EVS in Santiago de Compostela

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.