Last week I went to help Nuno during workshop in the school. The main topic of the workshop was environmental consciousness. The activity was very interesting as it was organized as a game, when students had to create their own countries with a country name and a flag, after it they were rolling a dice to get points and for points they were able to chose what resources they would prefer to have in their country – gold, fuel or water. The idea was to show them that water is the most important element on our planet and without it you not only cannot create anything, but even cannot exist as a human being. I think, students also enjoyed that class as all of them were involved in a game and a discussion. Such activities strongly motivate me to learn Portuguese faster, because I wish I would understand everything that’s going on during that classes!
Besides it, last week in Rato we also had a workshop for seniors regarding using modern technology. This activity is being hold every month, although It was my first time helping during that event. Nuno was teaching them how to install, delete, update and move applications on their smartphones. It was pretty useful for them, and it was a good opportunity for us to practice our Portuguese and have more contact with people, who only speak this language.
On Saturday we had a workshop organized by Gonçalo – one of the interns in Rato. He was teaching us how to edit audios in Audacity. It was very useful and interesting as I always wanted to know more about editing audio files. After it, we had no more excuses not to record a podcast with Martyna, so this week we finally did it. The hardest part for me was to chose only 3 songs for the podcast, so I decided to select among Belarusian artists only as it limited my choice a lot. You can listen to what we have recorded here: https://www.mixcloud.com/ratoadcc/
This Tuesday we also had a visit from a woman, who is a project manager of our sending organization in Poland. We met her for the first time here in Lisbon and made a long walking around the city center to show her everything. Hope she enjoyed it!
I also have finally finished my Russian Alphabet video for YouTube! Now my most urgent task will be to prepare a workshop about Russian Language for Jah Moment – an event that we are going to have by the end of April. Besides it, I started to edit a podcast and I need to work on next videos for Basic Russian Vocabulary playlist.
On the weekend the three of us (Martyna, Mimi and I) together with a former Rato volunteer went to hike along the Atlantic Ocean coast, next to Sintra. It was amazing! I’ve been to that coast last summer and at that moment I said that was the most beautiful place I have ever seen, so now I can only say that I still feel the same about it! I always enjoyed hiking in the mountains, but there you not only have mountains, but also the ocean is next to you. We were extremely lucky with the weather, so we were able to spend there as much time as we wanted. We started our route at Cabo da Roca and then went to the north, to Praia da Adraga though Praia da Ursa.
I’m also starting to notice that my Portuguese is getting better and better. Yesterday we were doing kind of a very specific shopping here in Almada (we were looking for crochet hook and thread as Mimi has inspired me to start making clothes by myself). Due to it we had to communicate with Portuguese sellers a lot, and here in Almada the majority of them do not speak English at all. And I realized that now I’m definitely able to say much more than a month ago, and I was also able to get what people were answering to me. (Hope after reading that Nuno will not make me write those posts in Portuguese)
