Volunteering is all about people.
Each of us came here to work for the community, in many different ways. When I pictured what my volunteering experience may look like, I always thought of my kids as the main characters of it. Those “people” I’m talking to you about. My work in the hosting organization (the Special Kindergarten no. 393) has been, of course, one of the highlights of the last five months, but there’s another community I want to talk about today: our Schuman family.
I wouldn’t say that going on a project abroad is an easy thing to do. Coming from the other side of the continent, Poland has a lot of new things to get used to. The first weeks are all about shock and adaptation. And, from the very beginning, there they were, all part of our own family. Sixteen of us, from eleven different countries, who decided to move to Warsaw for the people.
During these past months, the team has taught me a lot about their ways to live and express themselves, which also meant learning to deal with each other’s accents and establish new rules for communicating. While southern Europeans reaffirmed how similar we can be, Snežana, Lisa, Maria, or Ketevan introduced me to their countries (the great unknown). Having the chance to learn about all of them, through their memories and thoughts it’s the closest I can ever be to Serbia, Belarus, Ukraine, or Georgia. At the same time, people like Clara and Antonio showed me how different our perspectives can be and the way a culture can appear in many shapes (but were still a piece of home).
Our common life means sharing our workplaces, homes and time. And the best part is that I feel like we chose it to be that way somehow. After waking up in the same house and working with each other, we still open the group chat when we feel like doing something. My first thought every time I have any news is to reach them and, at the same time, I love the way they do the same with me. At the end of an awful Monday, I usually just want to watch series with Albane while we eat junk (vegan) food and complain about how bad our diet is. And, at the same time, we would encourage each other to get out on a Friday night. That happens in different ways between all of us; to be brief, we created our small space and learned how to use it to make the most of all of this.
Volunteering is all about people and I was lucky enough to find mine.