EVS in Pomiechówek

Hello everyone! Last week I took part in my first ESC training at the Agrykola Youth Hostel. Together with 15 other volunteers from all over Poland, who like me have "just landed" here, I spent a whole week in Warsaw. We had the opportunity to learn and gain a lot of new skills and experiences through this training, but also shared what abilities we have already gained during our stay here.  But most of all, we had the chance to meet many new people and their cultures. There were volunteers from Spain, France, Italy, Turkey, Georgia, Ukraine, Latvia, Germany, and Greece. Through this whole week of spending time together during sessions, team building activities but also just eating lunch or going out together we build up lots of connection with each other. We shared experiences or challenges we face in Poland or talked about things like culture shock and how to deal with it.    An important part was also learning more about Poland, its culture and language. In the morning...

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...

The   27th of March is the International Day of Theatre. Fortunately, this dramatic art is recovering the importance it used to have in our societies, and more and more people enjoy with the different performances available nowadays. For this reason, the library decided to organize an event for children about theatre, specifically about our already famous orange box, the Kamishibai show. In case you don’t know, kamishibai is an ancient Japanese theatre art that literally means “paper play.” It consisted on wooden boards with illustrations drawn on them. The narrator would change the slides and go on telling the story. This theatre was very popular from the 30s till the popularization of the television. Therefore, Marine and I did our version on cardboard, and chose the stories of “The Ugly Duckling” and “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”, for they are tales that everyone is familiar with and we needed that since we narrate them in English. We also prepared a li...

As foreigners living in Poland we -Marine and I- also like to travel and discover a bit more about this country and its culture. That is why we were so happy when the cultural center in Górzno invited both of us to participate in the activities they had prepared for children during the winter holidays. In case you do not know, Górzno is a cozy little town close to Brodnica, which is close to Toruń. Marine had already been there in a conference about theatre so that is how we met Krzysztof and Agnieszka, the couple who usually manages the workshops in that cultural center. So there we started our travel on Sunday. Being Górzno a little town, it took us forever and four different trains to get there. The man was waiting for us at Brodnica and took us to their home for dinner -at 17.00, I will never get used to Polish timetables, but it was  another proof of Polish hospitality ♥. They are a very nice family and own a goat farm, so that they can make cheese and grow veg...

Since I first arrived to Pomiechówek I was eagerly expecting the Christmas period. Everyone talked about traditional dishes, snow and temperatures below zero. However, the most repeated event throughout these three months was the Art Bazar. This is a kind of handicraft market that takes place twice a year in the sports hall, before Christmas and Easter, and it is one of the biggest occasions in town. It was celebrated on the 2 nd of December, so Marine, the volunteer at Pompa, and I were in charge of some of the decorations for the place, as well as for the cultural center and the library. Therefore the two previous weeks we were super busy developing ideas and preparing all of the designs. I think in the end it looked pretty well and we had lots of fun.  At the library there was also a lot of hustle and bustle since they would have their own stand to sell  books as well as paint children’s faces. Finally the day arrived and it was probably the most active day in...

Not many people is totally aware of how EVS projects work.   As volunteers of the European Solidarity Corps, our main job is at our host organization, which for me is the library in Pomiechówek. However, we are part of a bigger organization that coordinates the individual projects of the volunteers, thus, every once in a while, we have the chance to take part in other events different from our own jobs. This was the case of the weekend of the Polish independence anniversary.   On the 8 th of November our team of volunteers was kindly invited to Serock – a little town close to Pomiechówek– to collaborate in the activities the social center had prepared for its users in commemoration of the 100 years of Polish independence. After a short presentation about the function of the institution and a comforting lunch the activities started. To run the workshops the participants and we were divided into three groups, so that they would have 45 minutes of each activity. Travis, vo...