Bekah Swingle with a friend she met in Romania

Bekah Swingle finds inspiration and insights in Romania

     July 2, 2008 -  Determined to spend her senior semester practicum abroad, Bekah Swingle could have easily settled for London.

     But why go to London to do pretty much what she was already doing here?

     “I felt like I needed to do something different, so I did my own search,” Swingle, who recently graduated with her MSW degree from the Indiana University School of Social Work.

     What she found was Veritas, a social service agency located in Sighisoara, Romania.

     Swingle, who grew up in Nappanee, Indiana, arrived there in January and started her four-month practicum, an experience that gave her an eye-opening look at the perseverance of social workers struggling to fund and start programs as well as a first-hand experience of what it’s like to be an immigrant.

     She settled on Veritas in part after finding out the director of the program, Dorothy Tarrant has an MSW degree and because the number of social service programs the agency has managed to start. 

     Under Communism and the country’s dictator, people weren’t supposed to have any problems so there was no need for social workers. “I realized they had built it from the ground up after the fall of communism. I really liked that,” she said of the work the agency has accomplished in recent years.

     Tarrant had worked as a professor for 20 years before arriving in Romania and was a natural teacher, Swingle said. She ensured students like Swingle were immersed in the local cultural and took them on weekend trips to see the country.

     Veritas put her background with substance abuse programs to work, but Swingle found it wasn’t exactly like working for an agency here in the United States.

     Veritas, like many social service agencies there, have few resources although it was better off than some agencies. Even so, the materials they have available for alcohol abuse education were limited at best, Swingle said.

      Many of the materials they did have were from the 1970s, she recalled.

     She spent some of her time working in a small village near where Veritas was located, a town where there was a sever alcoholism problem. Swingle worked with a range of people from teenagers to older adults.

     “We got a lot of villagers to come to meetings. I also went into schools,” Swingle said. “Some of the principals were very open to getting kids any kind of services at all.” While alcohol abuse was rampant, she discovered there was relatively low drug use because Romanians didn’t have the same access to drugs as Americans do.

     Swingle had tried to learn some Romanian before she arrived and then took a Romanian language courses offered by Veritas, along with other languages.

     She learned enough to go into a store and order what she needed and travel about without getting lost in a town that was the birthplace of Count Dracula, a fictional character in the Dracula novel, which was inspired by a well-known figure in Romanian history, Vlad Dracula.

     The experience of seeing social workers try to piece together programs – such as soup kitchen for the elderly who were left behind after other family members left Romania to find jobs – was an experience that Swingle believes will serve her well in the years to come.

      “It was good for me to see that struggle,” she said.

       It wasn’t unusual for Romanians to leave the country to find employment or to study. Many go to Western European countries like Spain and Italy, where they face the same kind of issues Hispanic workers do in the United States.

     “I now understand how overwhelming it is to be an immigrant,” Swingle added. While she was in Romania for four months, it was hard to imagine moving to another country for the rest of your life, she noted.

       Swingle said she considered various majors while getting her undergraduate degree at Indiana Wesleyan University at Marion. It wasn’t until she had graduated, that Swingle understood that being a social worker was what she really wanted to do. “I think a lot of it was seeing injustice and realizing that was the field I wanted to be in.”

       Swingle is currently working at Dockside, a home-based counseling agency. But she hasn’t forgotten her experience of being an outsider in someone else’s county.

      “I would love to work with an immigration agency at some point.”