Hey, it’s me again. Long-time no read, I guess, but the past few weeks have been pretty full and I finally managed to find a moment to write few remarks and to remember what has been happening on my EVS journey.
For those who haven’t read my first blog post, my name is Filip and I am an EVS volunteer in Shokkin Estonia at the moment. I am mainly focusing on games and possible use of them in education, but my EVS is a lot more than that.
So let’s see, what happened so far
. After a very turbulent October and first half of November, when I was struggling with finding a place to call home together with guys from Shokkin, I finally managed to settle down in nice and spacious flat in centre of Tallinn together with two other flatmates. Problem solved. This helped me to calm down a bit and focus more on my work.
First part of December was full of developing and creating games, I travelled to Finland and worked on educational activities with a group of friends, which was super amazing. Coming back to Tallinn, I tried to implement some of the things I learnt directly with kids who are regularly coming to the youth centre and it was really awesome. And I have been to couple of escape rooms and played a couple of board games – which is not only enjoyable for me, but I can categorize it as work. Jealous?
Christmas was a time off for me, since I travelled back to Slovakia to spend time with my family and slow down. I realized that I missed them and I was grateful for those moments. New Year in Ukraine and then back to Tallinn and back to work.
Occasionally, I was complaining that I don’t have so much stuff to do – and this dramatically changed. I continued working on the city game we are creating with group of Shokkin people and it seems like it’s really moving forward.
Apart from that, I got to coordinate a big project – Message Wear. Message Wear combines two amazing topics, active citizenship and creativity. First step is to host workshops for young people in order to make them more sensitive to problems in society and possible solutions to them. The second is connected to creativity, when the participants create designs based on those social problems. And at the end we print them on t-shirts, hoodies and bags. Technically, we are making a socially responsible line of clothing. Message Wear was already taking place last year with some very nice results, so if you want to check them, click here.
A small, but at the same time very enjoyable thing, was organizing a Slovak cultural night. I am not a huge fan of cultural nights and all the propaganda on how your country is the best, so I tried to take a slightly different approach and actually learned some new things about Slovakia as well. If you are interested in cultural evenings in Tallinn, follow Kesklinna Noortekeskus on Facebook and check the events!
As for recent experience, a few weeks ago I got a message from Olga, a teacher in one local school. She is organizing a series of workshops for students from her school, providing them on basic skills and knowledge on project management and Erasmus+ projects. She heard about me and my experience with all these things and invited me to run one session with the students and I was just amazed how smart and active they were. Plus, they are up to further cooperation with me and I can’t wait to see the outcomes of that.
However, all is not just milk and honey. Recently, I have been going through a quite difficult phase of adaptation to new environment. This happens to almost everyone when moving to a new place and it was rather hard sometimes. However, I feel like I now managed to get over it and I am getting used to this place. And can’t wait for what is coming up next!
