In late May, 10 employees from the VELUX and DOVISTA groups were in Romania building houses for families in need under the program “Live a dream”.
The trip was organized by The Employee Foundation and the local organisation, Habitat for Humanity. The employees volunteered and donated one week of vacation and a lot of hard work. The Employee Foundation hopes to repeat this trip next year, so keep an eye out if you are interested in a lifechanging experience. Here are a few pictures from this year’s trip.
The 10 volunteering employees met up in Bucharest and the trip started out lightly with a city tour of the capitol city of Romania. The evening was spend enjoying a dinner consisting of local specialties and getting to know each other.
On the drive from Bucharest to Bacău, where a hotel would be the base for the remainder of the trip, there was time to stop at the iconic Bran Castle in the region of Transylvania. The castle is also known as ‘Dracula’s Castle’ since the author Bram Stoker found inspiration for his famous character in Vlad III, who allegedly stayed at the castle.
On Tuesday, the team finally arrived on the build site. Time for a quick group photo in front of the house. The house consists of four apartments with kitchen, bathroom, living room and two bedrooms on approx. 65 square meters. The team was split into groups and did the majority of the work on two of these apartments.
Safety on site is of great importance for Habitat for Humanity. The local guide, Adi, gave a thorough safety briefing before building. Helmets were mandatory when working on the site and also made sure to ruin everyone’s hairstyles equally.
Our jobs consisted mostly of plastering, sanding, priming, painting, and a bit of floor laying. It was hard work and not the most exciting job, but it was needed in this particular case. It also helped to know what difference our work does to those in need.
Building with a lot of people takes coordination. We started out every day with appointing people to different jobs. A few of the employees had construction experience, but it is no requirement to participate. You just need to be able to do physical work.
Here we are listening to the heart-breaking story of a woman who received help from Habitat for Humanity. She was also working for the organisation. Recipients need to work on the houses and be able to pay the running costs of living there. They call it a hand-up in stead of hand-out.
In between working, we also had time for dancing. One of the participants is a part of a dance group and she tried to teach us a routine.
Tired, but happy. Waiting for the bus to pick us up from the site.
