Our volunteer- Pauline will finish with her voluntary service in a few days so she decided to tell us more about her experience. See what she shared!
Let’s talk about European Solidarity Corps Volunteering!
Thanks to ESC, I spent 6 months in Chepelare, Bulgaria.
During my time there, I worked in Municipality complex with children between 5 to 15 years. We did art activities, furthermore I had the opportunity to build my own personal project which was about recycling and Zero waste. Therefore, I created activities using simplicity
and waste, like games: Tic-Tac-Toe with paper and Tangram, a mathematical game with a cardboard, and also decorations for Halloween and Christmas.
By the way, ESC gave me freedom and space for my personal project.
Unfortunately, the recycling factory closed in July and municipality didn't put this subject as a primary problem.
Despite those facts, I met people in Smolyan and ODK (Children's Complex- Chepelare) who helped me to talk about environment and to protect our nature to children.
Chepelare is a small town, this is why teachers from the primary school and kindergarten heard about my devotion against plastic, so they invited me to do presentation in front of their classes. Moreover, I participated in different forums about this subject in Plovdiv and Sofia, which were very constructive and helpful for my project.
Communication was for me the biggest obstacle of my ESC. I knew it will be complicated, but I already lived in other countries, with differents languages. Nevertheless, bulgarian is very different from my mother tongue or English. So I learned how to be polite in Bulgarian language.
Otherwise, doing a long term ESC helps you to meet other volunteers all around your new country, an arrival and mid term trainings. This helped me a lot, cause I was the only volunteer in Chepelare, thereby meetings gave me opportunity to share my experience with volunteers who deal with the same scares, hopes and joys.
Project number: 2018-1-BG01-ESC13-061152
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