Athens
- 5 days with 38
volunteers, coming from 16 countries, working in 15 different non-profit
organizations. Somewhere in between there was us, the 4 EVS volunteers who
arrived to Kalamata in October and now got to go to the on-arrival seminar. The
seminar took place in a hotel in Omonia, which first scared me a little bit,
since I’ve heard the stories of the other volunteers who went there in September
already. Surprisingly I didn’t see anything threatening just a lot of policeman,
which also made sense, since we were living right next to a police station. The
hotel was nice, especially since we had 5 days without cooking or cleaning
ahead of us ;). At 6:30 pm the seminar started off with a short welcoming and
we got to see the other volunteers, as well as our 4 trainers for the first
time. We also played some games to get to know all the names, which was
impossible in only one hour. Everyone seemed
very nice and you could feel everybody’s excitement for the upcoming days.
After dinner we went out to Eksarxeia for one or two drinks.
The next day’s motto was “My EVS”. We
all took a closer look at our own project in creating a poster about it. Later
on everyone introduced the project to the other volunteers. It was very
interesting to see and to hear what the other volunteers are doing and also
nice to exchange our experiences concerning our projects. The second night we
climbed up on a little hill close to the acropolis, where we had an amazing
view not only at the lit up acropolis but also at huge Athens. Greece also won
the important soccer game against Rumania that evening so there were fireworks,
which made everything even more beautiful.
On Wednesday it was time to learn some
Greek. Our challenge was to create a TV commercial for a gadget that would be
useful for the everyday life of an EVS volunteer… in GREEK! We came up with the
idea pretty fast but spent a loooong time to translate everything into Greek.
My group for example invented the EVS volunteer GPS -“Συσκευη Ευρεση Εθελοντων”, an application for your mobile phone, which helps you
to find other EVS volunteers in Greece. The same day we also found out about
the origin and the background of the EVS program and we learned more about the
rights and the responsibilities of an EVS volunteer. After dinner we had a little
pyjama party at the hotel and after watching two movies
most of us went straight to bed.
The next morning we got up with a lot
of motivation, since we were going to explore Athens. We were divided into 5
groups with different themes (1. gastronomy and cuisine 2. crisis 3. tourism, sports and entertainment 4. social movements and NGOs 5. interpersonal relations)
in order to learn more about city, culture, language and people. Every group
had to do tasks around the city interacting also many times with people from
the street. In the end of the day we presented the results of our rallies to
the others. It was a very fun and interesting day but also stressful, since we
only had a certain amount of time to finish everything. The evening most of us
went out -even though it was raining cats and dogs- again to enjoy the colorful
nightlife of Athens.
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