Hi! It´s Anna with a weekly report about what was going on during my third week of project.
This week was really psychologically hard as on the 24th of February we all got to know about the war in Ukraine. It was hard to focus on doing anything besides reading the news hoping to find there some good one, but instead of it seeing more and more bad things going on in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. While I’m writing this the army of the country I was born in (Belarus) is fully prepared to attack Ukraine as well and nobody knows, if they will do it or when they will do it. It feels like a true nightmare that the war could be started in the center of Europe in the 21st century. I have a lot of friends, who have families in Ukraine, I’ve been there many times, and I want to believe that it all will finish as soon as possible!
Before all these awful events started to happen Martyna and I went to the live jazz concert on Tuesday to Hotclube de Portugal. They organize free jazz concerts every Tuesday, but you need to come in advance (before 10 pm) to be able to take a sit as there are a lot of people, who wants to come in, but the place is quite small, so they cannot let in everybody. The club is very cozy and has an authentic atmosphere inside, so it was a pleasure to attend that event. Besides it, on Tuesday we helped Nuno and Justyna during CV workshop. We were helping people to make a CV in Portuguese and were trying to encourage them to start looking for the job showing their strengths to them. Those people didn’t speak English, so that workshop strongly motivated me to learn Portuguese to be more helpful for the next projects like that.
Last week I was making some videos of the Portuguese songs and also suggested Nuno and João to make a playlist with Russian vocabulary on the YouTube. They accepted the idea, so I’m planning to start making those videos this week. Also Laura had a mentoring session with Martyna and me to get to know us better and to specify our goals and fears for the project.
On Friday’s evening we met my German friend Max. He hosted my boyfriend and I during our summer trip in Lisbon, and it was one of the most amazing Couchsurfing experience I ever had. He is very friendly and open guy and knows a lot of interesting facts about Lisbon. We went to Jasmim Amarelo, where you have a beautiful big fountain and a nice field to sit during summer.
Then on Sunday Martyna and I went to the protest against the war in Ukraine on Praça do Comércio. We went there together with another former volunteer, and she got us to know one Ukrainian guy there as well. Then we went to explore a weekly fairy on LX Factory. On Monday we had a Portuguese class with Muslim women , so on Tuesday we had a free day, which was cool as we finally had a chance to visit Feira da Ladra – the biggest flea market in Lisbon, which is being hold every Tuesday and Saturday (that days we usually had to work). From there we took a long walk to the very city center and finished our day watching the sunset on Miradouro de São Pedro de Alcântara.
I had a lot of mixed feelings about everything what was going on around this week. I suffer from being so helpless during all these dramatic events, but I want to believe that for some reason I need to be here in Portugal right now and probably it’ll make more sense to me later. Hope the war will end soon. Stay strong Ukraine!
