ERASMUS+ AND YOUTH OPPORTUNITIES AND ORGANISATIONS RESOURCE FOR GREEKS AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC

This post is a combination of two fantastic pieces of work: Daphne’s article on Erasmus+ she wrote a few months ago which comprises the bulk of this post, and Giorgi’s collection of Greek organisations that run European Erasmus+ projects that is a bit more comprehensive than the one Daphne put together. You will find that list at the bottom of the article.

 It can be a bit difficult to navigate through the vast, decentralised and chaotic field of European Youth Programs. That and the fact that  lot of it can sound too good to be true sometimes might discourage potential participants. Stick with it: it is true! The European Union’s allocation of funds might certainly be questionable in some areas (let’s not go there at this time, you know exactly what I’m talking about ), but there’s no doubt they’re investing tons of money in education and the future with Erasmus+.

Not all of it finds its way to the right hands, which could be said about all sort of freebie European Union money that’s come our way. However, you could definitely make the case that the same holds true for money as a concept in more general terms. But I digress—sorry, difficult to resist.

These big investments are part of a bigger picture, a plan so devious, its scope so ambitious, its goal so far-removed, it could only ever have been spawned in a bright, sterile meeting room in Brussels, in the incandescent depths of the HQ of the European Commission itself. Their goal, behind all of these lifelong-learning  and informal education bells and whistles, is the creation of nothing less than a common identity among young Europeans, a veritable European identity for the people who will have to deal with this shitstorm of gargantuan proportions heading our way, the true proportions of which we’re just starting to understand. That’s us, by the way.

I can’t tell if it’s working or not yet, or if perhaps creating this identity could be forming a barrier against the millions of non-Europeans that have started once again to enter European societies. But it can work; these programs teach tolerance and coexistence, after all. I do believe identifying as European can also mean accepting as European people who previously were not. It’s not, or at least it shouldn’t be, a limited-membership club. It wasn’t so in the past, and there’s no reason it should be now. That’s not how I look at peoples and nations at least and I’m glad I’m not alone.

Anyway. If we want to pull through this, all of this, as best we can, we need (informally) educated, internationally-oriented, risk-taking, adaptable and sensitive young people with a spirit of co-operation and participation. Erasmus+ programs are incredibly good at inspiring all these qualities in participants,  and more.

Ahem. This was supposed to be “just” a guest post. With this introduction of mine I was certainly planning to be shorter, I leave you to them. I hope this information proves useful to you. In fact, it can be quite life-changing, if you want or can allow it to.

erasmus+


Erasmus+ and youth opportunities resources for Greeks and the general public

This post has been long overdue. Since my first youth exchange in June 2013, I’ve talked with an ever-growing amount of people about what I do abroad, how I managed to find these projects, how it’s possible to do so many of them if I’m always broke as fuck and what exactly do I even get from them.

The last conversation I had was with the guys from the coding course I attended this week, and some of them showed great interest in what I had to say, since I already know a lot about these things. I absolutely despise talking, I get nervous and awkward and am unable to explain things properly, so writing is a much better way to get all this information out there.

So finally, here it is. A resource post with all the info and organisations I know about that have to do with youth mobility. Please, feel free to comment under my post if you are part of/know an organisation that you believe should be included in the list! Of course, I recognize that even my knowledge is quite limited compared to people that are actively involved in Erasmus+ as  part of an organisation.


First things first: What on earth is Erasmus+? (here is a bit more detailed page)

When people hear the word “Erasmus”, they instantly think that it’s all about the student mobility thing. Well, guess what. In short, Erasmus+ is the EU’s new programme for boosting skills and employability through education, training, youth, and sport. Before that there was Youth in Action.

The funding for the whole project is channeled to each country through the National Agencies. Through their pages you can find projects and information in your own language and contact them for inquiries.

So the lists that follow include NGOs that are either Sending (SO), Hosting (HO) or Coordinating (CO) organisations, or even all of the above! As copy-pasted from the programme guide, these mean:

    • Applicant organisation from a Programme Country: in charge of applying for the mobility project, signing and managing the grant agreement and reporting. The applicant can be a consortium coordinator: leading a mobility consortium of partner organisations of the same country aimed at organising any type of student and staff mobility.
    • Sending organisation: in charge of selecting students/staff and sending them abroad. This also includes grant payments (for those in Programme Countries), preparation, monitoring and recognition related to the mobility period.
    • Receiving (Hosting) organisation: in charge of receiving students/staff from abroad and offering them a study/traineeship programme or a programme of training activities, or benefiting from a teaching activity.
    • Intermediary (Coordinating) organisation: this is an organisation active in the labour market or in the fields of education, training and youth work in a Programme Country. It may be a partner in a national mobility consortium, but is not a sending organisation. Its role may be to share and facilitate the administrative procedures of the sending higher education institutions and to better match student profiles with the needs of enterprises in case of traineeships and to jointly prepare participants.

These may all sound kind of (or largely) unclear, so what essentially happens is, you find a SO in your country of residence, you apply for one of the projects they are offering (could be an EVS, or a training, or a youth exchange), you get accepted (or not), and you get to go to the country where that project is taking place. You’re hosted there by the HO. How to explain with clear, precise ELI5 wording what the CO part is still a bit unclear for me as well, so I would appreciate corrections and help here.


Personally, the crown and pride and glory of the Erasmus+ programme is European Voluntary Service, or EVS for short. It’s what I’ll be doing in the Netherlands from September 2nd.

Again, in short, if you are between 17 and 30, have spare time from two weeks up to a year in your hands, want to do something creative with your time, have no money to fund your interests, travel, meet other cultures and a horde of other like-minded people, EVS is for you. I strongly recommend it to people who are fresh out of university or school, have been unemployed for some time or just love travelling and experiencing new things. Or all of these! Important:

You will receive free accommodation, food, insurance and pocket money. The only thing you might have to pay is a small part of your travel costs.

Also important, you can only do EVS once in your life. If it’s a short-term project, you may be eligible to apply for a second EVS, but the time you spend abroad must be in total one year. Consider the possibilities carefully, because not everything is rainbows and unicorns. There are terrible projects out there, and people who just want to eat up the funding money. But don’t be discouraged like this – talk with people, do your research, ask me for recommendations and you’ll have the time of your life.

You can find ALL of the EVS projects here. You can search by country/town of preference and type of the project you want. The themes are extremely diverse. For example, I was a mentor of EVS volunteers who worked in TRAG, including therapeutic riding sessions for disabled people and of volunteers who worked in the offices of Greek Forum of Refugees.

In this European Youth page, you can also find other volunteering opportunities here, but I’ve never really participated in something like this so I can’t be of much help. Here you can find their Facebook page. I like organising things in lists, so I have put every page I’ll mention here in special list on Facebook. Good that it’s kinda worth it for something other than hoarding friends and stalking people.


Here we go then. It’s a clear list of NGOs that help you get involved with all the things I mentioned above!

Greek NGOs and other amazing groups of people:

This is not the best time for me to post this, because the Greek Nation Agency’s funding has been indefinitely suspended since April. You can probably discover the reason if you think about the state of the Greek political scene since the beginning of the year. What the suspension means is that there can be no projects implemented in the country whatsoever – no new EVS volunteers, no trainings, no youth exchanges, etc. The problems started way back of course, I remember the NA having financial difficulties for more than a year. BUT, you can still contact these NGOs to projects outside of the country – which I strongly advise you do. Most or all of these post regularly about new opportunites, be it short- or long-term. Keep in mind that even though I’m writing this in English so it can be accessed by everyone, a lot of the NGOs below have projects and information in Greek only.

You can also find some of these in the EVS database I linked above, if you search them by name.


I’ll start with this one as an honour, because I went to my first youth exchange through them. Everyone, meet

Based in Crete. I went through them to Finland, for a youth exchange called Creative Photography in the Finnish Wilderness, along with Garret and Dimitris. Gotta thank him for this whole business, cause he was the first to discover these things and went through Nuestro Mundo to Olde Vechte in Ommen, the Netherlands for a youth exchange in March 2013. That’s incidentally the organisation I’ll be going to for EVS.


Continuing with the organisation I was (am?) an EVS mentor for.

The Greek branch of Service Civil International. They will be my SO for going to EVS in Olde Vechte. They also organise a lot of workcamps which you can find out about in the page I linked here.


I know a couple of the guys involved here personally, and I love them. 😀

I think just their name is motivating in itself. Don’t be a couch potato.

Self-described as an informal group of ambitious people and filmmakers interested in new media & youth work.


I know their crazy dudette Antonia, who will never forgive me for taking away her tobacco.

You can also participate in workcamps through them.


They organised the last training course I went to, in Skoulikaria, Greece. They’re pretty new but have great aspirations.


I can’t remember how I found out about the rest of the NGOs, but probably through facebook shares or through people I met that knew them. Networking!

(Of course, there’s a lot more, and quite a few that are just Hosting/Receiving NGOs — meaning they can’t send out Greeks but only receive foreigners as EVS volunteers)


Other European organisations:

I will start with my favourite, since I’m going there for EVS in a couple of days. For a whole year! Woo!!

I strongly recommend attending at least one training/project happening in Olde Vechte, because you’ll start seeing your life change before your own eyes. I started with a youth exchange, and the place inspired me so much that I went back for a personal development training. From then on everything fell slowly into place and I decided it would be the best place for me to go to right now. There is an amazing amount of people who are working there, including the EVS volunteers and the trainers that come back several times per year to shake a bunch of young people up with their wise teachings.

OV is part of the Synergy Network, that organises trainings (either open calls or funded by the EU) for personal and professional development.

Right now the Spectrum Synergy project is ongoing.


Continuing in the Synergy business, I’ve also got to know some of the guys involved here. They’re real good! (They also have a wonderful partner page)


Moar Synergy. Their team has some amazing members and I’ve wanted to participate in some action with them for a long time, but I never got the chance. Soon, I hope!


Never had to do anything with these guys but I’m pretty sure they’re awesome too.


Welp, there’s also the Greek one. Starring my favourite mouse on their fb page.


Another NGO that is involved with Synergy and a long-term wish of mine to get involved in. Hungary.


More Balkan stuff, specifically Bulgarian. I went back and forth so many times in 2014 that it will always be in my heart, even though I wasn’t closely involved with any NGO there. Most of the info is in Bulgarian.

  • Balkan Kids| SO, HO (Hey David :D)
  • CVS Bulgaria | Facebook | SO, HO, CO
  • Suddenly I’ve forgotten half of the NGOs I got to know there. Ok. There’s still the EVS database.

Czech. Got to know through Šárka. 🙂


Cyprus! I visited (and was hosted at the volunteer’s places) both of them when I was in Nicosia (thanks to Toni :D) and later got to know Iliana from YEU in a training course in Bulgaria. Small world!!


Ok. This is getting really long, so I’ll now link to some more general resources which post about trainings all over.

First, here are some facebook groups (not my favourite thing because there’s too many posts):

Again, there’s quite a lot more of them, once you get involved they’ll start popping out like daises.

And some more pages and websites that can help you get into things.

Edit 31.08.2015: Panagiotis prompted me to add this one, it seems quite promising and I had been looking for something like it for a long time.

You can basically search for upcoming projects based on where you reside and where and when you want to go.

A network of eight Resource Centres working on European priority areas within the youth field. As part of the European Commission’s Training Strategy, SALTO-YOUTH provides non-formal learning resources for youth workers and youth leaders and organises training and contact-making activities to support organisations and National Agencies within the frame of the European Commission’s Erasmus+ :Youth in Action programme and beyond.

The Alliance of European Voluntary Service Organisations is an International Non-Governmental Youth Organisation that represents national organisations which promote intercultural education, understanding and peace through voluntary service.

The European Youth Foundation (EYF) provides assistance and funding for youth activities which promote human rights, democracy, tolerance and solidarity.


Facebook:

  1. Hellenic Youth Participation
  2. Youthfully Yours GR
  3. Προγράμματα Aνταλλαγής – Youthnet Hellas!
  4. Elix/ Ελιξ- Προγράμματα Εθελοντικής Εργασίας
  5. Youth in Advancement 18plus.gr
  6. Citizens in Action
  7. Think Positive
  8. United Societies of Balkans
  9. System & G – Greece
  10. You in Europe
  11. SCI Hellas
  12. Erasmus+ Youth Greece
  13. Εrasmusplusyouth
  14. Εν Γνώσει
  15. Horizonsforyouth
  16. Greece in Action
  17. KANE Κοινωνική Ανάπτυξη Νέων / Social Youth Development
  18. UNESCO Youth Club of Thessaloniki
  19. E.A.S.T.
  20. Be pART
  21. Breaking The Borders
  22. Association of Intercultural Communities
  23. Youth for Exchange and Understanding
  24. interaliaproject
  25. Break the Couch

 

Sites:

  1. Ευρωπαϊκή Εθελοντική Υπηρεσία
  2. http://erasmusnow.com/
  3. Eurodyssey
  4. The SALTO-YOUTH Resource Centres provide
  5. Nuestro Mundo

 

General programs and sites:

  1. http://joinyouth.com/
  2. http://youth-portal.com/
  3. http://goabrod.blogspot.gr/
  4. http://www.mladiinfo.eu/

FREE LIGHT

free_light_01_2015
Made by Agnese with the glasses. We didn’t talk almost at all but this doesn’t change the fact that she made something pretty.

This picture is a little token and memento of what took place in Olde Vechte in The Netherlands the past few weeks. That Olde Vechte. It’s become out of the blue a significant part of my life and if all goes well it’s going to become more important still in the months to come.

I’m posting this here because somehow everything I put on here gets reinforced in my head, it becomes more tangible. It works. Synapses and shit (I haven’t taken advantage of this enough, by the way—never too late to start).

People and how we work are weird… no no no. Sorry. I do this a lot: I talk about the general we when I mean to talk about myself and what I do. Let’s try this again: I’m weird. Remember, gotta accept accountability.

So I’m writing this post purely for my own benefit and not because I think it might be interesting to anybody apart from those with whom I shared the experience—kinda similar to how you post songs on Facebook and the only people who like your post are the people who already know and like the song and very few others actually listen to it, usually people who have a crush on you. That’s how talking and writing about youth exchanges and trainings is, including EVS, including Erasmus, all those sexy international things that have been taking a great deal of my time and energy the past few years. The feelings they have created in me are difficult to convey, offline as well as online, so I’m not going to go into the boring details of a purely experiential thing that’s as useful and interesting to read about as listening to people talk about the dreams they had last night. What I am going to say is do yourself a favour and participate in such programs. If you want to learn how, I can help you and direct you, and, who knows, one day even train you.

Sudden spontaneous insightful realisation time. The above paragraph starts with “So I’m writing this post purely for my own benefit” and ends with me urging you dear reader to give it a shot. What can I say, contradicting myself seems to be my new favourite hobby.

Scratch that, it’s not new at all.

Since I’m writing this, have a look at some of my older, more thorough posts about these experiences. Are you intrigued by what you read? Honest question. I’m really curious, because in real life most people express indifference when I talk about these projects.  This might explain why I felt the need to write the way I wrote this post.

I SEE GREEN (1st time in Olde Vechte)
HETEROTOPIE (France)
Creative Photography in the Finnish Wilderness
Danish Diaries
EVS in Sofia

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: Bulgarian Lessons

Здравейте! Това е първът път, че пиша в български на компютъра. Уф, е много трудно с друга клавиатура…

One of the great things about EVS is that it gives you the opportunity to have proper classes for learning the language of your host country. For us, this means at least 120 study hours over a period of a few months, and right now we’ve done exactly half of that.

We have lessons on Monday and Thursday mornings in Zazy Language Centre, which is located on Vitosha Blvd right next to the Palace of Justice. Quite a central place to have lessons, right?

This is the entrance to the building – okay okay, I know what you’re thinking, but, if you get down to it, it’s nothing more than a photograph of a public place! The relevant jokes one can come up with from the fact that the entrance to a fetish club is the same as the entrance to where we have our language classes are rather obvious and I’ll leave them to your own sick imagination!

This is the place where we get our капучино (cappuccino) during our почивки (breaks). Did you notice that the shop is called “Kinky”? Are you noticing a mysterious pattern here? It’s not just me, right?

On a completely unrelated note, in the class itself I’m always sitting opposite this map.

I’m sorry, this has very little to do with our Bulgarian, but I just have to get it off my chest. What is this map? I’m a big geography and map nerd so bare with me, but what’s that… peninsula jutting out from the East of Finland towards Svalbard? What’s that island to the East of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, like a hydrocephalic Puerto Rico? Oh! Maybe MacMillan accidentally revealed the true location of Atlantis, what mapmakers, satellites, Google Maps etc. have been meticulously hiding for millennia. Thank you, MacMillan! The truth is out there.

Sorry for that. I just wanted to share with this little thing that continually catches my attention during the Bulgarian class.

From left to right: Oles, Hanna, Zanda, Maria,
Zlatko (our teacher), Vicente and Jeroen.
Maria from Spain was absent that day but I really
wanted to take the picture exactly then.
Don’t worry Maria, I haven’t forgot about you!

Now, this is our class. That’s us, the Library volunteers and the guys from Smart Foundation. This is the place where the magic happens. We hope that in the following half of our 120 hours we’ll learn just as much, if not more, than what we have learned already, and some day soon we’ll be ready to walk up to any baba or dyado and ask them for directions, order properly at the underground cantina next to the library with the handwritten menu with the green marker (have you seen handwritten Bulgarian??), understand what they ask us at the supermarket after we say the predictable things, which usually leaves us like deer in headlights… maybe even read some Bulgarian books! Yes, that’d be great indeed.

So, until the next attempts to actually write a post in Bulgarian, довиждане! (dovizhdane)

EVS in Sofia City Library Blog: сняг!

Repost from the EVS in Sofia City Library Blog – I wrote that post about a week ago. More now did come, but now even that has melted. The novelty has worn off, okay, but the thought that we could have more any day still excites me.


Snyag; snow in Bulgarian!

Exactly one week ago we were eating ice cream in Vitosha Blvd and didn’t believe it when Boryana told us that it would be snowing soon. All for the better: the surprise was bigger!

Vicente and I thought that Maria and Zanda would have had enough snow for a lifetime, them being from northern countries and all, but then we realised that that would be like saying that we Mediterranean types have grown bored of our beautiful beaches, after so many summers of enjoying the sea and lying in the sun!

One of the things I like the best about snow is how everything is equalised under its blanket; the paths in the park disappear and the roads have to be cleaned if civilization is to keep doing its thing.Walking in the streets next to our apartment before the snow bulldozers -or whatever their names are- had really gone to work was quite a feeling; this whiteness that literally freezes reality visible, overwhelming, in all directions, including above and below.

I almost didn’t go out for my usual run because of the snow but my sense of duty prevailed in the end and it was a good decision (Vicente remarked that I was very disciplined!) The biggest park near our flat where I usually go to when I don’t want to go too far – Sveta Troitsa – gave me an opportunity to witness how, indeed, regardless of how many times you see snow in your life, every time is almost like the first.

“Gay” some things never change, no matter
in which part of the world you are!

 

Sofians went to Sveta Troitsa Park to enjoy
the snow with their children.

 

I miss my sled…

 

Is an invisible path still a path?

 

My hands were trembling too much in the cold outside
of the warmth of the gloves for this picture to be any good.

Snow never stays around as much as I’d like it to, however, and today the white stuff of happiness started melting under the winter sun, even though it was still the coldest day we’ve been here by far! By this morning all of the roads were already full of the dirty slush that the snow leaves behind and makes it unpopular to those who see a lot of it every winter. In light of this, our mentor Boris told us of a Bulgarian poet, Smirnenski was his name if I recall correctly, who made the parallel in one of his works between the urbanisation of Bulgaria -the rural families moving to the city to find work- and how the pure, innocent snow quickly becomes dirty in the city streets… I would love to find this poem and post it here actually.

Fortunately we heard that there’s going to be more snow coming in just a few days; the circle of rural innocence which turns to dirty urbanisation will not stop turning! What would the macroscopic, social equivalent of the dirty slush finally evaporating and returning to the sky be, though?

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!

 

24 Hours in Sofia

Departure time for Tourist Service’s bus from Athens to Sofia was 8:00 in the morning sharp. I caught it after a full day of melancholy of leaving behind things, situations and, most importantly, people that I love (the long-needed party at my place the day before with all the lovely faces didn’t help). You know who you are, I hope.

I get these very short but intense feelings of regret and of not having appreciated everything and everyone enough before and during every big journey of mine. Does everyone get these same feelings? I wonder about this a lot. Sometimes I think that everyone’s like me, but it is much more often that I feel I’m alone in too many things to count. It is a dangerous and untrustworthy feeling.

Athens to Sofia was an 11-and-a-half-hour ride. It wasn’t so tiring for me: I’m used to these long trips owing to my experience of catching ships to and from Mytilini and waiting for hours in European airports for frugality’s sake. I began reading Carlos Castaneda’s The Art of Dreaming which Daphne lovingly gifted to me before I left. It’s a great book and it made for a more… dreamy journey. Closer to the destination I started watching Skyfall but we arrived before I could finish it.

The first I saw of Sofia, I didn’t really see much of it. It’s been almost completely covered in fog since yesterday. I would expect that to be a normal thing for this city (it feels like the right kind of city to be foggy as a natural state, you know?) but even the locals were taken by surprise.

View from the window on that first foggy night in Sofia
View from the window on that first foggy night in Sofia

I was welcomed and taken to the flat by the very friendly Valentina, an employee of the Sofia City Library. The flat is on the 4th floor and guess what? There’s no elevator (or lift, if you’re American!), which might sound like a problem, but it’s in situations like this that a running schedule really comes in handy! Of my three fellow volunteers, only one had arrived yesterday and that’s Maria, the Danish girl. The other two will be coming tomorrow and the day after. This is the last fateful night I’ll have the boys’ room for my own. I shudder at the idea of having to share it for nine months! Let’s hope everything turns out alright and I don’t find sharing my private space for so long a little bit too overbearing!

I didn’t see much of Sofia today apart from the area close to the library, but I already find it an interesting city. It might look gloomy and run down in a lot of places (nothing I didn’t expect before I came here) but I can sense a history and character waiting for me to discover.

The library itself has a similar air: it’s an old building in obvious need of repairs and renovation, but the people working in it, such as Valentina and Boryana who are involved with the EVS project, but also the rest of the employees that we got to meet today, are full of life and joy. To give you an example, every Wednesday they have an English speaking group practice session for every library employee willing to join, and today they invited us newcomers as well. Everybody was delighted to meet us and Valentina also brought a bottle of fine red wine to welcome us with. I sense we’re going to work very well together and that they’ll take good care of us – they already do.

Not only that: their selection of books makes me want to just stay in the library and never leave – it doesn’t help that there are whole sections and rooms dedicated to books in languages that I’ve been meaning to practice on (German and Spanish) and many many books in English to choose from. Who knows what other treasures I might find in the meantime!

A funny little episode from today: I went to Billa to shop for some pasta (got some by Stella; surprisingly many Greek brands here) and stuff to make a Greek salad with, plus beers and a strange Bulgarian beverage I haven’t tried yet. I took everything to the cashier and it all amounted to exactly 10,00 leva – a little more than 5€. I thought this was amusing and so did the cashier. For some reason I don’t like speaking English when I’m in a foreign country; it feels uncomfortable, like I should know the language otherwise I’m little more than a product of globalisation and cultural domination. Like  “what the fuck is a Greek and a Bulgarian doing speaking English in the Balkans?!” There I was though, having a fun little moment with a Bulgarian cashier – in English.

Sometimes I feel really messed up with my strange self-limiting ideals.

Anyhow, the salad and the pasta were delicious and today was a great day in general. Here’s to a good start of our 9-month EVS project, and here’s a link to the library’s existing blog that we’re going to be taking over soon.

Ulitsa Shar Planina - the entrance to our building
Ulitsa Shar Planina no. 55 – the entrance to our apartment building

Certificates and Heterotopias

This post has been was a work-in-progress ever since I got back from France in August. A major contributing factor for this delay has been a certain game I’ve put close to 4 full days into in the past month. Another has been my enduring inability to prioritise my activities, declutter my life and put my thoughts and feelings in order. I have found that creation is what I need, a positive step in the right direction. Writing more and returning to Cubilone’s Dimension will prove to be, I hope, a step towards solving these problems. Actually, solving them sounds a bit alien; I can’t really imagine myself living without these aspects of my personality. Is this my personal story sabotaging my development? Have I made a self-fulfilling prophecy out of trying to form or carve my identity? Hmmm…


As the months pass by and my post-study period grows longer, the dilemmas grow larger and scarier and often I feel as if I’m stuck in the middle of two worlds.

This summer, after our fantastic experience in Finland in June, two important things happened:

The first one was that, after many years of thinking it over, I finally did my CELTA course, which means that I’m now an internationally certified English teacher, or at the very least I’m elligible to teach pretty much anywhere in the world. For four weeks, eight hours each day, I learned how to teach the English grammar, vocabulary, phonology, various methods, what one should and shouldn’t do… At least the basics, for it’s of course a lifelong process, as is everything. The toughest part was that my 9 colleagues and I each had to teach eight lessons, totalling six hours, which we had to plan thoroughly beforehand as well as execute the best we could in the classroom, teaching real students (who by the way did not have to pay money to learn English because it was trainees teaching them) and later receiving feedback on those lessons from our colleagues and tutor.

The Received Pronounciation phonetic alphabet.
The Received Pronounciation phonetic alphabet.

 

Oh, the things I heard about my teaching! I had never taught before, at least not in this “official” sense, and it showed. I was extremely nervous, kept staring at the whiteboard while writing my nonsensical teaching aids, had great trouble explaining in simple words things like the form and function of the present perfect or the lead-in for exercises… If those students hadn’t been as accustomed to other confusing teachers before me, they would have surely performed completely different tasks half the time, which they sometimes did. The tutors were brutal with their criticism at times, but it was all beneficial in the end: it helped me realise that one of my main and enduring weaknesses has been explaining things in simple and unconvoluted words even though, ever since (I remember having the same problem as well many times before), every time I realise I’m explaining something awkwardly or maybe unintelligibly, the self-consciousness still makes it almost impossible to explain in an empathic and efficient way. This will come with experience I suppose but it was one of the most important lessons. On top of that, we had to complete one assignment each weekend, which left us next to no free time at all.

CELT Athens July 2013

My tutors, Alexander Makarios, George Vassilakis and Marissa Constantinides were all exceptional in their own ways and did an excellent job in making me kick off my teaching career. Thank you guys! My colleagues -Vaggelis, Daniel, Ioni, Chrysanthi, Pedro, Panayota, Margie, Theo and Kelly- I grew sick of and am glad I didn’t have to spend any more time together with them. Just look how much we hate eachother’s guts in the pictures and video:

Celt Athens July 2013
Left to right: Margie, Pedro, Ioni, Vaggelis, Dimitris (that’s me by the way), Marissa, Kelly, Daniel, Chrysanthi, Panayota, Alexander, Theo

 

Four weeks of hard work; at least as many glasses of wine to make up for it.
Four weeks of hard work; at least as many glasses of wine to make up for it.

 

After I was done with the CELTA I was pumped to leave Greece and go teach English somewhere in the world with the coming of the new school year, preferably at a place in which I would be able to communicate with the locals in their native language. That was something that would exclude Japan -it’s a whole different chapter and dream- but would include Spain, Latin America and Germany/Austria, my B2 certificates for both languages fresh from early last summer and making me eager to get some real life experience with them as soon as possible!

But then the second thing happened.


Even before I had hugged my colleagues and tutors goodbye, desperate for some rest and some time to either think or not have to think at all, at the very least until the time I’d have to leave Greece to do my English-teaching duty, right then came the call for the Trip to Heterotopia. For 21 days in  Southern France we’re going to be a caravan visiting eco-communities, festivals, solidarity projects and groups. We will be wildcamping, so bring your tents, sleeping bags and headlamps!” At first I was very sceptical. I was tired and longed for doing nothing, as I mentioned above. It was only little more than a month since I’d been abroad last and, frankly, I felt as if I’d had enough flying around with backpacks, having to wait in airoports and making new temporary friendships, for the year at least. I reluctantly applied anyway; the idea seemed just too good to skip altogether.

To my surprise, I was actually selected, albeit at the last moment. When I talked with Chrysostomos, the head of European Village (the sending organisation) about the specifics, I warned him that my financial situation was at its usual low. He told me that all the costs together would amount to 120€. A hundred and twenty. I was shocked.

-“What’s the catch?” I thought I was being clever. “What’s the cost of participation?”
-“None. We’ve decided not to have one. Our current budget allows us to handle all the costs; it will be better and more convenient than passing them down to the travellers.”

That was it. 120€ would be cheaper even than staying in Athens for the same amount of time. Dafni wasn’t too happy with the suddenness of it all (we had made various plans for August already) but she was a sweet little understanding raccoon in the end and anyway had her own plans.

So there was us: 10 Greeks, and another 15 French people in it for the three weeks of the exchange. Together we visited five different locations and stayed some days in each, did wildcamping in every place, took part and volunteered for local festivals, picked organic vegetables from the community gardens and patches, learned how to build and use dry toilets (it’s not as bad as it sounds actually), participated in workshops on eco-building and local seed trading, there even was a Greek night dedicated to the Crisis. Our flag”ship” motor vehicle was the Vagabond Sage, a retrofit ’70s coach complete with dry toilet, wind generator and solar panels. We did not use all of its features but it was the symbol of our Trip in the French Heterotopias, the utopias that really exist.

The Vagabond Sage
The Vagabond Sage
Inside the Vagabond Sage
Inside the Vagabond Sage
Self-organising
Self-organising
Lautrec
Lautrec
Nettle salad. Guess who helpedicked it... it's not too bad actually.
Nettle salad. Guess who helped pick it… It was delicious and the numb fingers somehow made it better.
Lots of camping was had.
Lots of camping was had.

 

All pictures by Marina, Myrto and Caro (I apologise for the terrible formatting of the pictures above. The gallery couldn’t come out right. I think it’s time for a new theme anyway...)

The experience from those three weeks is hard for me to put into words, not unlike much of the rest of my life. The trip was very practical: we had to pack stuff, unpack stuff, cook most meals from scratch (and cater for close to 30 people at times), deal with stuff changing places and having to ask about their whereabouts (looking at you, coffee and coffeejugs!), set up tents, build dry toilets and showers, empty said toilets, and many more things I’m generally not good at, the cerebral rather than practical, abstract rather than present, clumsy and unwieldy person that I generally am. I was much happier sitting somewhere writing my morning pages (more on those in the near future) or enjoying the sun than really helping to prepare dinner, for example, but not being really useful filled me with guilt. I felt that this separated me from the rest of the group and made it harder for me to contribute to our common goals and tasks. Sure, learning about eco-friendly and transitional practices was heaps of fun and super-interesting; connecting with the French and the Greeks was exciting and fun and there was all this adventure and thrill of moving from place to place and exploring rural Southern France, but I always had this nagging feeling that alone I could not do this, that somehow I wasn’t the right person for it. Once again, as I have too many times before to count, I felt like the black sheep. Or rather a sophisticated, colourful goat among a herd of sheep that has none of the definite deviant prestige that black sheep usually have but instead has a certain, perhaps misplaced, idea of superiority. When that idea is threatened and attacked by no-one in particular but, at the same time, everyone at once, I can be very reclusive and pensive. I was the city kid in a group of people who lived and breathed nature, it seemed. Thankfully, there were other people in the Greek group with whom I could share the feeling.

(Video I made with Phoenix for Daphne. Phoenix is the little fox she got for me while we were in Finland. The video is in Standard Definition, unfortunately.)

At the same time, I know that what we did in that trip is important and is the future. Anything that could make me and others more self-sufficient, make us able to take our own situations into our hands, free to lead our lives as we please, is important in this age of destroyed opportunities, slave wages and fear-mongering. We had some discussions on self-reliance around our almost daily nightly fire, watched a couple of movies that inspired me to take action one way or another (more specifically Να Μην Ζήσουμε Σαν Δούλοι), but most of all it was the people who took part, with their lifestyle and their choices, that made me think and feel.

Departure day
Departure day

 

To cut a long story short, by the time we had got back to Greece I didn’t really want to leave immediately to find a job abroad. I had this feeling that staying here in Athens might not be so futile if I can find a way to use my time actively and creatively. Additionally, I felt and still feel that there’s lots of shit I have to figure out, reconcile, get over or leave behind before I can start something new. Putting some order to my digital belongings, selling or giving away stuff, giving time and energy to learn from everything that has happened in my life recently is really what I need but keep postponing due to distractions. Part of me tells me it’s all still being lazy and that purposefully skipping the opportunity to work abroad when I had it is regrettable, not to say of suspicious motivation on my part.

What appeared instead, however, is an excellent testament to the power of serendipity and letting the flow guide your path. Even if I missed the teaching abroad deadlines, there’s a very good possibility I will still be leaving the country after all to do my EVS (European Voluntary Service). Since there’s nothing urgent to do, might as well take advantage of my extended gap years while at the same time being independent for a change.

The real big questions in my head right now have to do with what path I should follow: one focused on living in the moment, taking advantage of opportunities as they come (the EVS and YIA side), discovering the Heterotopias that exist right under our noses and applying myself to that, or the other, in which I’ll make myself more qualified for actual work (which could be in the form of a MA in Prolonged Indecisiveness) or, yes, getting money and building the foundation for future survival? Certificates or Heterotopias? Playing it by ear as I’ve done a lot lately, or gearing up for the mystical tomorrow-never-comes “adult life”, which some would argue can’t include working as an English teacher abroad? /s

I have the EU and the YIA program to thank that have given me time and time again the opportunity to flourish!
I have the EU and the YIA program to thank for giving me time and time again the opportunity to flourish!

 

From where I’m standing at the moment, the hopefully upcoming EVS looks like it might be able to combine the best of both worlds for me: independence, creativity, new experiences as well as involving myself with things that might benefit my future options of getting by. Still, it’s too fresh to announce anything concrete. If I’m finally doing it (my application’s in the notorious EVS red tape maze right now), which I should know by December, I’ll be leaving for Bulgaria in January 2014 and will be living there for close to a year working for Sofia City Library. That will involve updating their volunteer-run blog, creating promotional media for the library and, from what I can tell, having relatively lots of freedom to pursue my own projects.

What will happen next and whether or not I’ll manage to take advantage of the months ahead will depend entirely on my own ability to balance, prioritise and purge, while at the same time not leaving the flow. OK, maybe not entirely: the current monumental instability of the world will provide us all with some interesting distractions, surprises, dangers and wild card paradigm shifts. One thing’s for sure: we already have absolutely no excuses to feel bored.