Pułtusk day

Hi everyone,

From the 15^th to the 18^th of September, Pułtusk turned into a beehive for the “Pułtusk days” and of course, FIYE took part in the event! On Saturday the 17^th, we invited the volunteers from Warsaw to help us promote volunteering, as well as our upcoming language café, that will take place every week from October. Jaqueline and Simona were on training that weekend but Luciana and Yi-Chieh joined the fun.

For that occasion, we decided to turn our stand into a cosy language café with tables offering lessons, games, recipes and other activities in all of our languages: English, French, Spanish, Turkish, Portuguese, Chinese, Taiwanese and German. People could learn useful sentences, animals and numbers, try out some tongue-twisters, get some recipes, learn how to use chopsticks or draw Chinese characters, or just discuss in a variety of languages.

 

Of course, we also had a multitude of games and sweets, as usual! Quiz, fun facts, geography, Chinese brain-teasers, learning games … People from Pułtusk had a lot of choices! The “be the fastest to hit the picture of the animal that you hear” was a hit!

 

Children and teenagers were the most curious ones about our language café and really gave it a try, learning for instance how to count in Spanish, discovering animals in French, practising their English conversation, introducing themselves in Turkish, trying out tongue-twisters in Portuguese or again learning how to use chopsticks!

 

We taught our languages the whole day but what we did not expect was to learn that much Polish! Indeed, two very nice girls wanted to teach us Polish and our language café turned into a Polish café. We learned numbers, animals and useful sentences and I can still remember how to say “squirrel” in Polish: wiewiórka. Who knows, it could come in handy at some point!

It was another very fun day where we all learned a lot. Thus, for us volunteers, the challenge was to attract people to our stand and to convince them to give a try at foreign languages; a task that was not always easy. Indeed, discussing with a native speaker is often very intimidating, for anyone, and we had to find ways to convince people to do so. We learned how to better approach and offer a language-related event like this one and that will help us improve our upcoming weekly language café.

It was also very nice to see the inhabitants of Pułtusk  being genuinely curious about us, our languages and our cultures and we hope that they learned as much as we did and that it will encourage them to discover more about other cultures.
 
Na razie,

Julia