Ahoj,
this month started with various one-day volunteering activities, on the 2nd of June I volunteered at the Red Cross to give food to homeless people, which made me appreciate the things I have even more because, in reality, not everyone in the morning can afford to drink tea with their desired flavor or attend a yoga class later in the evening, however, one can only be thankful for the things which they already have and only hope for the best, especially if one has hit a very rock bottom. After volunteering at the Red Cross I went to a yin yoga class with sound healing, which helped me to give up on feeling resentfulness, and focus on forgiveness, it also reminded me that the reason why we can’t forgive someone is nothing else than that we have not forgiven ourselves and that you can only help someone else if your cup is full, otherwise, you are just giving shattered pieces of yourself away to the others and that is helping to no one. The following day, we and other upcoming workcamp leaders had to attend first-aid training hosted by INEX, where we were shown what to do in various emergencies and how to do CPR. After the first aid training, on the 5th of June, I as a part of the INEX team also participated in a one-day volunteering event at the social centre called Integra. There we helped people with disabilities to enjoy various activities, at the very beginning it was hard emotionally for me because from my own, not so severe, experience I know that these people just want to feel included and it would be a dream for them to do things that other people would normally do, but they can’t because of their disability and that is quite distressful. Therefore, although as unfortunate as it sounds one must accept that it is out of your power to do anything to make the situation better for them, however, it is in one’s power to bring some light to their lives by helping them to participate or present some activities they could be a part of. At this event, we got assigned one person to whom we would help to participate in the activities. I got assigned to help a female named Zuzka, although she had her disability, I could feel that she had a sweet soul.
During the event at times, there were moments I found myself being a bit distressed, not because of being scared to get close to the person, but rather because I did not understand what the person was saying to me due to the language differences, as well as a fear of that I might have upset her, however in the very end all that mattered to me was that she felt happy. Soon after this event it was time to prepare for the second leadership academy, and make sure that I had everything for my upcoming workshop about stress management and for the tasks assigned to me, due to this the hours in the INEX office flew quite fast and soon it was a time to go on our second leadership academy training, which was a short simulation of the workcamp. On the day when we went to the training, on my way to the place I fell in love with the amazing landscapes one could see outside of the bus window, the mountainous terrain and trees surrounding the landscape felt fascinating to me, although it was for just a short time being before we arrived to the training place, I felt grateful for seeing this kind of side of Slovakia. During the training, we participated in various activities like the feast of cultures, multicultural games, conflict management, and many more. Later, we even got some free time to see the city, which made me feel grateful because this city is on the UNESCO Site Heritage list and I knew there were lots of things to see.
In the evening we, with other participants, also visited the tea house and played tricky games. I did not solve any of them, but the hardest game for me was drawing a beautiful moon because it started to make me feel very frustrated, so after that, I went to scream into a pillow and sleep. After the training we slowly started to prepare for our tea meeting about mocktails, I felt quite nervous about it because I had a feeling that a lot of things were not planned out and needed more attention, as well as I was not feeling my best at that time, but I guess it was fine, although there were some errors regarding it, but people seemed to enjoy mixing up their drinks and BBQ in the very end. After our tea meeting and working in the office for a few days, it was time for summer solstice or midsummer which we always celebrate in my home country, so I decided to go on a solo trip to Budapest, a country I wanted to visit for quite a while before I was worried that I might have to cancel it due to the health reasons, but I did not and that made me feel happiness.
To see more of Budapest and not be in a hurry I stayed there for one night, I was quite surprised at how easy it was to orientate around this city and I fell in love with the architecture, which was beautifully breathtaking, both in a day-time and night-time, I feel very grateful for the opportunity to visit this beautiful city and I will return to Budapest one day again for even more of exploration, other than that I was preparing for my upcoming workcamp “bring happiness to the social centre” in the office and somewhere in the middle we also hosted another ESC volunteer so he could visit the french assembly, I also went to vegan food fest, where I tried ananas tepache.
See you next month, Eve
