Tag: zanda

EVS in Sofia City Library Blog: EVS On-arrival training in Hisarya

Reblog from EVS in Sofia City Library.

Part of every EVSer’s life is the on-arrival training, a get-together with all the fresh volunteers in the country and a familiarisation with everything he or she needs to know about his or her voluntary service: the personal project, his or her rights and obligations (and those of all involved), how the health insurance works, etc etc. But it’s not just that; if it was, the on-arrival probably wouldn’t be etched on every volunteer’s mind as a definite highlight of the EVS project and some of the best days in his or her life in general.

Some people thought we were actually trainers!
Who else was provided with t-shirts by their
awesome hosting organisation, eh? 🙂
Picture by Petar Markov.
Posing with the library shirts.
Picture by Petar Markov.

Agne, the volunteer who was working in the library before us, had this to say about their on-arrival last year:

All EVS volunteers have to undergo training. On 19-24 July we had our ‘on-arrival’ at the Black Sea resort of Albena, organised by the Bulgarian national agency.There
have been nearly sixty trainees in total – EVS volunteers from projects all over Bulgaria – some of them ‘on-arrival’ like us, others ‘mid-term’.

Four trainers were giving us workshops, supported by several other people from the national agency.

The training, of course, is not just about partying. A typical day included a couple of three-hour sessions, separated by a two-hour lunch break – the latter typically spent at the beach.

I was not the only one thinking the sessions were fun but intense. We did: ice-breaking games in order to get to know each others, our projects & countries of origin; psychology workshops (personality types, negotiations, conflict management); classes about practicalities of
doing an EVS (volunteerism, AXA insurance); plus creative tasks such as designing posters, shooting short films & running for quests all over Albena. […] (full post here)

Presenting Sofia City Library and our project to the group.
Picture by Petar Markov.
Everything’s better with posters and sketches!
Picture by Petar Markov.

In our case, the place was Hisarya, (warning: musical link!), an old town well-known in Bulgaria for its hot springs. It took place from March 7th to March 13th, making it one of the longest trainings ever – lucky us! Our accommodation was Augusta Hotel, a renovated communist era hotel built close to one of those springs and using the water to fill its swimming pool, spas and saunas. Apart from the food, the experience of staying in that place was quite… interesting. Hotels always give me the impression that they exist sort of independently from the rest of civilisation, like places that belong nowhere specific. But that’s another topic entirely.

 

That’s us. Kuba and Ula from Poland; Anna from Austria; Florian from France; Anna, Christina and Dimitris (that’s me) from Greece; Bojan from Serbia; Miro from Slovakia; Veronika from Czech Republic; Corinne from the UK; Niina from Finland; Elena, Paula and Vicente from Spain; Rian from the Netherlands; Zanda from Latvia; Maria from Denmark; Gabriele and Rasa from Lithuania; Hilal from Turkey; Susanna from Armenia and our two trainers Nasko and Maya from Bulgaria! A truly multicultural, European group!

Our trainer Nasko and the EVS project cycle.
A session on intercultural communication, they said…
Picture by Petar Markov.

Meanwhile, there were another 40 or so EVSers having their mid-term training in the hall next door. The “evening activities”, in which we could all mingle together after the tough sessions of the day, were pure pandaemonium. Let’s just say that by the end, our socialising limits had been tested.

Shot from the Uglies Party the mid-terms
prepared for the on-arrivals.
Guess what the dress code was.
All bowed to the superiority of the post-it game!

I’d love to be able to convey at least part of what makes these kinds of things like youth exchanges, and in turn this training, so special, but I find it very difficult to do so: while I was thinking about writing this post, I realised that I have actually avoided writing about such experiences in the past. Being stuck together with complete strangers for a week and by the end feeling you’ve known them forever, doing things that an outsider would probably find silly or weird but you’re greatly enjoying, is not an easy feeling to explain. A friend of mine says its false intimacy. Maybe in the case of youth exchanges it mostly is: after the exchanges, I’m sad to say, it’s impossible to keep contact with everyone. Even the  people with whom you thought you could be great friends, the people you would genuinely love to keep in touch with, are in time forgotten…

This training, however, was happily different in this respect. After the final day of the training, after all the parties were had, all the games were played, all the informal education was, erm, unleashed, all the projects were presented and all the friendships made, we all knew that we would see eachother soon, or at the very least had the possibility to do so; we were all volunteers in the same country, after all…

Indeed, on the weekend after the training, more than half of the group almost magically ended up in Sofia (most of them don’t live here) and what followed was a crazy couple of days. It was also Zanda’s birthday then and everyone was invited to the party. That night we hosted 5 people in our tiny little flat! But for every person that wasn’t in Sofia for these moments, a promise to visit had already been made. A promise we can’t wait to keep.

We all had a secret mission assigned to us
by the trainers in the on-arrival, which we
had to work on throught our days in Hisarya
and presented to the group on the last day.
Zanda’s was to create a collage of everyone’s
national flags. After the training we took theposter
home and this is a picture of it with Florian
in our kitchen. Proof of the impact Hisarya
had on us and our relationships in Bulgaria…

So what did we all take away with us from this experience? Personally, I had the chance to come closer to my own personal goals for the EVS as a whole, got many ideas for improving my own experience and work in the library and of course met great new people. I’d really like my friends and colleagues to include their own versions and impressions of the on-arrival, so the following space is for them.

(SPACE!)

 

This one is the product of  Corinne’s secret mission.
It, too, is hanging on our kitchen wall.

EVS in Sofia City Library Blog: Introducing! Second batch of fresh volunteers in Sofia

Repost from the Sofia City Library Blog on which I started posting today.

Dimitris from Greece; Maria from Denmark; Vicente from Spain and Zanda from Latvia. The four of us are the fresh batch of EVSers for the Sofia City Library. Our project started in the second week of January 2014 and will end in October of the same year. That’s right: we’ll be living in Sofia together for a full nine months – in fact it’s already been two weeks we’ve lived together. This blog will serve as our medium of communication with the world, our platform for sharing all that we do here in Bulgaria, our work at the library, our experiences as EVS volunteers and lots more. We’re picking it up from where the previous volunteers left it off. Thank you Jose Manuel, Agne, Sarah and Ricardo; we promise we’ll make you guys proud.

Left to right: Ricardo (the veteran), Zanda, Maria, Vicente, Dimitris.Picture by Valentina.

And for those of you just dying to know a little more about us, fear not: we wrote little texts for introducing ourselves, exclusively for this post – for your eyes only!

Zanda:

This is a very special place I want to tell you about. A place where the cows are blue and skys are orange. In this place lives a grandmother with white hair who is called Baltic Sea. If you listen carefully you can hear how she whispers old stories about Baltic countries. This place is made from grass, rivers, forests, trees and flowers. In this place live people, who don’t talk, but they are singing. Their flesh is the earth and their blood is the water. This place is LATVIA.

In Lavia there is a girl with messy hair and mind full of birds. She loves books, music, dancing, colors and she also likes meeting people from different cultures. This girl is me – ZANDA PILATE.

Vicente:

Let’s talk about me. 29 year old unemployed Spanish male. That sounds like very average. Let’s be more personal. I am a daydreamer who is always making other plans while life happens, like Lennon said. I would like to have time to live in dozens of countries at the same time, and this is the first time I’m living abroad. When I was younger I wanted to be a great journalist, help to save the world working as a war correspondent of the BBC or something like that. Then life happened. I was working in a rutinary job for almost five years. Now is the first time that I am in the place that I want to be in a long period and that makes me very happy.

I come to Sofia, a city called like my Grandma, to live with Dimitrios, who is called like my Grandpa. Feels good to be grounded by cultural junks like me, something that never happened to me even when I studied journalism.
As a Spanish I don’t see myself as a regular countrymen, not the type of “Como España en ningún lao”. Even if it has some good points I feel very disappointed with it, and another thing that makes me happy about staying in Bulgaria is that I’m not working for a shitty payment, not consuming there, not paying taxes to the traitors in the government who put the payment of the debt constitutionally before public healthcare.
My family is very conventional, so for me is always a shock to know other costumes, living with vegetarians, for example. My mother is probably checking my weight when I come back to Spain.
I’m writing this with my fingers burned by a fucking frying pan so I expect that Dimitri appreciates my sacrifice.

Dimitris:

Soon I will be celebrating the completion of my 25th revolution around our Host Star, forever travelling together with the Pale Blue Dot, on the Pale Blue Dot, like a flea on a dog chasing its tail. Most of this time I had lived in the region of this Pale Blue Dot called Greece, where I was also born; a place famed by others of my species for its history, culture, good food and fantastic weather, “a cozy little spot”, as I imagine Douglas Adams would call it. However, something beckoned me to move for a while a little bit to the North to this neighbouring region called Bulgaria. Putting that “something” into words is very difficult, so I suppose just saying “it felt like the best next step” should do nicely. Would the word “serendipity” sound too pretentious?

I have these second thoughts a lot, you know: one of my typical characteristics is second-guessing and analysing everything I feel, think and do, in order to follow more closely my ethical compass, a weird, imaginary but perfectly mundane object that would look like what you would get if you put together timeless growth, soundless laughter and mindless wonder, and clicked “reconcile” on your 3D printer that somehow ran on yogurt – preferably vegan (yes, there exists such a thing! Crazy, isn’t it?!) I’d be a textbook INFP, if such a thing as a typology textbook existed (it does in my secret world, where the above Dimitrian object is a platonic ideal).

In case you hadn’t realised by now, I greatly enjoy writing (not talking) about myself. I also tend to unnecessarily convolute things. To spare you with the nonsense, as I’m sure you want to learn more about me and not just read things I somehow believe look clever on a screen, I’m interested in media, the natural world, (alternate) human culture, history and languages, and, even though my writing style obviously doesn’t show it, I believe in and value simplicity. I studied Cultural Technology media and culture and I think this project at the Sofia City Library, as well as the whole philosophy of informal education behind EVS and YiA programs, suits my current professional and personal ambitions like a glove. Would it be too cheesy if I put another “serendipity” here?

Maria:

I’m Maria from Denmark, Mimi the Baby at the Sofia City Library and the glitter loving DustyFairy at tumblr.
I’m the baby of the project because I’m 21 and the youngest, even though I’m the most responsible and Zanda thinks I’m acting like a mother. I’m only doing this as a cover for whom I really am, and I learnt from the very best; Wendy. She was the greatest mother Peter and the boys could ever have wished for even though she made me a bit jealous when she gave Peter the “thimble”.
I am a creative, glitter loving, crazy fairy.. Oh! I mean person, of course! A creative but responsible young girl who is a passionate complainer about everything and nothing, and who in the end still hasn’t figured out how the thing about being a grown-up is done correctly. I have, for some time been looking for my pot with “adultness” and I have started to wonder if I might have forgotten it at home, next to my fairy dust, when I was visiting princess Tiger Lily, Peter and the Boys in Neverland, the Netherlands I mean, last month before I got here.
Hmm.. Anything I forgot to tell…? Oh yes!
My biggest weakness is my fear towards onions. They are evil! They make you cry for no reason and when they do, they infect you with “The Onion Syndrome”, which, for me personally, means that I act even crazier than normal and that I even get a little mean. I’m convinced that some onions deep down in some of their inner most layers are nice onions and that they make us, fairies, ehh humans, cry because they are forced to by Captain Hook and his pirates that threaten them to walk the plank if they should ever consider stopping their cooperation. It is easier for Hook and his pirates to catch and kidnap us when our eyes are too swollen from crying and it also makes us more convince-able under the influence of “The Onion Syndrome” to cooperate.
There is so much to tell!! But I have got to go now.. Mitco is destroying things in the kitchen.. AGAIN!
Have a continued sparkling day!