EVS On-arrival training in Hisarya

Part of every EVSer's life is the on-arrival training, a get-together with all the fresh volunteers in the country and a familiarisation with everything he or she needs to know about his or her voluntary service: the personal project, his or her rights and obligations (and those of all involved), how the health insurance works, etc etc. But it's not just that; if it was, the on-arrival probably wouldn't be etched on every volunteer's mind as a definite highlight of the EVS project and some of the best days in his or her life in general.

Some people thought we were actually trainers!
Who else was provided with t-shirts by their
awesome hosting organisation, eh? :)
Picture by Petar Markov.

Posing with the library shirts.
Picture by Petar Markov.

Agne, the volunteer who was working in the library before us, had this to say about their on-arrival last year:

All EVS volunteers have to undergo training. On 19-24 July we had our 'on-arrival' at the Black Sea resort of Albena, organised by the Bulgarian national agency.There have been nearly sixty trainees in total - EVS volunteers from projects all over Bulgaria - some of them 'on-arrival' like us, others 'mid-term'. 

Four trainers were giving us workshops, supported by several other people from the national agency.

The training, of course, is not just about partying. A typical day included a couple of three-hour sessions, separated by a two-hour lunch break - the latter typically spent at the beach.

I was not the only one thinking the sessions were fun but intense. We did: ice-breaking games in order to get to know each others, our projects & countries of origin; psychology workshops (personality types, negotiations, conflict management); classes about practicalities of doing an EVS (volunteerism, AXA insurance); plus creative tasks such as designing posters, shooting short films & running for quests all over Albena. [...] (full post here)

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Presenting Sofia City Library and our project to the group.
Picture by Petar Markov.

Everything's better with posters and sketches!
Picture by Petar Markov.

 In our case, the place was Hisarya, (warning: musical link!), an old town well-known in Bulgaria for its hot springs. It took place from March 7th to March 13th, making it one of the longest trainings ever - lucky us! Our accommodation was Augusta Hotel, a renovated communist era hotel built close to one of those springs and using the water to fill its swimming pool, spas and saunas. Apart from the food, the experience of staying in that place was quite... interesting. Hotels always give me the impression that they exist sort of independently from the rest of civilisation, like places that belong nowhere specific. But that's another topic entirely.

That's us. Kuba and Ula from Poland; Anna from Austria; Florian from France; Anna, Christina and Dimitris (that's me) from Greece; Bojan from Serbia; Miro from Slovakia; Veronika from Czech Republic; Corinne from the UK; Niina from Finland; Elena, Paula and Vicente from Spain; Rian from the Netherlands; Zanda from Latvia; Maria from Denmark; Gabriele and Rasa from Lithuania; Hilal from Turkey; Susanna from Armenia and our two trainers Nasko and Maya from Bulgaria! A truly multicultural, European group!

Our trainer Nasko and the EVS project cycle.

A session on intercultural communication, they said...
Picture by Petar Markov.

Meanwhile, there were another 40 or so EVSers having their mid-term training in the hall next door. The "evening activities", in which we could all mingle together after the tough sessions of the day, were pure pandaemonium. Let's just say that by the end, our socialising limits had been tested.

Shot from the Uglies Party the mid-terms
prepared for the on-arrivals.
Guess what the dress code was.

All bowed to the superiority of the post-it game!

I'd love to be able to convey at least part of what makes these kinds of things like youth exchanges, and in turn this training, so special, but I find it very difficult to do so: while I was thinking about writing this post, I realised that I have actually avoided writing about such experiences in the past. Being stuck together with complete strangers for a week and by the end feeling you've known them forever, doing things that an outsider would probably find silly or weird but you're greatly enjoying, is not an easy feeling to explain. A friend of mine says its false intimacy. Maybe in the case of youth exchanges it mostly is: after the exchanges, I'm sad to say, it's impossible to keep contact with everyone. Even the  people with whom you thought you could be great friends, the people you would genuinely love to keep in touch with, are in time forgotten...

This training, however, was happily different in this respect. After the final day of the training, after all the parties were had, all the games were played, all the informal education was, erm, unleashed, all the projects were presented and all the friendships made, we all knew that we would see eachother soon, or at the very least had the possibility to do so; we were all volunteers in the same country, after all...

Indeed, on the weekend after the training, more than half of the group almost magically ended up in Sofia (most of them don't live here) and what followed was a crazy couple of days. It was also Zanda's birthday then and everyone was invited to the party. That night we hosted 5 people in our tiny little flat! But for every person that wasn't in Sofia for these moments, a promise to visit had already been made. A promise we can't wait to keep.

We all had a secret mission assigned to us
by the trainers in the on-arrival, which we
had to work on throught our days in Hisarya
 and presented to the group on the last day.
Zanda's was to create a collage of everyone's
national flags. After the training we took theposter
home and this is a picture of it with Florian
in our kitchen. Proof of the impact Hisarya
had on us and our relationships in Bulgaria...

So what did we all take away with us from this experience? Personally, I had the chance to come closer to my own personal goals for the EVS as a whole, got many ideas for improving my own experience and work in the library and of course met great new people. I'd really like my friends and colleagues to include their own versions and impressions of the on-arrival, so the following space is for them.

(SPACE!)

This one is the product of  Corinne's secret mission.
It, too, is hanging on our kitchen wall.

Baba Marta and Martenitsi

One of the most interesting celebrations in Bulgaria is Baba Marta, or Grandma March, a pagan tradition for welcoming the spring which lives to this day. On March 1st, Bulgarians gift one another red and white interwoven strings (martenitsi), which they are then supposed to wear or adorn themselves with until they see a stork or a budding tree. That's why you can often see red and white strings hung on trees everywhere around Sofia: people wish to share with the tree the health and luck they have enjoyed by wearing the martinitsi. Isn't that sweet?

The tradition of Baba Marta has mysterious origins; we have already heard three stories on how the Martenitsi first came to be, but the common thread running through all of them has been that the red colour is supposed to come from the blood of an innocent, be it of a young girl or a wounded bird. According to Wikipedia: "While white as a color symbolizes purity, red is a symbol of life and passion, thus some ethnologists have proposed that, in its very origins, the custom might have reminded people of the constant cycle of life and death, the balance of good and evil, and of the sorrow and happiness in human life." Notice the sacrifice (red) of the innocent and pure (white).

Does it remind you of anything? Yes, paganism! In fact, just like pagans used to personify the elements, Baba Marta has been imagined as a grumpy old woman who goes through sudden and violent mood swings. This is to symbolise the sudden changes in weather the month of March is known for in many different cultures. We got a taste of Baba's bipolarity ourselves: following a streak of very -unnaturally- warm days, in the morning of March 1st the sun had been shining and the weather in general had been perfect, but later that day it started raining, it got colder, and since then things still haven't got better. Baba, have mercy, look at our Martinitsi (but also take climate change into account)!

Anyway, to celebrate the day, we made some Martinitsi of our own! There was a relevant workshop in the Children's Department of the Sofia City Library, where we learned how to make them and had plenty of materials to let our imaginations run wild. Who said you can't mix tradition with innovation?

The girls hard at work... This is Daphne on the left, my girlfriend,
who was visiting during those days.

The twist in the technique!

Martenitsi come in various shapes and sizes!

Enjoying them before giving them away...

Different styles of martenitsi

Zanda's hair (picture by Daphne)

Ben Ten and Angry Birds martenitsas...

Interculturarl learning and communication

On friday the 21th of Feburary
By Natalie Jivkova

We, the volunteers from the Sofia City Library, and the guys from the SMART  foundation had a great day, when we were participating in the workshop of "Intercultural learning and communication".
Our cool coach was the ex-volunteer Natalie Jikova, who for more than 10 years have been "working" with EVS volunteers as trainer, coordinator, supervisor, mentor and of curse as friend, because she believes in EVS as a great life changing experience.
She had prepared a whole day of creative activities and there were not one minute to sit still and get bored at all.
We were presenting and talking about the pictures we had to make of ourself and our collegs in witch we would show our strenghts, skills or just something we would like to share with the others. It turned out to be very informative and funny, both to learn new things about the others and to learn how others are seeing you.
We talked a lot about culture. What culture is, what defines culture and the most important thing, that culture is more than just one thing. That culture is a lot of different factores; religion, country, family, friends, society etc., and that these factors are the ones which defines who you are, how you see yourself, how you see others and how others sees you.

It can lead to problems and misunderstandings, if you are not open minded and not tries to understand others culture and not want to understand why it might be very different from yours.We made a play, in order to show some of the difficulties it could bring, with a Japanese businessman who want to sell some of his business but the cultural greetings gets in the way. He as a Japanese is of curse bowing but the Tibetans is showing their tongue in order to greet someone which would be offencive in most other cultures and a sign of bad behavior, even though it is very respectful and normal for Tibetans.
With the Bulgarian buyer is the problem and the misunderstandings caused by the opposite way of showing yes or no with the movement of the head. The Bulgarian buyer is understanding the nodding as "no" and is also signaling a "no" with a nod and understand the shaking of the head as a yes and is also himself signaling a "yes" by shaking his head. The Japanese businessman is, like most others would, understanding it conversely.
The last buyer is a very passionate Georgian buyer who wants to pay more than the Japanese businessman wants, in order to show how generous he is and how much he wants to buy. The Japanese businessman think it is weird and and asks the Georgian buyer if his mother never taught him how to calculate?
The Georgian  guy takes it very personal and as a great offence that the Japanese first of all is talking about his mother and secondly dose not seem to be welcoming the generous offer. The result of this last meeting, even though it is not the solution, is that the Georgian guy ends up beating the Japanese businessman.
The easiest way to have avoided this, would have been for the businessman or the buyers, to ask in order to understand in stead of just judging the other person,  feel offended and so on. They, and even more important we, should always remember that the person we are talking to or with is interpreting what we are saying diffrent from what we understand that we are telling him. At the same time should we also always keep in mind that we just as much will understand what the person is giving as respond different from what the person that send it does.

It was a very productive day with a lot of fun, new perspectives, new information to reflect on and new things to take with us to use in or projects and in our future.
 All in all just a great day!

Bulgarian Lessons

Здравейте! Това е първът път, че пиша в български на компютъра. Уф, е много трудно с друга клавиатура...

One of the great things about EVS is that it gives you the opportunity to have proper classes for learning the language of your host country. For us, this means at least 120 study hours over a period of a few months, and right now we've done exactly half of that.

We have lessons on Monday and Thursday mornings in Zazy Language Centre, which is located on Vitosha Blvd right next to the Palace of Justice. Quite a central place to have lessons, right?


 

This is the entrance to the building - okay okay, I know what you're thinking, but, if you get down to it, it's nothing more than a photograph of a public place! The relevant jokes one can come up with from the fact that the entrance to a fetish club is the same as the entrance to where we have our language classes are rather obvious and I'll leave them to your own sick imagination!



 This is the place where we get our капучино (cappuccino) during our почивки (breaks). Did you notice that the shop is called "Kinky"? Are you noticing a mysterious pattern here? It's not just me, right?

On a completely unrelated note, in the class itself I'm always sitting opposite this map.

 

I'm sorry, this has very little to do with our Bulgarian, but I just have to get it off my chest. What is this map? I'm a big geography and map nerd so bare with me, but what's that... peninsula jutting out from the East of Finland towards Svalbard? What's that island to the East of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, like a hydrocephalic Puerto Rico? Oh! Maybe MacMillan accidentally revealed the true location of Atlantis, what mapmakers, satellites, Google Maps etc. have been meticulously hiding for millennia. Thank you, MacMillan! The truth is out there.

Sorry for that. I just wanted to share with this little thing that continually catches my attention during the Bulgarian class.

From left to right: Oles, Hanna, Zanda, Maria,
Zlatko (our teacher), Vicente and Jeroen.
Maria from Spain was absent that day but I really
wanted to take the picture exactly then.
Don't worry Maria, I haven't forgot about you!

Now, this is our class. That's us, the Library volunteers and the guys from Smart Foundation. This is the place where the magic happens. We hope that in the following half of our 120 hours we'll learn just as much, if not more, than what we have learned already, and some day soon we'll be ready to walk up to any baba or dyado and ask them for directions, order properly at the underground cantina next to the library with the handwritten menu with the green marker (have you seen handwritten Bulgarian??), understand what they ask us at the supermarket after we say the predictable things, which usually leaves us like deer in headlights... maybe even read some Bulgarian books! Yes, that'd be great indeed.

So, until the next attempts to actually write a post in Bulgarian, довиждане! (dovizhdane)

Free Sofia Tour

We'd heard plenty about the Free Sofia Tour, and my personal experience from similar free tours in other European cities had made me excited to see what this one could offer and whether or not it compared to the excellent standard I had come to find abroad.

We joined the 11am group yesterday with Jeroen with Vicente. Within 2.5 hours or so, we found out about the secret of Sveta Nedela's dome and the most important terrorist attack in the history of Bulgaria; we visited the hot mountain springs next to the old public bath house; we discovered the secret of the controversial statue of Sveta Sofia and how the name of the city doesn't actually go back to her - a story that deserves its own post; we witnessed the traces of the clash between Bulgaria's secular socialist past and its Orthodox Christian tradition, and the list goes on.

It's a free tour, but when donation time arrives at the end you'll most definitely feel like supporting 365 Association and its efforts, like we and everyone else in the group did. Don't miss it if you're visiting Sofia, even if it's only for a weekend - perhaps especially then.

Many thanks to Yana for being our excellent guide.

Can you spot us?
The imposing building in the background is the ex-communist party HQ,
now occasionally used by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Want more ways to discover the city? This post written by the previous library volunteers is exactly what you're looking for: Getting to Know Sofia, the Host City of your EVS

Valentine's Day

Warning! If you're single and/or hate Valentine's Day, skip this post and allow me to redirect you to the Wikipedia article on the appropriately named Singles Awareness Day - S.A.D.

Now, for the rest of us healthy people with perfect social lives: how did you celebrate your February 14th this year? If you are Bulgarian, you either had the typical romantic date, gifting your significant other one of the heart-shaped balloons which were being sold everywhere in the centre of Sofia as well as maybe some Bulgarian roses (the national flower), or you followed the more traditional national Bulgarian Tryphon Zarezan day: a celebration in the name of the patron saint of wine which consists of trying the new year's fresh vintage.

There is also a thrid option: if you were an EVS volunteer like us, you prepared for this day by helping cut out little hearts and animal shapes for the children to glue together and create greeting cards for eachother as part of the festivities in the American Corner. You don't know cute if you haven't seen an owl made of hearts with an "I'll owl-ways be your friend!" written on it.

Course in Project Management

Established by the SMART foundation

Carried out by Alexander from the 42-foundation

We had a great day where we learned all the aspects of making a project, from having the idea  to adhering to the deadlines in the last seconds, to figuring out the right location and sponsors; how to actually find them and make them support YOUR project and in the end  make all of your project come true and function in the real world. The short version: how to get the project from your head carried over to the real world.

In order to show that we had understod everything we had been told, we were put together in groups of 3 to make our own fictional project and go through all the steps. In my, Zanda's and Hanna's group, we established a soupkitchen/homeless center, the other group with Maria, Jeroen and Olles (the volunteers from the SMART foundation including Hanna) thought out a weekly film festival, and the last group consisting of Vicente, Dimitris and Boris (our mentor) planned a tandem languages homepage with real-life happenings.

Alexander also told us the funny story about why his foundation is caled 42. Anybody who can guess why? Because 42 is the answer to the meaning of life! Or at least it is according to "the hitch-hikers guide to galaxy". But as he explained us, the answer is not always the most important part, but asking the right questions. If the people in "the hitch-hikers guide to galaxy" had asked: "what is 6x7?" the answer would have been more right than any other. So at some point is it more important to ask the right questions -that make you think and wonder- than expect some great answers from others that will change your life without you lifting a finger.

It was a really informative day, and we learned a lot. We have taken it with us and will now use it, though in smaller amounts, when we are doing our own projects at the library.