Volunteers in Romania: the power of non-verbal communication

It is known that communication is one of the most important parts of the life of any human. Being a social creature, human beings need to communicate, to share ideas, to develop connections through language.

One of the biggest challenges we face while doing volunteer in Romania is the language barrier. If you work mainly with people who speak English this is not a problem, but this is not the case for us. Every day we go to the schools and we have to overcome the fact that we don’t speak Romanian and that the kids we are teaching don’t understand English.

In this point, facing the challenge of communicating through words, we have only one option: using non-verbal communication. And this is when the fun starts. When I went in my first class, I was surprised. There I was, with two of my colleagues, a teacher who barely spoke English and two dozens of kids that only spoke Romanian. In these types of cases, there is only one rule to be followed: don’t use only words. Facing this situation, we had to make gestures, show the games we wanted to play by giving examples, smile or make an angry face according to each behavior the children had.

Nonverbal communication has been intensively studied and discussed by specialists. It is known that this is a very important part of any conversation, . The tone of your voice, the amount of time you look the people you are communicating with in the eye and the gestures you make are of extreme importance in any conversation and they can affect the way the other person receives your message.

If non-verbal communication is important when both the intervenients speak the same language, you can imagine its importance in communication between people who don’t understand each other through traditional language. 

In the beginning it can be difficult and sometimes even frustrating. It is possible that in the beginning you cannot send your message in the right way or the others cannot understand you. Maybe in the beginning you will have to explain something over and over again until your message is perceived. Maybe you will be shy and you will not communicate in the best way. But every day you will improve and someday this will be totally natural for you.

And in the end, everything works just perfectly: the children play the games we organize and enjoy them, they understand us through our gestures and they like us a lot.

So, think about it every day in your life: by improving your non-verbal communication skills you can improve your competence, share your ideas in a better way and be able to communicate with people who speak different languages from your own. 

And, most important, loose the fear of doing something or going somewhere just because you don’t understand the language.