Last September, our dear member Liisu decided to get a Mediterranean breeze and leave for a 11-month ESC volunteering experience in Terrassa (Catalunya) with our colleagues from La Vibria. After the first few months, we have asked her to share with us some insights of her life in Spain so far, and the result is not dissapointing at all! Enjoy the reading!
“Hey everyone! Some of you already know me, but for those who don’t, my name is Anna-Liisu and I am currently doing my ESC in Spain, in a smaller city near Barcelona called Terrassa.
Before my volunteering program I had many different jobs, but for the last four years I was working as a teacher of history, civics and human studies. I had always wanted to try out living abroad, somewhere in the south where the culture is very different from what I am used to and to also be part of the ESC program to gain experience in fields I normally would not have so much access to. So I started looking for ESC possibilities in Spain for its rich, diverse history, exciting (and a little bit exotic) culture and for the opportunity to finally learn Spanish.
Shokkin Group, with its wide connections and network (thank you Olalla and Pavel!), helped me find exactly the organization I was looking for: La Vibria Intercultural. We had an online interview where I just talked about things I would want to do and it turned out that they were looking for a person who would want to do activities that I was passionate about and had just the right project for me: the perfect timing and the perfect match!
The start of the adventure
So on the 14th of September I put my life in Estonia on a pause and came to live in Terrassa for 11 months. Important thing to know about Terrassa and the region of Barcelona is that although it is Spain, it is also Catalunya: an autonomous region of Spain, with its own language (something between French and Spanish), its own traditions and culture. It is also the most expensive region in terms of prices and rent in Spain.
Together with me, seven other volunteers started their program, and that was in addition to four other volunteers from a previous “season” whose project was finishing in December. Not all of us work in the same organization, but the organization I work in (La Vibria) is also coordinating the other ESC volunteers between different local organizations.
ESC volunteers live in three different apartments where they assigned us randomly, and I got very lucky: I live in the center of Terrassa in an old apartment, which is five minutes from my workplace AND I got my own private room (some of the volunteers have to share a room).
Although some of the other apartments are more modern and more functioning, I prefer the old apartment with character, as it kind of reminds me of the Telliskivi-Pelgulinna region: historical neighborhood with a lot of cool and random activities.
In January we had new volunteers coming and now I share the flat with two guys from Belgium and Ukraine and two girls from Italy and France (who are awesome, by the way!).
My volunteering work
So what do I do at La Vibria? To be honest, it is very hard to explain. La Vibria is a similar organization to Shokkin, but a lot bigger. They host and coordinate international and local projects, are focused on gamification and green practices and try to give young people opportunities to go abroad. So my tasks are within this range and to help out with a lot of different things.
That is the coolest part: I rarely get bored because people give me different tasks and I can always initiate something that I myself want to do, the people of La Vibria are very supportive of this.
The nice thing about La Vibria is that we volunteers only work 28 hours a week, normally from Monday to Friday with 2 days for home officing (Wednesdays and Fridays). Besides, when you help out in a project or something that needs to be done outside of the normal working hours, you get extra free time after that, so the system is very fair.
The funny thing is that this kind of trust between the volunteers and the whole team makes you actually more motivated to initiate and do things, so you sometimes still end up working overtime- not because you have to, but you actually want to try out and do new things.
Just to give you an overview of different things I have done or helped out with this far, from September to January:
- Collected over a 100 different energisers and getting-to-know-each-other games which will be printed on smaller cards, so facilitators can more easily use them while hosting projects.
- Collected activities for team-building and final evaluations and created some workshops for soft skills and competence development, so people can access and use them more easily.
- Creating a local actionbound treasure hunt for discovering Terrassa and used it a few times with different people, so they could have some team-building activities while discovering the key points in Terrassa in a more modern way.
- Created and facilitated an educational portable escape room about different types of discrimination.
- Been part of helping out with project applications and brainstorming sessions for both international and local projects.
- Been part of a team which tests and upgrades educational board games already created by La Vibria in previous projects and introduces them to other youth workers.
- Helping out with a local program Feinateca which goal is to help unemployed young people to develop their skills and competences which supports them on finding a job. Since the locals don’t speak much English and I don’t speak Catalan or Spanish, I am more involved in helping with the creation of activities, but not facilitating them.
- Helping out with hosting Intercultural evenings, which is meant to be a cultural exchange between locals and the volunteers who share their culture from respective countries through games, dances, food, etc.
- Helped to host and facilitate an international training course about social entrepreneurship with the administration and bureaucratic part as well as the project program, facilitating some workshops and being in charge of the evening free-time activities.
… and a lot more smaller tasks. I have had the full possibility of joining activities and projects that I am passionate about but also to try out tasks and things I would never have the chance to do in my daily life. So I would say the work experience is just getting more interesting every week.“