As a volunteer, you must respect the agreements with the European Solidarity Corps-ESC program and with your hosting organisation. Yes, I want to do volunteering and help, but it also means committing to other things.
The on-arrival training is an obligatory step when you start your ESC. Even if it was online due to Covid, it’s a good way to meet people that are coming from another country to do volunteering abroad, just like me.
We started the training with an activity to get to know each other and build a team. Each of us prepared a presentation of our volunteering journey with pictures representing what we are doing. It is certainly a proper activity to know more about the people you are in this training with and a good way to have a retrospective perspective about your first few months as a volunteer. I think it was actually one of my favorite activities. What a good start, right?
We had many opportunities to discuss the different dimensions of being a volunteer and the learning process, reflecting on what I’m learning and improving during my volunteering.
On the second day, we started doing Spanish lessons in small groups. We did some exercises and wrote a short story about volunteering. It was great to speak Spanish with the others and not only English.
Solidarity was a big topic of the course and we were also talking about unity and what really means solidarity in general.
One thing I learned is that the volunteering agreement is more important and much needed than the volunteering experience itself. The fact that you have a written agreement makes the volunteering even more important, don’t you think?
Lara
