EVS in Santiago de Compostela

Ukraine is a country of possibilities. But sometimes Ukrainians just need somebody who can be the example and the inspiration. How international cultural exchanges affect business in Ukraine I will tell in my story about 3 business from Ukraine.  The creamery built by French hippies  The appearance of the creamery in 2002 has changed forever a village Nyzhne Selysche in Transcarpatia (West Ukraine). Every morning starts here with people from the village and surrounding ones bringing milk. The production of cow’s milk is a possibility of significant additional income for local residents. Also, the creamery itself is a moving force of the cultural development of the village. People do not want to leave it anymore, there are educational and leisure institutions, anyone can start own business or get inspired by those who has already started.  The story has started from leftist commune called Longo Mai, a network of agricultural cooperatives with an anti...

My name is Sasha and I work in Civic Center Santa Marta. Normally I spend my time in playing room with children 3-12 y.o. We have different activities like reading books, playing boarding games and when we have to celebrate something (and trust me in Spain we have a lot of celebrations) we prepare posters, costumes, etc. I always have something to do in my Center. But I love my project not only for this. I have 5 important things I got from my project and I am going to tell what does it mean to be volunteer in Santiago de Compostela ;) 1.   To work in real conditions with real boss, colleagues, responsibilities and schedule.   Yes, maybe it sounds a bit scary, but in my center, all people are so friendly and open-minded that sometimes I feel that it is just a summer camp. We have a lot of fun. And I love my talkative compañeras de aula de juegos.   2.   To have a lot of new friends from all over the world. During my project, I met other volunteer...

The cathedral of Santiago, the narrow streets, the smell of seafood and the rain. These are the most noticed things about Santiago for me. It’s not that big city but it’s really unique and you can’t avoid falling in love with it. After one month of volunteering in Santiago I can say that I arrived here in the busiest month of the year or this is what I think so far. It was all full of Christmas lights and music which brought joy to my soul. In the center where I volunteer it was all about this important celebration. Typical Spanish sweets, gifts and Christmas decorations... We were super busy preparing for it. My favourite activity was the Christmas party because I love dancing and especially with kids! In January the celebrations don’t end because here in Spain there’s another important day and it’s Reyes Magos on the 6th of January when children receive their gifts. Although many Spanish people are starting to receive them in the 25th of December. And yes, I also got a gift...

Hello again from Olga. No doubt that EVS is a great chance to discover a new culture and get used to different type of daily life. But I am here not only to learn Spanish culture, but also to share the knowledge about my homeland Russian Federation.  It can sound strange to you, but I am not from Moscow or even not from Saint Petersburg. Everybody knows that Russia is enormous but it’s difficult to imagine any other city except these two. Let’s get acquainted with two more at least. I am from beautiful small city Cheboksary, which is situated on the river Volga. It’s one hour by plane from Moscow and we consider it as the central part of a country. To tell the truth, I am not originally Russian, I am Chuvash, and Cheboksary is the capital of Chuvash republic. We are one of more than 160 nationalities that you can find in Russia. We have our own culture and language, that take their origin in turk roots.  Also I was studying and working in a neighbour republic Tatarst...

That’s how I start most of the conversations here in Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galician region in Spain. Since I am here, there is something that surprises me the most. It’s not that Spanish people have dinner at 11 pm or the fact that it is raining under any circumstances and even not that crowds of pilgrims scurry back and forth under my window. But the knowing that time is going extremely fast. Now it’s my second month on voluntary service in Don Bosco Center and the time to tell you finally about myself and my relations with EVS. Maybe when you hear a phrase «EVS volunteer» you imagine a very funny college graduate who is enjoying his gap year and has no idea what to study next. Let’s break the stereotypes a little bit. I am 25 now, finished university long time ago and had three-year working experience in my home region. So why I am here? The point is that I have never looked for stability in my life. I believe that a positive stress always keeps you alive. S...

Hello everybody, we would like to introduce ourselves in a brief post before starting to update the blog more regularly. Until now we are 3 volunteers from 3 different country, Olga from Russia, Mine from Turkey and Filip from Luxembourg. Olga and Filip work both in ETL Don Bosco. Mine works in  ARC Os Tilos. In the following weeks we will be joined by three more volunteers. We hope that you are excited to learn something about us and our experiences in the next months. ( From left to right : Filip, Mine and Olga)

Click here ⬆ Last Friday night in April was very special night for all volunteers, and also for all our friends that we met during othis EVS project. We had amazing intercultural party! Each volunteer needed to represent his own country in 10 minutes, and plus , to cook something delicious, of course, typical from his country. People learned that Luxembourg is very small country, but that they have amazing wine and mustard:), that Belarus has beautiful nature. They've learned traditional Turkish dance, wonderful customs in Serbia and that Belgium has more than 1500 different kinds of beer and much, much more.

Last Friday, our coordinating organization Don Bosco in co-production with the local escape room team, invited us to participate in an Escape Room taking place in our center. Afterwards, there would be a dinner together with all the participating teams and the people responsible for the organization. As we were already talking about joining an Escape Room altogether as volunteers the weeks before, this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Especially with the included dinner, it seemed like the perfect Friday night plan for most of us.

During the Christmas time, our hosting organization organized Bosco Nadal. It was a camp for kids during their holidays, which is very helpful for a lot of parents who have to work during this period. It lasted two weeks, from Friday 22nd of December to Friday 5th of January. During this time our center organized a whole bunch of activities during the mornings from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.

For the Christmas time, every volunteer decided to stay in Spain. As we wouldn't be able to see our friends and family, we decided to celebrate this fest with our family of Santiago, the European volunteer family. The first surprise we got Friday before Christmas. ETL Don Bosco, our coordinating organisation, gifted us with baskets filled with food and drinks and wished us Merry Christmas. It was really nice  of the people we are working with and all of us were very thankful, especially to see how much they care about us and our happiness. As for the Christmas days some of the volunteers would leave Santiago to visit some friends in Spain, we decided to keep these baskets until the 27th and have a little after work Christmas dinner together. Furthermore we played the secret friend game, so every one took a name and had to get a small present for this person, but this also had to wait until everybody returned on the 27th.

Two months after our arrival in Santiago, the last 7 of us, who arrived the latest on their project, had our On-arrival training. It took place in a small village called Bergondo, situated close to A Coruña. In the morning of the 10th of December we took a train to Coruña where we should meet at the bus station with other volunteers. It would be the first time for us to get in contact with volunteers living in other cities of Spain, so everybody was quite curious to find out where they were from, what they would be like, if there'd be perhaps somebody from ones own home country etc.. When we finally arrived there it was crowded, 30 - 40 people waiting for us, all stranger to each other, but united in the decision to take part on an Evs project. After we took the bus to Bergondo, we got our rooms. Everybody got a room with people from other cities, so that we would be forced to socialize a little. We had few minutes to put down our stuff, greet each other and exchange a few words b...

When I first arrived in Santiago I was a little bit nervous. I didn't knew exactly what awaited me, so it was in some kind the moment of truth, the moment where my choice to participate in an EVS project for seven months got real. A lot of questions shot threw my head, like "What will the city be like?", "How are the other volunteers?", "Who are these people from the Hosting Organization I only know threw Email contact?", "Whats my flat like?", "Whats the work about?" or "I don't even know Spanish, will I get along?".. Now after two months, I know the answers to all of these questions that appeared to me some seconds after I climbed out of my plane. So I can say the city is beautiful and I love the galician lifestyle, the other volunteers, as well as the people from the Hosting Organization are really kind, the flats are nice as long as we keep them clean and I really like my work here . As I think, that these are...

Participating in an EVS is an once in lifetime experience. On the one hand, it is a huge decision to take in a young age, to quit home for a long time, to go to a place you don't know, where you are in confrontation with a new culture, perhaps a new language you don`t understand, unknown people and for some the new situation of living alone for the first time and carrying more responsibility than ever before. On the other hand it's an immense chance, to get to a new place, to improve your intercultural understanding, to learn more about the world and more about yourself by taking you out of your all day life and putting yourself under completely new circumstances. It's a possibility to improve many different skills, participating in projects, working in teams and giving your own input as part of the group. Furthermore it can be a great possibility to learn a new language. During this post I wanted to give the volunteers, staying in Santiago de Compostela, the possibilit...

Few days ago, we (volunteers of Santiago) came up with the idea of  making an international dinner. We considered this as a good idea, to learn more about each others cultures and also to  benefit  from our different origins to get a huge multicultural dinner, which leaded us to discover new tastes and new meals. Furthermore we saw it as an act of  " team-building" as it leaded to strengthen our relationship as flatmates through a nice evening. As we are from different countries (Luxembourg, Ukraine, Turkey, Serbia, Austria, Czech Republic, Greece, Belgium and Belarus) there was a huge field of different courses that could be cooked.

Our first training was in Bergondo (A Coruña). My flatmate Pavel and me were two volunteers from Santiago who went there. In Coruña we met with all other volunteers and together we went by bus in Bergondo. They showed us our rooms, and very soon after that we started with activities!  Each day we had activities from 9.30-21.30 (including coffee breaks and breaks for lunch and dinner). Alber g ue center (youth hostel) in Bergondo is very nice center with a lot of sport fields and it´s just next to the big and beautiful beach. We were so lucky that we had wonderful weather in October! Every day we spent few hours on the beach (of course most of those hours were at night) and the bravest ones even went for a swimming.  Staff from Alber g ue center are absolutely wonderful! Each day we had nice meals and great snacks. Coffee, milk, tea were always on the table, and also Nesquik lovers were very satisfied!:)

We went two volunteers and one monitor from Santiago to the Intermediate Evaluation of May (8-12) in Mollina. We arrived Monday by bus from Malaga, Mollina is 1.5 hour from Málaga it is a small and very quiet city. We stayed at the facility CEULAJ who is looks like to a holiday center. When we arrived everyone had a badge with his/her name, center and city on a paper of colors each color correspond to a group. We were divided in 4 groups.

Well, to begin with I would like to say thank you to Don Bosco for organizing so amazing events! However, it was awesome also because of the creativity of the volunteers.  So, we had 5 countries: Austria, Denmark, Germany, Spain and Ukraine.  And we started in this alphabetic order J Josipa organized an interesting game for the memory, where we also learnt some things about her country – Austria.   The second country was Denmark – and there we had a quiz. Amanda prepared exciting questions, and we all competed to know who knows about Denmark more. It was interesting, funny and creative at the same time. I even took the notes about the program she used to do it, because its really cool.   Then, we want to see the presentation of Germany! It was hilarious! We had an amazing dance! Chelly told us the translation of this German cool song and we enjoyed dancing! It was easy to understand from everyone’s face that they really did like it! 

Monday Today during the morning we did the presentation of the animators and we divided in 3 groups: old, middle and young. The older painted some tattoos and talked while the others playing. Tuesday Today we prepared the activities of the day. We divided in 3 groups another time, the old started the script of a movie. It was a very good day, later we played with the small and middle. Wednesday Today we did the preparation of our day, after we divided in groups and the smaller ant the middle were playing while the older was doing the leather bracelet and we finished the script of the movie.

    On the 1st of March it was Santiago’s carnival and of course the “ludotequa” took part in the parade to represent Don Bosco’s center.     This year the theme was “Don Bosc's Jungle”. We had lots of different animals: Sheep, owls, cows, dogs, chicken, penguin and parrot.  We took a van and we stuck a banner on it with a message showing respect to fauna and flora.