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{:}{:en}First day in Craiova for the Nikolauskonvoi. Today we continued to off-load the remaining five lorries as we did not manage to finish those upon arrival yesterday. With joint forces of all Santas and more than 50 young supporters from Craiova we were able to off-load and put away the goods in record time.
Immediately after that we started to commission food, hygiene goods, Christmas parcels and much more onto our lorries and transporters for
today´s distribution tours.
The first teams left around lunchtime.
My team and I have left towards a Roma settlement in Caracal, about 50 kms away from Craiova.
We arrive at two old and run-down industrialized buildings where many poor Roma live under one roof. We have handed out food, hygienic packages including soap, tooth paste and tooth brushes directly off the lorry. The kids additionally got a Christmas present and sweets.
As usually, our visit at the Roma was very loud and hectic and they besieged our lorries, trying to gather more than we provisioned for each of them.
It seems that the extreme poverty of these people urges them in situation like those to lose all their inhibitions and use any change of gathering food or other goods. This situation tends to be very stressful for us as they shout, ask and demand in a language we don´t understand and hence cannot answer, whilst at the same time keeping the steadily growing crowd at distance.
Nevertheless, we do enjoy handing out supplies and Christmas parcels to those people as we all know that anything we hand out is urgently needed especially amongst those people, who don´t have a simple life in Romania.{:}