Three Days With My Volunteer Friends

Well it has been six months since I landed in Northern Ireland. I didn’t realize how fast time has gone by. Now I am midway through my EVS experience. Wow! On my EVS training I had the chance to reflect on many of the experiences I have had over the last six months. I was delighted to spend other three days with my 18 volunteer friends from all around Europe (such a pity that my dearest Emelie was in Sweden for a wedding, we all missed her a lot, and I cried every night, so sad…).

We all went to Cultra, a small village twenty minutes away from the city of Belfast, where you can experience the life as it was during the 1920s. You can find people on the street dressed in time typical clothes or you can even go to a lovely wee cinema to enjoy a silent film. There was a piano there and María delighted us with a concert, but the piano was out of tune, so we all ended hating her!

So what did I do during these three days? Complaining a lot about Public Achievement and all the people I work with ;) I actually spent a lot of time thinking about my experience and all the work I’ve done within this organisation and I shared my experiences with the rest of the group. It is so good this feedback because we all can learn from each other; different opinions and experiences can make you think about some issues that you never realized before.

During the on arrival training we all wrote a letter to ourselves and we opened it the last day of this training. I could remember most of it, but not completely, and reading what I wrote to myself five months ago wasn’t as pleasant as I expected. I’m still stocked and struggling with many aspects that don’t work properly with me. But I promise that I’m working on it!

But not everything was hard work!!! We had lot of time to chill out together and to play many games. “The wolf” became our favourite in the first training so we spent some time playing it during these few days, although we were not as passionate as some months ago. It’s amazing seeing how good we get on all together! We are a big group with very different and strong personalities, but we are just amazing! LOL

One of the best activities we enjoyed during these few days was the Lingo. We learnt from a professional English teacher about different words, expressions and pronunciation of the slang in NI. As we all are foreign people, we made fun of it. I think the funniest moment was when we repeated those impossible dialogues full of expressions that made no sense.

As we were experiencing life during the last century, we went to different workshops. We learnt how to bake our own soda bread using the traditional techniques, we observed how the basket making worked and we got a chance to meet a girl who was learning how to use a machine to weave linen. You need a ten years training to learn that job, isn’t that insane?

The last night in the village, a man came to teach us some Irish dancing.  We had an amazing time dancing all together as a group. I have to apologize to all my dancing partners, as I put too much energy on it and some of them nearly lost some of their limbs! I have to confess that I didn’t stay to the end, being two hours dancing my feet off was little too much for an old man like myself.

After three days of early mornings and late nights we all had to say goodbye and go back to our homes. It was a very good opportunity to hang out with other people in the same situation as yours and we could spend those days exchanging experiences and gossiping a bit ;)

Thanks for everything my friends! And thanks to Lisa, Connor and Mary for putting so much effort into this!

Luís