On Friday, 3 July, a fire truck’s water jet arced over a field beside a library in Ungheni, and a few dozen children watched from a distance as the water fell back like rain. It was the last day of a week of summer activities run by Branch No. 2 of the city’s public library, housed in the Regina Maria Multifunctional Cultural Centre.
The children climbed up to the truck of the Ungheni Emergency Situations Directorate (DSE), learned how firefighters’ equipment and technique work and — the library writes — understood “how important their work is in saving lives.” The water-jet demonstration was followed by the game that gave the day its name: “Paparudă, rudă, vino de ne udă!” Laughter, cold water and high spirits, at the end of a week that kept children close to the library in the middle of the holidays.
One demonstration, from a campaign reaching tens of thousands of children
The firefighters’ visit was not an isolated moment. Demonstrations like this are part of the prevention campaign that the General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations (IGSU) — of which the Ungheni DSE is a part — runs in schools and kindergartens across the country. From the start of the 2025–2026 school year through March, rescuers reached 1,086 educational institutions and trained 121,828 children and 12,644 teachers, according to IGSU data cited by the MOLDPRES agency.
It is not only about admiring the truck. In these lessons, children learn how to react to a fire or an earthquake, how to use a fire extinguisher and how to evacuate safely — skills a child retains better by seeing the truck and the people who put them into practice than from a leaflet.
«Paparuda», a custom older than the library
The game that ended the day is not a summer-camp invention. «Paparuda» is one of the oldest Romanian customs — a pre-Christian rain-calling ritual performed in times of drought: young girls dressed in greenery dance and sing verses that call for rain while being doused with water. It was performed on the third Thursday after Easter, but also on any summer day after a prolonged drought, and the custom has counterparts among neighbouring peoples — “Perperuda” among Bulgarians, “Dodole” among Serbs.
In a summer when Ungheni had only just come out of an orange-code heatwave, with temperatures up to 38 degrees, a game about calling the rain carries a very concrete resonance too.
An organized holiday day
Branch No. 2 is one of the libraries trying to keep children occupied over the summer, when school is out. The institution is housed in the Regina Maria cultural centre, opened in 2018 with external funding, which gathers a library, conference hall, gallery and interest clubs under one roof — the same branch we wrote about in June, when a writer donated children’s books to it.
For a parent, a day in which a child learns about fire from firefighters and cools off under a water jet is, in the end, a free and useful way to spend a holiday — the kind of activity that, in a small town, does not organize itself.