Two months
have already passed in Maribor, and my old feelings that this town was too
quiet for me are more and more vanishing. I found my favourite spots, my little
habits… I just come back from Vienna, where every single building is a master
piece, and it felt very good to come back to our little peaceful Maribor. It seems that everything is going slower down
here : people relaxing in café, stopping to have a delicious Ice cream,
chilling in Pyramida…
I think
their way of life has started to influence mine, and I’m glad of it because it
was one of my personal goals : arrive to take some time for me and stop
running. I spend the last fourth years in Lyon, and I was running from activity
to another, I could spend several days without having any moments on my own. These
last days, I had some guests for one week, and I noticed I really needed some
time alone. That’s how I realized how much I appreciate theses little moments
in Maribor that are part of my life now : crossing the park and the railway
with a small fear that the train arrive at each time, trying to reproduce the
amazing salad of Isabella, traveling the town with my flashing green and pink
small bike… I guess that’s how start
finding a personal balance, it feels good!
In the
context of Erasmus program, Sofia and I had the chance to participate to an
Arrival Seminar: we spent 5 days with 18 other volunteers, coming from 14
different countries. The aim was to deeply understand how work EVS, our
missions, roles and responsibilities. We also had to build a little project
involving local community, we only had one day to do it, and very few budget. I
already knew how efficient team working can be, but building a project with
people from abroad was even stronger, from the diversity of their points of views!
We came out with an idea of interviewing
people about their though of strangers, to observe how much stereotypes are
presents in Slovenia. We decided to do it in a playful way, by building up a
story about an EVS volunteer coming to Slovenia : in this story were some gaps,
that interviewed people had to fill in, with their though about strangers. By
example, if we asked “What do you think about French people?” and they answered “selfish”, it would come back against their own country in their
final story (“from what he has heard, Slovene people were selfish…).To sum up, depending on the opinion of people, each story
was completely different. At the end, we realized we expected much worse than
what we actually got : good new ! What I also got from this seminar was that
whatever our origins, we all had theses confused feeling, between big
excitation and fear, but we were also all glad to do this experience.
This week
made me realize how important is informal learning : the fact of having no
“good answer”, of being on the same level than trainers and building our own
path instead of following the same one… I deeply think it’s the point of every
EVS : learning in another way : in our own way. It makes you growing up,
revealing who you really are. You may change, maybe a little and maybe a lot,
but that’s for the best, and no matter what will happen in the future, no one
will be able to take you off this experience.
Coline
