In Odorheiu Secuiesc, pensioners are now learning how to stay in touch with family and loved ones online at their local library.
In 2004, Kovacs Erzsebet, a 64 year-old retiree began going to the town’s Pensioner Benefit Fund to attend choir and dance lessons. While visiting with other pensioners in her classes, a common theme often came up: how to stay in touch with family abroad. For many in this city in Harghita County, and throughout Romania, maintaining contact with relatives living and working in other countries is difficult and expensive. Kovacs, in order to assist her peers and share the knowledge she would gain, took it on herself to take an Information Technology (IT) training course from the Modern Business Science College.
After taking the course, Kovacs worked with the Pensioner Benefit Fund to petition their community for a training computer, and by Christmas, their requests were answered by a local company. Kovacs shared her newfound knowledge with her friends, and over the years, secured seven additional computer donations. Demand, however, outpaced the resources they had as 50 to 60 pensioners were attending Kovacs IT training courses, to the point where they could no longer all fit in one location.
Following a conversation with Kovacs’ local librarian and the director of the Pensioner Benefit Fund, the Biblionet [8] partner library arranged for Kovacs to use their additional computer resources to teach a weekly class at the library.
Thanks to her course, the library has become a key place for the elderly to use IT, be it for reuniting with distant relatives, seeing video of their grandchildren for the first time, or even the pride of knowing that retirement can be a time for new learning.