V4H (Part III) Preparation

To finish the week let’s look at all the work that had to be made before for this training course to happen.

To tell the truth, the preparation stage started already just after the New Years – more than half a year before. As everything, it started with meetings and discussions of what needs to be done, who will do what and how are we going to make it happen.

As the project included a lot of countries that are not in the EU we needed to check who of them will need visas, how to get them, what are the procedures and of course prices. It was interesting to call the embassies, find out that some countries don’t have the Portuguese embassy in the country and that another embassy is responsible and once again call and try to explain everything.

However, it was just first of all the tasks we needed to do. We still needed to take care of accommodation, training room and a great place to eat. Of course, our target was to have all the places close enough that participants wouldn’t need to spend a lot of time just getting from one place to another. With magical powers of Cintia and others of Juventude we made it possible!

So finally, we got to the last preparation stage just weeks before the project started. We had to buy all the materials, food for the coffee breaks and prepare GNRation. It was so funny to do the shopping for the coffee breaks. We had a shopping list of what more or less we will need and of course we bought more. We had just one cart full of water not counting other stuff. What is more, we needed to go to different shopping centers to get everything, because we had some special cases – NO gluten and NO sugar girls. When in the second shopping center we forgot to ask for the invoice so we needed to come back, and when the address was wrong so we reached the point when we were singing and dancing next to the cashier waiting for a miracle to happen.

The last day of preparations was even crazier. We already had some participants in Braga, but nothing ready. We just had time to leave everything in GNRation, but not prepare the rooms. In the hotel we still needed to leave the list and when we had some presents, but we didn’t know when to give them. So we went to the hotel and of course the list of participants was wrong and one person was written twice. Then we decided to leave all the presents in the rooms, but not all the rooms were already ready. So we prepared everything in one room and then with the help of cleaning ladies we made it happen.

The only part was missing the preparation of GNRation, but we also managed to make it in time. Hotel was so helpful that they were even sending some of the participants straight to GNRation even if there was no need, but we met some of the participants in advance. By the way, while doing all the preparations we also needed from time to time, go and grab someone from the bus station.  

But I think we made it well and we made it happen. I was a lot of hard work, but in the end we managed also to have fun. We had a great team and sometimes all you need is just some people like you!

Gi

Cultural Challenges for EVS

Being an EVS volunteer each day you may encounter not just with a work challenges, but also “country” challenges. So today let’s see some of the cultural challenges, you may encounter.

I come from an Easter Europe country where people are a little bit more conservative and more closed. Well, Portugal is totally opposite. Here people like to touch you, invade your personal space and of course kiss you while saying hello, what is not something so usual for me. I don’t mind changes and I got ok with it, but of course I had some funny moments.

It was my first days in Portugal and I was just learning how to say or probably “do” the proper Hello in Portuguese, when somehow I mixed sides. Maybe because I am lefty and I do everything backwards, or because of some other reasons, but I leaned to the wrong side. When I realized it was a wrong cheek, I instantly tried so change sides, the person also got confused, and as I had in my head like a little tutorial singing how to say hello – cheek, kiss, cheek, kiss – I was already in the part of kiss, when I decided to change directions… So what can I say, I just gave a very warm Portuguese welcome. Of course both of us felt very embarrassed, but it is life, anything can happen!

Other thing that I had to get used to was different climate. I come from a pretty cold country, but it’s only cold outside. Despite the fact that outside might be -20 degrees inside will always be +20 or even more. Winters in Portugal without central heating system are a huge difference but then you spend more time with others and heat just one room and stay in the house with more sweaters and winter pants. However, the climate for me is extreme not only in winters. I am used to not that great temperature differences, but here people feel OK with +35 in the day and less than 20 in the night. For my Lithuanian body it’s too much, so I am always wearing a sweater when others are with t-shirts and I already got used to be called a girl from Angola, because I am always cold in Portugal!

One way or another, EVS is an experience with lots of different challenges. They arise every day and in a lot of situations. You may try to hide or run away, or you can just deal with them with your head up high. EVS is a school of life, so try to take as much from it as you can!

Gi

EVS after work

We as EVS volunteers try to live here till the fullest. We try new work areas and always are the first to help everyone, because everything is still very interesting and we want to do everything! For this simple reason, we want to do everything not only in work area, but also in free time.

Portugal is a great place to do your EVS, not only because old tradition and amazing architecture, friendly people and nice working environment, but also because of all the celebrations.

I am not a very religious person, but ended up in the one of the most religious cities in Portugal – Braga. You can find a church in every single corner and I am not kidding at all. But it’s not that bad, when you get used to it. For example – Braga as all the main cities in Portugal has a Saint of the city and it is a huge celebration. The entire city is decorated and there are a lot of traditions for this celebration.

This celebration is called São Joaõ. And the best part is that it is also celebrated in Porto. For this and only this reason, we decided to celebrate this amazing feast in Porto. Of course we had to work, so we left for Porto just in the late evening. Almost made it to the train, like Portuguese style, but made it.

We even had a make-up session in train and didn’t even see how the time past and we were in Porto. What is more, we had green wigs – presenting traditional herbs of this celebration and the best part was that the wigs we got in Braga for free and basically no one in Porto had them, so it was very easy to find each other in the crowd. The not so fun part was that there is also a tradition to hit everyone with a plastic hammer on the head during this night, so we also got hit more times, because everyone wanted to hit a green wig.

 This celebration is also known, for Sardinhas – traditional Portuguese fish that everybody was grilling in the streets. Everywhere you go, you can smell the Sardinhas and see people just eating only them. It’s not only restaurants who are grilling them, there are a lot of casual people who just go out of their houses and make a Sardinha party next to the house and sometimes they offer Sardinhas or you can buy them.

You walk in a huge crowd of people, get hit by hammers, you stop and dance in the crowd, because someone was dancing and now everyone is following the lead. You have a great time with your friends and then, you go to see the fireworks in the Ribeira – next to the river. I felt like it was New Year night how great the fireworks were.

It was really one of the greatest nights – all the crazy traditions, all the amazing food, spectacular views and of course best company ever! 

Gi

Jump Your Feet Away

Being a volunteer you have to work in different areas and sometimes you see interesting things. Today I am going to tell you about one of these interesting things.

One of the Geração Tecla actions is going to the schools and spending the break with kids called Animação de Recreios . We have three different schools that we visit every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday – once per week every school. This activity is something different from all the office work, that sometimes makes you more tired, than a half an hour spend with kids, so it is good, that we have an opportunity to try to find ourselves in different fields.

In all the schools the best game for all the kids is jumping the rope. It reminds me a video of DJ Fresh – Gold Dust. But of course kids are not such professionals yet!

The strangest part is that we are going to three different schools, but that are kind of close to each other, and half of the kids from all the schools live in the same neighborhood and come to the activities after school, but still they jump the rope in different ways.

The kids from Tuesday’s school have a special song when they are jumping a rope and they sing it while jumping and they even have the special way of dealing with the rope.

The kids from Wednesday’s school really enjoy jumping in pairs; or if you allow them, they will try to fit as many as possible to jump. Then, when someone doesn’t manage to jump on time they have to go back to the end of the line while others continues to jump till the last person is left, who is the Master of the rope.

Thursday school’s kids have their own different traditions of jumping the rope. They all line up and then one kid runs in jumps once and runs out and they go like this till the first kid is in the front. The first kid then jumps twice and on and on, till the break is over.

The part I love the most about going to schools is that the kids try to count in English. Ok, firstly we were counting in Portuguese, so now you can wake me up in the middle of the night and I will count you in Portuguese as fast as I can without even thinking till 30! But now, as I already mentioned, the kids are trying more and more to count in English and show us, how much they know.

Once we even   made a special rope like a net that they need to climb through without touching the rope. Of course they were jumping, flying and crawling on the ground like preparing for war. We were even laughing that we are making the little soldiers. But they really are like that especially when they start every 5 minutes to say, that it is too easy and we have to find a way to make the net more difficult to climb through.

Sometimes, it is so nice to feel like a kid and play with them; sometimes we also try to jump the rope or climb the net or play other games. Once we tried to do a relay and they loved it!

Probably the best part of this activity is forgetting everything. You are a kid again and you don’t have any more work to do, just for that half an hour you can crawl on the ground and pretend that you are 5 again and don’t worry about anything!

Gi

Language helps you, Language fools you!

Today let’s remember some funny stories. EVS is something really big in a life of a person who goes through this journey. Sometimes you have to deal with upcoming problems and hard work, and sometimes you just smile and say Oh well, it is life.

 So today I want to tell you a story how sometimes language can not only help you but also make some obstacles. Firstly, when I came to Portugal to do my EVS I knew just a little bit of Portuguese. Actually now, I think, that at that time I have convinced myself pretty well that I knew a little bit of Portuguese. I could understand some things, but talking part was as for everyone really hard.

I decided to work extra to faster improve my level. From one side, it was really easy, because I spent a lot of time working with kids, and it is normal, that they still don’t speak English, or their English is even worse than mine non-existing Portuguese. However, kids just had some specific questions in the beginning so it was not that hard to be in their level, but I wanted more.

I asked some Portuguese friends, if they know any ways how I could improve my Portuguese. They were really kind and said that reading books really help. So I started to read in Portuguese. By the way, I also had a course in the university, but as I already said I wanted to improve faster.

First book was really hard – I basically was translating every other word, but ok I managed to read it. However, maybe the main idea got lost in the way… Like in any language in Portuguese as well are some words that are written similar, but the meaning is totally different. In my fist book I would always encounter with the word sido – that in Portuguese is a past tense of to be, but at that time I didn’t have a fancy dictionary that could tell me that, and sida – is AIDS, so in my imagination, all the guys in the book had aids, because this word I managed to find. It was a little bit strange, but you know, it is a book anything can happen.

The next book I took had pastor alemão, that in the beginning sounded ok – a German pastor, but then the German pastor was always following one guy, it became weird and I finally figure out that it’s not a German pastor like some kind of priest, it’s German Sheppard – a dog! But as long as I managed to convince myself that what I was reading was true, I had more than interesting books!

I am still reading books and improving my vocabulary and the structure of the sentence, just sometimes I read words how I see them, not how they are written and for that reason, sometimes people don’t understand me. Like I was talking about cacatriz, and no one knew what it was, because a scar is cicatriz. Or I saw a little nice saparinho in the sky and no one else could see it, because there were only passarinhos!

I think every language is interesting to learn, with all the crazy stories of all the wrong interpretations of the words or phrases. But the most important thing is to try and not be afraid later to make fun of yourself!

Gi

   

Who we are?

Today I am going to talk about us – the EVS volunteers. I don’t want to make a profile of everyone. I was thinking that it would be nice to remember at least one thing what we did here and, of course, we are still not over with our journey and there are way more things that we did or still do.

Anna – a German girl, with an artist soul and mind with imagination.

One morning she decided that one meeting room is not nice enough so she took a marker to her hand and in few days a simple white wall was updated with an artistic picture of Henry Dunant.

Kim – a German guy with golden hands who can fix anything.

He has a lot of great ideas what to make with kids and he is very good in explaining how things work. These chairs are just one of the projects he developed with kids in the community center of Prado.

Marta – a Spanish girl who loves Mickey Mouse.

For this reason she choose a Mickey mouse as her muse to create a mask for the carnival as a prototype for kids to have more ideas for their own masks.

José - a Spanish guy with a great humor sense.

He works in Prado together with Kim, normally with adults, but this time he was trying to teach how to make a Spanish omelet to the youth.

George – a Romanian guy who is a master of graphic design.

One day he decided to leave the office for a while and made a presentation for kids about how the animation movies are made!

Giedre – a Lithuanian girl who is writing all the blogs.

One day I also decided that my imagination is being trapped while spending too much time in the office so I made some pillows to decorate the school.

So this is it, this is us. We are the lucky 6 volunteers who are here in Braga since October. We share the same house, most of us work in the same office and we are going to stay here for exactly 12 months!

Gi

Casual week of a EVS (Giedre)

Actually it is really hard to write how the week of volunteer looks like. The main fact is that volunteering is somewhere out of routine and you can never know what is going to happen. However, I will try to make at least some guide lines how it would look.

Down here you can see my week, and now I will try to explain in more details what is what. It's just my week and other volunteers have different schedules, so don't think that everyone does the same things!

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
Morning	Office	School/office	School/             JCV in Action	School/Blog	Ponto Vermelho
Afternoon	Office	Ponto Vermelho	JCV in Action	Ponto Vermelho
Evening	Portuguese classes	Atelear Creativo	Portuguese classes

So let’s start from the beginning. Monday is a really good day to start work. It can go slowly for you to get in the mood of work, so here is no pressure (normally). Usually I come to the office around 9:30-10:00. This is the time to find out what things are more important to work on and what things I can leave to be done for later during the week.

As I am a part of a project JCV in action, the work there is never like a routine. You never know what might come up and working with international projects is really fun. Like few months ago I would have spent my Mondays while reading CVs of people who want to be the next EVS and I have read more than 100 of CV and Motivation Letters. Believe me it takes a lot of time. So normally my Monday goes while working on the things of JCV in Action. After work on Mondays I have classes of Portuguese.

Tuesday stars with some kids’ action. I go to school for the long break of half an hour to play with them. After school, back to the office to think of, what we might want to do this evening in the Atelear Creativo. After lunch it’s Ponto Vermelho. There normally on Tuesdays we have to do the checking of the clothes that arrive with our lovely Carrinha and to pick witch ones will go to the shop and which ones will go to the famous Lixo (trash)– it’s basically the only word you need to understand in Ponto. After Ponto we have some time for quick food and after there is Ateliar Creativo. There we normally do some crafts with kids.

Wednesday morning is also either going to school (a different one) or staying in the office and helping with JCV in action things. Afternoon is all for the JCV in Action work where we work on international projects, EVS and everything that is connected with Erasmus+ or other possible programs. After Office there is another Portuguese class and half of the week is done.

Thursday morning is for school or writing this lovely blog, or working on Facebook page of Ponto Vermelho. In the afternoon is again Ponto. There on Thursdays we normally get the Carrinha again and we are till our necks with bags of things to check.

Friday morning is again in Ponto, but on Fridays we arrange the shop and make it look nicely, as well we think of some ideas to improve the appearance of the shop and ways how to make it more appealing.

Friday afternoons I have free, but it was not all the time like this.

The schedule of the Portuguese classes changed, and there was a period between the courses (we are lucky and we got 2 semesters of Portuguese classes in the university of Minho), when we had more work in the office. As well in the summer there will be no school and there will be more projects to occupy kids, so the schedule will change again.

For now, my schedule is like this, with some tiny changes that appear during some unplanned events.

Gi

    

What is EVS?

So let’s start from the beginning. What is EVS? Ok, I think everybody interested in it already knows at least the meaning of the letters – European Voluntary Service. But what does it really mean?

Few months ago we had lots of interviews with the candidates for the next EVS project, that we have written and I hear a lot of answers, what EVS is in their understanding.

Helping others… Sharing… Contributing… Youth mobility… Thing from a bucket list… Charity organizations… Giving… Creating… New experience… Good opportunity to improve social skills… New people… New cultures… Contacting different countries… Knowing each other…

So I decided to think what EVS is for me. I am already living it for more than half of a year, and I can say for sure that my opinion has changed. Of course, not totally, but now I have more perspectives.

Firstly, my answer was more like the others. EVS is changing cultures, learning new stuff, getting out of your comfort zone and everything else that is like a myth and untouchable.

Now as I am already living it, I can say, that EVS is an opportunity for improvement. It starts with the learning of how to live with other people. You have to get used to not only living in another country, but also with living with other people. They are also from different countries; they have different understanding about how to deal with even the easiest things in the house (that you never thought that it could be different than you did your whole life). Some things will make you go crazy, some will be actually really helpful, but the main point is to widen your perspective and be open for the changes.

Another thing about EVS is a great opportunity for trying yourself. Not only trying yourself if you can live on your own, or if you can manage to survive with just a certain amount of money. It’s more about trying yourself in different working areas. I think it is easier for younger people, because they are just after school or university with not a clue of what they want to do in life next, so it’s a great opportunity to try a lot of things and find out there you fit best. The important thing is not to be afraid to fail, and realize that you are not good in one or other job, after trying it, but at least you tried and then you can try in different area and maybe you will be the greatest. We don’t know our real talents until we try new things. EVS is the best place to try yourself, so use this opportunity as much as you can.

Of course, it is a great place to develop your language skills and you will realize that words are not that important actually. In the beginning, when you don’t know the language, you learn how to communicate without it. You will use hands, gestures even crazy sounds and you will make it. Later you will even notice that sometimes you understand people when they speak even a language that you never knew before, because you will take more notice to their body language than to the words that come from their mouth.

And finally, EVS is a life changing opportunity, but everything depends on you and how much you want to change. It’s not about changing who you are it’s more about changing how you see the world. Like any international experience it allows you to better understand the world, how we are all different and how we can have different opinions and still manage to work for the same goal.

We are people, we make mistakes, we make wrong assumptions about people, about other countries, about how we should work and EVS is the best place to start seeing everything globally and looking out of the frame that society have put you in!  

Gi

EVS corner

There is no big need to explain what an EVS corner is.

Here you will find everything about EVS…

Some useful information.

Some funny stories from our life. 

And everything else that might be similar to European Voluntary Service!