February : Exploration month

First month, everything to discover.

What to say about that, I couldn’t believe that is happening, I’m feeling just too lucky.

This journey started with a long trip by bus. I went from France to Slovakia. Somehow I like travelling by bus, to me it’s part of the adventure. I could feel how far I went, enjoy the landscapes, and sometimes meet other travelers.

So here I am. This is real. I am officially part of the Inex Slovakia team with two other volunteers/colleagues/flatmates. If you come around you could meet them. Borja (Borja’s Insta), he is from Spain and Mathilda (Mathilda’s Insta), she is from the Netherlands. We are a little team, our colleagues have been working for Inex Sk since quite a few years now. They are Jarka, Mirka, Mayka and Monika. From time to time, we are also helped by volunteers who live in Slovakia.

I’ll answer the main question that everybody is curious about :

What do I do in this volunteering ?

I’ll say that our missions are divided in three big topics :

First, there are the administrative and promotion parts. To me, they are really important. It is about supporting international projects. In concrete terms, it means that we will upload the projects on the website, give information through social media, be part of events to meet people, tell about our experience as volunteers, get known our organization and the values we want to share.

Then, the second big topic is community work. They will be activities with local people. For example once per month we go to a structure called Integra and do some activities with people who have disabilities. At the office, we organize monthly an event called tea meetings. Everybody is welcome to join and discover a topic through a workshop or a presentation. It is another way to pool knowledge and ideas.

The last topic I’ll call it the experience in the field. When I say that, it is not in the corn field, let’s get everybody to agree. As you read in the previous episode, there are international projects all over the world. Our organization Inex organizes volunteering projects in Slovakia. This summer, I’ll be part of two international projects as a camp leader. Beside this, we are on a mission to create a workshop about a thematic we like. And then, we’ll present it to international groups.

More specifically from this month, about the promotion part, I experimented a little bit photoshop ^^ This is a funny part to me because I can free my creativity and experiment. Let see how it will go.

I’m pretty sure that you’re impressed by my diamond

About life here, we celebrate Valentine’s Day in Integra. There were a karaoke, we danced, stuck hearts in paper on the wall and listened nice Valentines notes in slovak ^^

We also had the first tea meeting with Borja and Mathilda. It was really nice. We presented ourselves, our countries and shared our cultures. And we also brought some cakes and dishes which remind us home.

Otherwise, some of you probably guess : I started to learn slovak. Yes, it is not a joke. We have a slovak class with Zuzka. She comes every week especially for us. We started with some little words in slovak, the numbers and colors. This is difficult haha Well there is a beginning for everything, right ? :p I like it because now I could laugh with people from here. Sometimes when I say “Dobri” they think that I could speak slovak haha That’s so funny 🙂

By the way, I also take some time to visit around, try new cooking stuff or meet new people. With my roommate Mathilda we’ve been in Banska Štiavnica (don’t ask me to pronounce the name of this village). It is a little town in the middle of Slovakia with UNESCO heritage. I’ll share some pictures with you.