EVS in Pomiechówek

  Before arriving at the library, I'd never had to create communication posts or projects. I’d never used the website Canva (no, I tried it once, but it wasn’t conclusive at all…). I was convinced that I had no real creative skills. But when I arrived, my colleague Kalina taught me how to use the software Gimp and Canva. It’s not that complicated after all, and I’m now able to help her on different communication projects for the library. Even if sometimes it’s hard to be imaginative or original, I love to find new ideas and improve my creativity ! Until now, I had to design projects for : The national reading day The kitten Kicia Kocia The Christmas wishes The new books post etc. And I’m pretty proud of it !

Dzień dobry everyone! I'm Marine, the new volunteer who works in the library since September 2019. I come from France and I'm here until August 2020. I took a long time before continuing this blog, for my new life was so full and exciting! But the good thing is that now I have plenty to say and to show to you! So let's start a recap of the last 6 months! Who am I? First of all, I will introduce myself a bit deeper. So my name is Marine, I come from Rennes, a city in Brittany, in the West of France. I celebrated my 21st birthday in Pomiechówek.  Before I decided to make an ESC (new name for EVS, now it's European Solidarity Corps, no more European Voluntary Service), I spent 3 years at the university, studying art history.  I loved it, but I didn't know what to do after that, and I was eager to live on my own, abroad, to have experiences I wouldn't be able to have at home, to confront a new way of life, new people, a new language, etc.  And until no...

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...

The 8th of March is International Women’s Day. Surely, everyone remembers this date, but I discovered this year that each country celebrates it in a different way. In Spain, it is a day for the vindication of women’s rights. There is a female strike and huge demonstrations in the main cities. The number of participants keeps growing every year, reaching 370,000 in Madrid. That is why I was very shocked when, just after arriving to work, two strangers (delegates from the mayor, as I was explained later) came in the library with a bucket of tulips, gave a flower to each of us and three kisses. We also had some sweets from Mrs. Ewa. Apparently this is super common in Poland; every women is congratulated on this day and usually receives some flowers. Marine and I also decided to do our bit to contribute on this day, as part of the activities organized by the Culture Center. We did a presentation -translated by Ania- about Influential European Women, focusing on people or fac...