The volunteering I'm doing is proceeding in a school, in Narva Vanalinna Pohikool. My task is assisting english teachers during their work and give some help to the students if they need, so I'm developing a lot of skills in communication as the main challenge here, for me, is the language barrier.
I'm italian, so I speak a language without cases and with a different sintacical structure than the languages that the students speak, russian and estonian. Anyways this is also one of the reasons why I like this challenge, as communicating is just an exchange of informations through different codes I just need to understand a little of the language code to exchange some informations. However we had a russian language course so it's not just the filosofical learning that gets me expiriencing but also the practical one. Thanks to it I had the chance to meet the russian teacher with a very strong and interesting personality that got me and the other volunteers started to understanding their culture.
One cool experience that also started me integrating to this new place was one of the times, me and some volunteers went in the sauna of the gym we were usually going to: as we entered that sauna there were 10 big, stong and sweaty men sitted and looking at us, they probably understood from the moment we entered the sauna that some foreigners were coming, so after a few minutes talking between each other one man asked us in russian from where we were from, and just like this we got a really good chance to practice the language we were learning and we managed to engage a very COOL and LONG conversation (basically 10 minutes, in which 5 were hhhmmm, how do you say that, ehmmm) explaining who we were and what were we doing here.
So volunteering is a journey by itself, it has the same features of a trip where you're not going to the main parts of the place you get, but you try to see the unseen, where nobody goes, with the only difference that here you became part of it and you have the opportunity to give and gain the most you can from the place.
I'm italian, so I speak a language without cases and with a different sintacical structure than the languages that the students speak, russian and estonian. Anyways this is also one of the reasons why I like this challenge, as communicating is just an exchange of informations through different codes I just need to understand a little of the language code to exchange some informations. However we had a russian language course so it's not just the filosofical learning that gets me expiriencing but also the practical one. Thanks to it I had the chance to meet the russian teacher with a very strong and interesting personality that got me and the other volunteers started to understanding their culture.
One cool experience that also started me integrating to this new place was one of the times, me and some volunteers went in the sauna of the gym we were usually going to: as we entered that sauna there were 10 big, stong and sweaty men sitted and looking at us, they probably understood from the moment we entered the sauna that some foreigners were coming, so after a few minutes talking between each other one man asked us in russian from where we were from, and just like this we got a really good chance to practice the language we were learning and we managed to engage a very COOL and LONG conversation (basically 10 minutes, in which 5 were hhhmmm, how do you say that, ehmmm) explaining who we were and what were we doing here.
So volunteering is a journey by itself, it has the same features of a trip where you're not going to the main parts of the place you get, but you try to see the unseen, where nobody goes, with the only difference that here you became part of it and you have the opportunity to give and gain the most you can from the place.
Project number: 2023-1-EE01-ESC51-VTJ-000134063
Project title: „Community Spirit”
Project title: „Community Spirit”