end, children experiencing unique camp activities. The results can be seen at the location of the "LONG AGO" camp, in the shape of clear outdoor playgrounds which have been saved from unwanted vegetation, a new straw roof for the original barn and a new restored building, that will house the bread oven. These results demonstrate the possibility of refunctioning old rural buildings into a teaching facility, only with the help of an NGO, volunteers and sponsors. This is a clear proof that people from different backgrounds want to regain a sense of belonging to a historical evolution of man kind, which had its moments of glory. The rural life in the Apuseni Mountains was such a period and not loosing its traces was a strong motivation to all our partners. They, we and the restored location were the first direct beneficiaries. The whole process started in 2012 also influenced the mentality of the locals towards valuing their culture in a touristic manner. We can say that only in the year 2022 we properly started working for our main beneficiaries that we had in mind, the children. We still have much in plan for them, like preparing more camping spots for tents, a traditional kitchen and a new small scale building for kids to practice straw roof building. A bigger acquisition, we can not afford yet is another property, with a barn and a stone house, that has a better incline and is more suitable for a playground. Buying that property would give us the possibility of catching a small river and build a traditional mill. With this final building on site, kids will be able to make their own bread, starting with planting and harvesting the wheat, taking the grain to the mill and baking in the oven.
The competences that volunteers and kids learn in our camp are about the traditional hands on building techniques, that were very sustainable. By using straw for roofs there is no production costs and pollution, every part of the wheat is used. The principle of traditional buildings was to use what materials they had on location, reducing the need of transportation. All the materials like wood, branches and straw are non polluting and regenerable
