After more than 3 months of being here I finally have my on-arrival training. Today I want to share with you my final thoughts about this intensive time.
Training started 2nd of December in the afternoon. We were able to see each other and get to know little things about each other such as where are we from and where are we now doing our projects in Portugal. We had also an opportunity to answer some questions about
Day after we were more concentrated on our contributions, fears and expectations about training and what will happen after it. Later we were sharing our experiences with covid time during a project in Portugal. Unfortunately although it was nice to share our thoughts I had a feeling that we concentrated too much on how covid affected us, our work, our relations with people and our project at all. After all, I was kind of emotionally exhausted because each of us had different experiences and some of us didn`t want to shere them.
On the 3rd day of training we talked more about our projects and it was really nice to share what we are doing during each project and our reflections. We were talking about what we have learned so far, about challenges we faced and our expectations. After this experience I must say that it was an important experience for me to be able to sum up my feelings about this project. We were also talking about solidarity and what it is for us. It was interesting that each of us had a different understanding of this word.
During the 4th day of training we get more information about what is intercultural learning and how to solve the problems we face during our daily life in Portugal but also those that are connected with work, organization, our tasks. After all we were able to participate in open space for learning. To be honest I had more hopes and expectations about this part then I should have. But I must remember that during covid time when we are forced to be on training online everybody acts differently and not each of us can feel involved in the topic the same and it’s fine too.
On the last day we were talking about youth passes and our personal projects. I think this day was the most interesting. Although almost none of us had an idea about our personal projects we were able to discuss this topic and our ideas in small groups and share our hopes and needs to do something else that can be good for us and for the project too. I still don´t know about what topic I want to care about during my final project but at least I have some ideas that I can work on.
To sum up everything I just want to say that I appreciate this time that I could spend with other volunteers even though it was more moderate contact than natural. I hope we will meet each other somewhere in Portugal.
