Birka: EUROPEAN SOLIDARITY CORPS

Čau visiem,

I am Onur from Turcija. I am a 21-year-old English language teaching graduate. You can also call me a tech enthusiast and a language nerd. Throughout my senior year in university, I’ve searched for opportunities around Europe, especially regarding Solidarity Corps projects to experience living abroad and to look for new adventures. And here I am in Latvia.

My first ever month abroad… It was truly an adventure. In a country which I had little knowledge and basically no idea about what kind of a place it was until I got accepted. So, it was the right decision, in a way, to fully experience a different world.

My first perceptions about Latvia and Riga, where I work and live, started to form in the very first days and developed ever since. For me, Riga was small but sometimes felt big at the same time. As for the people, majority of them seemed unhappy or quite neutral emotionally and I could feel the distance between people. As the time passed by, I saw that not everyone is like that and thankfully, I was surrounded with that kind of people. I can say that it is very different from my culture but I started to adapt how relationships, human connections and daily life work in general.

I had a very packed first month which helped me go through this period with maximum interaction in local and international level. It was very hard to take in all the experience and learning sometimes. But, after a month, I look back and see how many things I have done and how many people I have met. It always takes some time for me to adapt to a new environment but adapting to a new country… That’s a whole different process for me. Let’s go through this month together:

I spent my first few days with getting to know people in my organization and my work partner Viola. I also had the opportunity to get to know Riga with the help and friendship of the members of my organization. They welcomed Viola and me with a homecoming party in our new apartment where we will spend 11 more months. We had dinner, played board games and had a lot of fun. We spent the rest of the days exploring different parts of Riga with different people until our first working day. We walked around the Old Town, went to Ala, took a boat trip, and went to see a movie.

In our first week, besides discovering Riga and getting to know people, we cleaned our house and learned some fun facts about our house, such as our kitchen being actually white and not beige. It was a messy experience. But at the same time, this cooperation also helped us built a nice friendship. Then, came the “volunteering” time.

I remember our first day at work and first task like it was yesterday. We were given the task to design the concept of a tent we would have in a festival in Ikskile. We also had the responsibility to take pictures of the festival and film two contests which were about singing and dancing as well as editing the footage to promote the festival on social media. I was quite nervous as it was going to be my first filming experience.

At the same time, we also prepared some workshops for the upcoming youth exchange we organized, called “Health is the New Wealth”. It was about gaining a healthy lifestyle and investigating why we need to have a healthy lifestyle, how we can accomplish this, what are the reasons effecting our health and many more through non-formal learning methods. The exchange was held in Krimulda with 40 people coming from Romania, Italy, Poland, Hungary and of course Latvia. As volunteers of Klubs Maja, we were also a part of the Latvian team and participated and conducted activities. The exchange itself was good but I had problems connecting with the people and the cold weather there made me even grumpier. Also, the fact that I was in a youth exchange without my national team for the first time affected my mood greatly.

Before the final day of the exchange, we went to the Ikskile Festival. There, I had to do my best because I only had one shot at this. I was constantly changing angles to get the best shots, trying my best to stabilize them. I tried to be all around the stage, totally experimenting with my task. I filmed the dancing contest and Viola filmed the singing contest. At the end of the day, I hoped that my shots were good enough.

After the exchange, we had our first editing task which was quite hard to accomplish as my experience in this field was not more than having an Instagram account. We also had another challenge. We exchanged our footage from the contests and edited each other’s videos. I took the challenge and worked on my project 2-3 days, structuring what I can I do and how I can do it better with feedbacks from other people such as my coordinator and people who ran the festival. Most of the time, it was quite frustrating since I had no idea how to put a video together. Also, currently, I am using a 10-year-old computer which makes everything 10 times harder. But I managed to do it in the end.

After successfully delivering my project, it was time for us to join the on-arrival training for volunteers. The training is organized for every volunteer approximately at the beginning of their voluntary service by the National Agency. For us, it was our third week in Latvia. It took place in Riga for 5 days with 17 people from 8 different countries which were Turkey, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Romania and Russia. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting any other people from Turkey, but there they were. Two other Turkish people than me volunteering in Latvia… It was a relief knowing that I wasn’t alone and I enjoyed the fact that I was sharing the same background with those people. With all the other volunteers, we became a huge family during those five days. We learned about European Solidarity Corps, Youthpass, how to cope with problems, what are our rights, ways of reflecting on our learning, how to develop a sense of initiative, commonalities of our cultures and much more.

On the final day of our on-arrival training, we went to the summer camp which was held in Adazi by our organization. I went there with Viola before the last day of the camp to present our culture to the participants of the camp. This was the first cultural night we organized in Latvia. Together, we created a playlist which was a mixture of Turkish and German songs. For the rest of our presentation, we used videos and Kahoots presenting our countries and culture in a fun way. We also had traditional food and sweets to present our cuisine and help the participants explore the culture deeper with flavours they have never tasted before.

Next day, the camp was over as well as my first month in Latvia. It was full of people, experiences, feeling of differences, fresh starts and new adventures ahead. Hope to experience more here. Until next time, have a great month!