April 2020

Dear readers,

the month of April once again takes place between four walls. However, we have remained active during this month to offer many events digitally.

We worked as a team during the first week of the month around a webinar for Aunt Rosa's library program. This webinar was dedicated to Simone de Beauvoir's work, in particular her book "The Second Sex". We imagined a meeting on the open source video conferencing platform Jitsi. It took place on Thursday, April 9, 2020 at 7pm. We first made a short presentation around Simone de Beauvoir's biography. Then we devoted ourselves to several chapters of her book, especially around the conclusion. During this event, we were able to discuss different subjects, such as the perpetual inequality between men and women in society, but also, we were able to be a little critical about her work. We decided at the end of the event to continue the cycle of conferences in this way.

Throughout April, I decided to continue my French courses but this time, once a week and not every fortnight. This is a very enriching job for me because I have to learn how to make people learn my mother tongue and try to keep up a progression. I try to make the courses active and not to adopt a pyramidal approach to learning. I try to integrate several games and a lot of exercises where the students are actors. Lots of rehearsal, of course. I'm quite happy with myself and I see, lesson after lesson, a real progression of the students.

I have also proposed to organise an open discussion event on sexuality. I don't consider myself a teacher or an expert on sexuality, but I think it's important to have places where we can have free exchange or free expression on taboo subjects. It's one of the ways to develop mutual help, understanding and social connection between people. Society has become very individual and I think it is necessary at the present time to rethink it and to develop simple but essential actions to recreate solidarity between people. This open discussion on sexuality took place on Friday 17 April at 5 pm. About ten people were present. The first question was: What do you think of the sexual education you received? If you have had any form of sexual education. We were able to compare the different experiences and discuss different themes in a free way. I was very surprised at the end of the event, at the time of the evaluation, by the number of topics that people wanted to discuss at the next meeting.

On April 23rd we had a meeting organised by Movit with the different EVS currently in Slovenia. It was good to be able to hear from the other volunteers and to be able to exchange about our situation and volunteering in this period of quarantine. At 7pm, we had the second webinar on Donna Haraway and her literary work. Donna Haraway is the author of the Cyborg Manifesto, a text mixing feminism, queer theory, biology and science fiction. It was again a very enriching moment where we were able to talk about different topics. 

I will see you in May for my penultimate blog. I have been in Slovenia for 8 months now.
Enjoy the May sunshine.
Gilles.