The last month before Christmas started with freezing weather, but that wasn’t enough to stop us at INEX (mostly because I’m the only one who thought it was cold…)
During the first week, both Sarah and I presented our workshops. She went to the English International School of Bratislava; I was also there to assist her and the children with the different steps of the bookbinding process. The next day, it was her time to help me at Gymnázium Jura Hronca, where I met Tomáš once again to talk and discuss with students about Media Bias.
The next day, it was time to travel to the Mid-Term Training. This was something I was looking forward to, not necessarily because of the excitement that visiting Nová Dubnica entails, but to reconnect with the other volunteers who chose Slovakia for their ESC projects. Once again, Andrea and Martin, the trainers, had lined up a series of quite interesting and useful workshops and presentations that allowed us to get to know about new opportunities for the future and to share how our own projects have been going. It was reassuring to find that I’m not the only one struggling to find what to do after my project ends.
Coming back to Bratislava, it was my turn to go to the English International School of Bratislava. Upon entry, some of the children that I had met during Sarah’s workshop came over to say hi, and it was uplifting to see that they still remembered my name. The presentation went rather well, even though the group was a bit bigger than expected.
On the same week, we were lucky enough at INEX to host Tereza and Irina’s Tea Meeting about Georgia and Armenia. The presentation was engaging and allowed us to learn a lot more about these two ancient countries, and especially about the regional differences in culture and language within them.
I took some holidays and visited Romania, one of the last countries in the Balkans I hadn’t been to before. Bucharest is a grandiose city of huge buildings and boulevards. The Parliament building, for instance, has more than 1000 rooms, and, during construction, 1 thousand tons of reinforced concrete and 2,5 million tons of marble were used. However, the luxury of the “Palace of the People” has it’s known, contrasting with a rundown, ill-kept, grey metropolis that is home to 1.7 million people and serves as the capital of one of the least developed countries in the European Union.
Back in the office, I started working on my meet the office video, which you can already watch on our YouTube channel, and it was time to make the last preparations for the quiz night we had at Prešporkovo family centre. The teams were made up by the families, and they filled up the room with their knowledge and some laughs at some of the more comic questions we had lined up for them.
INEX house also served as the location for Zážitkovica. Romi, Zuzka, Katka and Peťo prepared various workshops to help us organise our thoughts and cut down the stress of daily life. From these, I would highlight the one where I delved deeper into what it is and how to use mental mapping and Eisenhower’s matrix. I would also like to give an honourable mention for the very tasty lunch bowls we had. The same day, I took the overnight to Krakow, and when I woke up, everything was covered in a thick layer of snow.
I got to learn more about this breathtakingly beautiful city where Karol Wojtyła, later Pope John Paul II, started his career as a priest, while trying to avoid causing harm to myself on the slippery slopes of the castle’s hill. The Christmas feeling that the snow brought in Poland was kept up in Slovakia, with the Boxes of Love initiative.
More than 40 people came to INEX’s office to create their own boxes, and Santa Claus has a lot of work to do in order to deliver the 53 boxes. Each box had inside, a salt and sweet snack, a fragrance of some sort, some creams, a sudoku puzzle, a towel, and a postcard also written by the participants. Speaking of Santa Claus, that Saturday we had our Christmas Party. Barbi, Braňo and I prepared the 50 litres of Kapustnica more than 30 hours in advance, elevating my cooking skills from 0 to some number that I’d rather not specify. A lot of people came to the party, bringing snacks and drinks to share with everyone. There were creative activities, in which I did not succeed, as most of the kids achieved better results than me. Sarah and I presented our project outcome, but the highlight was the tombola, where I won a new t-shirt and a toy car 😀
The next day, before dawn, it was time to escape the Slovak winter with yet another visit to Catalonia, where the sun shone and made the 16 degrees I used to call “cold weather” before the start of the project feel super warm.
