In July, I arrived to Katowice and the most interesting adventure of my life started. In this journey, I am hosted by Fundacja Rozwoju Społeczeństwa Przedsiębiorczego (FRSP) and with my colleague is Natia. The first month here was to acclimatize. To understand how to move around, to discover Wola ad the district. Thanks to the activities of GOKwe had a full immersion in the culture and tradition of this region. We were involved in some trip with children, and of
course I did not understand anything in polish but the women of GOK and the children were patient and help me. When we started polish lesson was like to wear glasses. All this strange words with a lot of consonant had a sense. The first words I learned was “trzy, dziewięćdziesiąt dziewięć” in Tesco and “Pszczyna” to take the bus. After 2 months, nine time out of ten I say “Piscina” that in italian means pool, our teacher Ana will be very happy to read this. Wola and its sky fascinated me. I never expected to find amazing dawns and sunset in Poland. Sometimes the sky has pink violet and light blue shades like in a fairytale. My favourite spot are the ponds with the swan and other aquatic bird.
My European Voluntary Service project provides widely different tasks. It is possible to distinguish among:
- office support and social media management;
- monitoring of labor office;
- show cooking;
- Italian lesson;
- entrepreneurship workshop.
These actvities require a deep preparation and analysis. I never teach before and these tasks give me the chance to reflect about which methods apply (non-formal or formal education) and obviously what kind of skills the participants should improve. But, above all, how I can not be bore. It is a constant creative work on myself. The second set of activities concern the everyday living in FRSP. I have the chance to raise my professional skills in the field of project management and administrative work. Marcin and Natalia are very patient with me and explain everything in detail. They challenge me all the time proposing me to write a local or European project or designing a database and so on. They are like tutor and mentor in the same time sharing with me their experience and know-how. During this month I play with social media. I find a new hobby learning about IT. At the end, the monitoring of Labor office, that is the core of my EVS project. It consists in examining the capacity of LO to meet the request of foreign jobseekers. This is a huge opportunity for me to face up with the Polish job market, especially Silesian. On the other side, due of this task, I can travel around this voivodeship learning more about its tradition and history. I am very pleased with the path done until now and I am ready for the new challenge that are arriving. To write about what I learned it is very hard because it concerns several aspect of my being: communication, creativeness, logistic skills and so on. At least I would like to thank FRSP for implementing this project and for putting up with me every day, the team of GOK Miedźna w Woli leaded by Joanna for helping me to feel like home and each person I met here!
