Hey,
I’m Amélie, I’m 23 years old and I am
from Belgium. Since September, I’m a volunteer at the Centre of Rehabilitation,
education and care. I’m here for 10 months.
In the centre, there are hippo therapy,
one kindergarten school, one primary school, one secondary school and one club
for the people with disability who don’t go to school anymore. There is also
professionals like physiotherapists and psychologists who work with the studemnts
of the school and sometimes with children who aren’t in the school.
For the project, I work in hippo
therapy. There are 8 horses and one pony. The main things that I need to do are:
- cleaning
the horses,
- go
and pick up the children in the school,
- prepare
the horses,
- Hold
the horses when we walk with them and the children.
During the week, for 2-3 hours, I go to Klub Absolwenta, which is the graduate
club which supports young and disabled people and school graduates. Also I go
to the kindergarten for 1 hour and a half.
When I’m in the Klub Absolwenta I help them
making some arts and handcrafts for Christmas or Easter.
The activities I do in the school mostly
depends on the week. Most of the time I am with the psychologist to see what
she is doing with the children or I help her to prepare some stuff.
Sometimes I go into a classroom to see
the way they have their classes and their system.
I work and live with Anna, another
volunteer who comes from Germany. For three months, we were with another
volunteer from Sweden, but she needed to leave. It was so difficult !
During the free time, we go into
the city, we see movies (on Thursday it is always a movie night), we go to see
other volunteers, we cook together. Also we talk and laugh a lot.
When I first came to Poland, my level of
English was very bad. When somebody talks to me, I had to focus a lot, and I
could only understand half of it. It was so frustrating because I wanted to
speak and exchange with others but I couldn’t.
I remember that during the first week
with Anna, I absolutely understood nothing about what she was telling to me. I was
a little afraid that was going to stay like this. Imagine being together with a
people for 10 months and don’t understand anything. It is not a good thing. But
after 2-3 weeks it was really better. And now we really understand each other.
Sometimes we don’t have the vocabulary but it is not a problem because we can
mimic or explain the words. And for anything I wouldn’t change my flatmate.
Another big difficulty in the beginning was
that I went to my On-arrival training just one week after my arrival. It is a
meeting with other volunteers of Poland for one week. During the seminar, we
speak over the projects and we exchange a lot about the different countries,
cultures, politics. All of them in English. I have to confess that it was very
difficult for me to understand something about the subject which looks so
complex in English for me. It was funny because everyone was thinking that I
was very shy, but it was just that I don’t understand what they said to me.
Fortunately, there was a boy from France and he translated the important things
that I don’t understand for me. It was very helpful.
Now it’s been 5 months that I have been here
and I have progressed a lot. I can speak with the people normally and I don’t
need to be super-concentrated. I have made the mid-term seminar and I have
almost understood everything. I can also see a movie with the subtitles
in English. And it is magical because I discover all the songs and what they
actually say now that I understand better.
I hope the rest of my project is going
to be like the start because till now it has been really good!
