EVS in Pomiechówek

Every year Poland celebrates the “Libraries Week,” consisting on different events and activities during the week for everyone. During my stay in the country it happened from the 8th till the 15th of May and, of course, the library in Pomiechówek wouldn’t be less and plenty of workshops and other events were held here. I also decided to do my part and create a new escape room -once again following the idea of the previous volunteer, Angeline. After much discussion, we decided that the story theme would be “Alice in Wonderland,” merging the fairyland kingdom with the writer Lewis Carroll’s room. The final composition turned out pretty cool in my opinion. The pre-game story explained that the Queen of Hearts had stolen some pages of Carroll’s manuscript, so that Wonderland would never be the same and she could take over it. The participants had 40 minutes to find the 10 missing pages in the room and save the Kingdom. First, the children (though not only did we have childr...

One of the things that scared me the most before coming to Poland was, without a doubt, the Polish language -and I bet it’s a shared feeling by most of the volunteers. It is truth that most of the languages spoken in Europe descend from Indoeuropean, but nowadays they don’t really look alike anymore. Polish, belonging to the Slavic languages family, has very little to do with Spanish (which derives from Latin) or English (German and Latin descent). Also it’s easy to spot some Latin-derived words in Polish, like “biblioteka” or even from French, like “parasol” (meaning umbrella), but these are mainly exceptions and the bulk of vocabulary and grammar forms have nothing to do with anything I am familiar with. Therefore, I was really worried about how would I communicate with everyone here, especially since Pomiechówek is a small town and I had no high expectations with people speaking English. Fortunately, everyone at the library speaks quite good English –and also Marine, the v...