Hello, hello again, it’s me Khatia- your storyteller from Georgia. I just realised, that it’s been more than 7 months since I moved to Warsaw and started volunteering for Schuman Foundation office, so I decided to tell you a bit more about my life recently.
I will start from very early days. I remember my first day in the office, I woke up so motivated in the morning even when I hate waking up early. I put on nice clothes, ate my breakfast quick and left for work. When I arrived in the office, I had a feeling I was Emily but in Warsaw, (if you have seen Emily in Paris, you know what I mean). I was walking in the office like I owned it , I was so excited to see my working room, my desk, my computer, all the files on the shelves. It wasn’t my first experience working in the office, but it was completely new page of my life.
I met Mezei on that day, we talked a bit, we had meeting with coordinators in the conference room and then we decided to go for lunch in Georgian restaurant, since we could leave earlier cause it was our 1st day. Mezei tried Georgian dishes for the first time and she still talkes excited about Khachapuri, Eggplant with walnuts and Georgian lemonade which is made from taragon. (I’m so proud and happy hahah)
After few weeks we already had prepared our workshops and we went for our first workshop in December. We visited one of the public schools of Warsaw. I have to admit that at first we were very scared and stressed about workshops, but everything went well at the end, both students and teachers were friendly and excited to see us, they really enjoyed our presentations. Thanks to this workshop our confidence and presentation skills have developed much more. We also had to do online workshops because of Covid-19 pandemic situation during Winter, that helped us to improve our technical skills and learn how to use different platforms for online meetings, but it was sad that we had to stay in the office all the time.
Students really enjoyed the game in which they had to write their names with Georgian alphabet.
But our first outside-Warsaw trip was in Radom. We went by train, did our workshops and came back with bus. Bus trip wasn’t really nice,first of al lit was very tiring and people were rude. When they heard me and Mezei talking in English, they told us to shutup, they were bothered. You’ll have few of this kind of situations, because not every Polish person is friendly to foreign people, who can’t speak Polish, especially old generation. We had another funny situation at the train station in Radom. We had to visit toilet urgently, but the problem was I didn’t have exact ammount of cash to pay and i couldn’t pay with card. I was trying to explain to lady who was „controlling toilets”,that i needed change, but she couldn’t understand English and I couldn’t understand her Polish. I was so angry,cause she was very rude and aggressive,because I didn’t speak Polish. At the end, we couldn’t do anything and she didn’t let me in.
After this many months went by really fast. We’ve been doing workshops and presentations with schools around Poland and some universities. We visited some cities like Radom, Katowice, Świętochłowice, Będzin, Ostrow Wielkopolski, Chorzele and etc.
But my favorite trip would be to Świętochłowice school visit, cause first of all these kids were very nice and friendly ( I still have them on my IG, haha), teachers were very motivated and friendly as well, they hosted us with coffee/tea and bakery stuff, they gave us space to rest and also participated in our activities like kids. I really loved them!!! Secondly we could visit Katowice too and meet our friends Sophie & Hugo in Będzin, (we actually stayed with them for 2 days.) After workshops Me and Mezei went to discover Katowice, almost got lost while searching for bus stop, found some nice places (and Georgian restaurant ?) and took nice photos.
At the end of the day, we bought Georgian wine for our friends and I cooked Georgian dish “Lobiani” that is pie made from beans. It was nice that we finished our exhausted day with fun evening, with lots of laughs, stories and happy memories. This trip will always be in my heart ❤️
Except workshops we also manage our volunteering social media pages and we really enjoy taking tik-toks and instagram reels. Lots of people watch our videos, that gives us more motivation.
I want to mention our big event for Europe Day that was held in Łazienki park on 7th of May, and me and Mezei were co-coordinating. We had interesting and fun,educational activities for kids, teenagers and parents. You can read more about our event on this link, but the main idea of the event was to promote European values, European Solidarity Corps and our projects. I’m very glad that our event went even better than we could imagine, we had lots of visitors and participants and this success gave us more motivation to plan more events like this.
Well, we still have months to go and I guess I will have more to tell you soon, but for now that’s all. Thank you for your attention.
See you soon!
Khatia