Tom Andreassen discovered Romania more than a decade ago and has dedicated himself to building dreams for the less fortunate Romanian children ever since. He got there by coincidence.

“What I liked most were the people; they are very warm. When I first came here, I went to a family from Mogosoaia. I knew they weren’t wealthy, but every time I was there, it was like they’d saved for two months beforehand just to give me what I needed,” recalls Tom.

He attributes the beginning of his adventure in Romania to his passion for photography. In the three years following a serious car accident when he was 20, Tom discovered the beauty of life.

“Photography is for me like rehab. When I take my camera and go in the forest, or take pictures of people or things, it’s like being restored”, says Andreassen.

Recovered, he dedicated his life to helping the less fortunate, organizing humanitarian actions in different parts of the world – such as Afghanistan, Kenya, and Kosovo.

Baptized as an Orthodox and adopting the name Nicolae, his relationship to Romania is a special one. Andreassen has been gathering children off the streets since he first arrived in Romania, going out and living with them to try and understand what it was like for them to be homeless.

His experience taught him that perhaps education was the only way for them to have a better life, developing a strategy to manage a school for abandoned children in Peris – a city in the South-East Romania – and to endow the staff working there.

This year, he’s brought 52.000 Norwegian crowns to Romania, collected during the Hand 2 Hand Festival in Halden, using this money to buy school supplies, clothes, and food for the 20 children taken from the sewers near a train station in Bucharest.

"When I was asked if I could work with street children, I tried to read; to understand how they are. But I don’t think it’s possible. You can have all the education in the world, and you can read as much as you want, but it isn’t possible to know how is to live on the street if you haven’t been there", he recalls.