Another World, Right Next to Us

What a volunteer narrative from Ferentari reveals about care, precarity, and who gets recognized as fully human

Ferentari is often described through statistics: poverty, crime, segregation, school dropout, exclusion.

But statistics are not the only way inequality becomes visible.

Sometimes it appears in a much smaller scene: waking up at 6 a.m. to make sandwiches. Sitting around a table. A teenager complaining through most of a cinema trip, then quietly resting his head on someone’s shoulder.

Those moments were what interested me in a cultural case study I wrote about a 2022 volunteer narrative published by Asociația Casa Bună, an NGO working with children from Ferentari. Rather than treating the text as a report on poverty, I read it as a narrative about personhood: how certain lives become recognizable, valuable, and emotionally legible to people who would otherwise encounter them only through stereotypes.

The distance is not really geographical

One of the most striking lines in the narrative describes Ferentari as “another world”, despite being physically next to the rest of Bucharest.

That image stayed with me.

The distance between these “two worlds” is not measured in kilometres. It is social and perceptual.

The text describes people living in their own “bubbles”, able to remain physically close to inequality while barely encountering it as a lived reality. In my reading, this is where Judith Butler’s idea of recognizability becomes useful: inequality is not only about who receives fewer resources, but also about whose lives become visible to us as complex, valuable, and fully human in the first place.

A child from Ferentari can be highly visible as a category, “Roma”, “poor”, “problem child”, “from a bad neighbourhood”, while remaining almost invisible as a person.

That distinction matters.

Care is much less heroic than we like to imagine

What I found especially interesting about the Casa Bună narrative is that it does not build care through spectacular acts of charity.

It builds it through repetition.

Cooking. Cleaning. Waking up early. Getting irritated. Being tired. Staying anyway.

One of the most ordinary lines in the text is about waking up at 6 a.m. to prepare ten sandwiches. It sounds almost irrelevant, but that is exactly why it matters. Care appears as work rather than a moral identity. Time. Friction. Routine.

Lauren Berlant’s writing on “inconvenience” helped me think about this.

Being close to other people is not automatically beautiful or transformative. It can be tiring, awkward, frustrating, and unequal.

That does not make care less meaningful. It may actually make it more real.

“Too mature for their age”

Another phrase in the narrative describes the children as “too mature for their age”.

It sounds almost complimentary at first.

But read more carefully, it becomes something much darker.

Children are supposed to be allowed a certain degree of dependence, naivety, and safety. When a child is “mature” because they have learned to expect disappointment from family, the state, society, and other people, that maturity is not really a personality trait.

It is an adaptation.

This is where Butler’s distinction between precariousness and precarity becomes important. Everyone is vulnerable. But vulnerability is not distributed equally.

Some people have institutions, families, schools, neighbourhoods, and social networks that absorb risk.

Others learn to stay permanently alert.

The narrative repeatedly presents guardedness not as a defect in these children, but as a rational response to a world that has repeatedly failed them.

That shift in interpretation is important.

The child is no longer “difficult”.

The more interesting question becomes: what kind of world makes this behaviour necessary?

The cinema scene

The moment I found most powerful in the text happens at the cinema.

One of the teenagers complains about the outing. He says they should have gone somewhere else. The complaints continue for around twenty minutes.

Then, without any dramatic conversation or breakthrough, he rests his head on the volunteer’s shoulder.

She interprets it as a moment in which he “let his guard down and felt safe”.

And then the film ends, and the complaints start again.

That detail is what makes the scene work.

Nothing is solved.

The child is not “transformed”. The volunteer does not rescue him. Structural inequality does not disappear because two people share a moment of trust in a cinema.

And yet something happens.

For a brief moment, the child is not presented as a social problem, a member of a marginalized population, or a beneficiary of humanitarian work.

He appears as one particular person who feels safe enough to lean against someone.

That is a very small event.

But politically, I think it matters.

The limits of care

There is also a danger in narratives like this.

Stories about volunteering can easily become stories about the volunteer: their kindness, their transformation, their realization of how fortunate they are.

The Casa Bună narrative occasionally approaches that territory. The volunteer even describes wanting to “take them all home”.

But the text also acknowledges that this is impossible.

Good intentions cannot substitute for functioning institutions.

Proximity cannot replace housing, education, healthcare, anti-discrimination policy, or long-term political responsibility.

That is one of the tensions I found most interesting.

Care matters, but care is not justice.

Recognizing someone’s humanity does not automatically change the structures that made their life precarious in the first place.

Still, recognition is not nothing.

Seeing differently

I think that is ultimately what this narrative does best.

It does not offer a solution to poverty in Ferentari.

It changes the scale at which the reader sees it.

From “the Roma problem” to one child.

From structural inequality to ten sandwiches at 6 a.m.

From abstract vulnerability to someone resting their head on another person’s shoulder.

The political significance of these moments is not that they resolve injustice.

It is that they interrupt the distance that makes injustice easy to ignore.

Because sometimes “another world” is not actually far away.

It is right next to us.

An ode to new research methodologies in my career

One thing this project changed for me methodologically was how I think about context. I studied political science and was used to approaching research by looking for patterns, categories, and relationships that could be made comparable across cases. Here, close reading forced me to slow down and ask a more basic question first: what does something mean in this particular place, with this particular history?

That mattered especially in the Romanian context, where categories such as “Rroma”, poverty, neighbourhood stigma, care, and even ideas of normal childhood are shaped by long histories of exclusion and public framing. The same gesture, phrase, or narrative could mean something very different if removed from that context.

The shift taught me that understanding culture and history is not an optional layer added after the “real” analysis. It is part of the analysis itself. Before comparing, measuring, or generalizing, research has to understand how people, identities, and problems are already being made meaningful within the world being studied. I’m genuinely excited to merge everything I’ve learned from political science, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studied so far into my next, this time, Development Studies research project.