April 2025 : A busy 10 days in Romania for our team… just to show a few snippets of what we did, and some of the Romanian traditions and features of local life that many are not aware of.
Wherever we went, we always fed the strays.
We bought food packages and took them to those in the rural communities who needed it most of all. We used donations from our team specifically made to buy the food.
We spent time with our NGO charity Save The Horses Romania with over 120 rescued horses. We took apples, carrots, and two of our Paws2Rescue vets to help check on the newly rescued old horses.
Of course, we spent many days at our Sanctuary, playing with the dogs, sharing Easter eggs and helping to clean and feed the dogs too.
Whilst we saved over 14 dogs this trip, always the hardest is to choose who to save from the public “kill shelters” and here are some of the ones we took out, filling our car to the brim, with dogs in every single space of the car.
This was the condition of the boy we named Ben. He was so seriously injured, we had to take him straight to the local vet clinic where he stayed for a week. He will recover just fine thankfully.
Just one of many dogs we saved from the fields, forests and side of the road. She was so scared – and full of ticks and fleas.
We shared some of the local Easter traditions. They do not have chocolate eggs. The eggs are all boiled and then dyed red by hand. We made 200 of these for the dogs to share Easter joy with.
We went to the village church for midnight mass. One of the traditions is for the congregation to walk around the outside of the church 3 times with candles lit by the priest.
We enjoyed the traditional Easter Sunday breakfast too. Along with traditional dishes like this one we made – Sarmale – stuffed cabbage rolls.
Apart from enjoying the beauty of rural Romania, every day, we encountered the local traffic jam… sheep.
Another common sight in rural Romania are the storks nests on top of the telegraph poles. So beautiful to see.
And finally, in the remote villages, homes do not have taps or running water. All water is collected in bottles from the village well. This was the first time that Nisha had experienced this, and it was a reminder of how different to our lives in the UK, life in rural Romania really is.