The past months: working and dancing

I've been here for five months already! That means I’m halfway through my project, time is going fast now. I remember that my first week here felt like a whole month, but now that I’m used to living here, months are starting to feel like weeks. Time is flying by! I still really like the work here. We have a lot of different things to do by now. I am still organising workshops at the Scout Centre, but I’m also going to Kesane, Edustep and the School of Innovations.

Once a week I am at Kesane, an organisation for people with mental disabilities. I have been going to the same group for some time now and I really like it there. The people are super nice and now that they are getting used to us, they are more open to us and always really happy to see us. This also means that I have to listen to endless stories in incomprehensible Georgian, I don’t understand a word of what they’re saying. However, they don’t mind at all if I don’t understand, they are just happy to talk to me. Sometimes I respond with ‘yes’ or ‘good job’, and then they seem content. Furthermore we are mostly playing Fruits and Vegetables Bingo, which is really good for learning Georgian names of fruits and vegetables.

Next to this, I am going to Edustep once in a while to help with English classes. We work with three different age groups, doing games with them and trying to make them talk in English. Georgians are generally quite shy about speaking in English and often think they are not good enough, but they are all eager to learn and very kind.

This week, I will also start English classes at the School of Innovations, a school in New Rustavi, for the 4th and 7th grade. At this school, I am already joining music classes once a week as well. The first time there was quite a culture shock for me. Krista and i sat in the back of the room and watched the kids with amazement, it was like a classroom from a movie: none of the kids sat on their chair, they were all running around, fighting with each other, making paper airplanes, shooting erasers and other stuff around the room, rolling on the ground, showing the teacher their drawings… doing everything but paying attention. That lasted for the whole lesson. The music teacher did his best to make them participate, but also didn’t seem that bothered by the total chaos. That is so different from a Dutch classroom! I think Dutch people see this chaos more as losing time, since in this time they could also have learned something already. On the other hand, the kids were still quite young: first and second grade.

Next to experiencing culture shocks and giving English classes, I am also doing Wushu club at the school. Doing Wushu (apparently this is the correct name for Kung Fu) is a really nice experience, I never did sports like this before. We are learning Tai Chi now, for which you have to move really slow, but have really strong muscles… I always feel my legs after the class.

In our free time, Krista, Charlotte and I started doing another sport: we took a dancing course! In eight classes, we learned the basics of Adjarian dancing, the traditional dance from the region Adjara. It was amazing to learn! Adjarian dance is seen as the most easy, but we already struggled a bit with learning it so fast. Everyone seems to know exactly how to move your hands in this super elegant way from one side to the other, but I always have to think a lot and then still look like an elephant compared to the dance teachers. Still, I had a lot of fun learning the dance steps, and the teachers gave us enough time to master it. The course ended quite fast though. At first, we had classes twice a week, but then they announced that it would become three times a week, to end the course faster. It turned out they were moving the dance school to a new location, and as things go with planning in Georgia, they apparently only now realised that they wanted to finish our classes before moving, so suddenly we went to three classes a week. That was quite intense, but it was all worth it. I am thinking of starting another course next month, for a new dance style.

If so, I’ll let you know how that one will go!

In short, I am having a good time here working and dancing.

Hopefully the coming months will be as good.

See you soon!

Vibeke

P.S. Someone else who's having a good time: our 'office cat' Shavi! He is a stray cat and not supposed to be in the office at all, but sometimes he sneaks in anyway. Here you see him busy with his main office task (when not busy stealing our food):

Comments

MOVING TO GEORGIA: MY FIRST EXPERIENCES!

Moving to Georgia: my first experiences! At the start of September I moved to Georgia to volunteer at the International Scout Center in Rustavi for 6 months. In this blog I will tell you more about why I decided to volunteer in Georgia, about how I prepared myself to move abroad, about my expectations and about my experiences of the first weeks. Who am I and why did I decide to volunteer abroad? Why did I decide to move to Georgia? I am Renée and I am 25 years old. I am from the Netherlands and there I lived in a small city called Leiden. The few past years I was studying Education and Child studies there. In my bachelors I did an exchange semester and lived for 6 months in the city Tartu in Estonia. This was a really nice experience and after I came back to the Netherlands I decided that at some point I wanted to live abroad again. So when I graduated university last year I knew what I did not want: a stressful job in the Netherlands. I explored different possibilities, for exam...

In the head of a volunteer - Arrival and first week

I can’t believe that it’s been two months since I set foot in Georgia for the first time. And yet it seems like a lifetime of experiences. Here is an assortment of my very first moments, hope you enjoy :) The arrival and discovery of Rustavi landscape When I arrived at Tbilisi Airport I was surprised to see it was not as big as I expected a capital airport to be. I waited alone for a few moments for Aleks to pick me up. During my wait I went to exchange money (by the way, if you come to Georgia, don’t do it at the airport, the exchange rates are far better in the city) and I realised that I really was far from home, I couldn’t understand any of the words people were saying to each other. When Aleks arrived I went in the car. I had a cold at the time, and I travelled at night, so I arrived in Georgia without any sleep. I felt really tired and I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t talk m...

WE ARRIVED!

Gamarjoba! Welcome to a new round of ISCR blogs. I am Vibeke, a new volunteer from the Netherlands. A month ago, I arrived at Tbilisi airport together with the other Dutch volunteer Renée, and since then three more volunteers arrived: Krista from Latvia and Charlotte and Anias from Germany. For the coming months, we will organise activities at the Scout Centre in Rustavi, try to understand something of the Georgian language and discover the beautiful country! 😀 With this blog, we’ll try to keep you updated. But how did I end up here? This summer, I applied for the volunteering program at ISCR with the European Solidarity Corps. I just finished high school and wanted to take a gap year before starting my studies. As I am always eager to explore new countries and cultures, I decided to apply for a long-term ESC program, in order to not only explore a country, but also contribute something to it. I started to search for countries that I knew nothing about. I wanted a country that will gi...

CHAPTER 1

Once upon a time there lived five gnomes. They each lived a different life in a different place for a different amount of time. However, the thing they had in common was an unexplainable urge to add a new plot to their autobiographies, to put their for-centuries-collected skills and knowledge to a good use and go to a land far far away. They packed their biggest tiny backpacks, said farewell to their gnome families and forest fairy friends, each jumped on the back of a seagull and flew into an unfamiliar direction. This is where their stories intertwine. Turns out all the seagulls were going the same way; they dropped all the gnomes at the same place – a magical castle surrounded by forests and hills. The castle was home for many, no matter big or small, young or old, beginner or advanced, from this planet or another. All the residents of the castle warmly welcomed the gnomes with open arms and open hearts. The castle was a place where a helpful hand was given first and questions ask...

In the head of a volunteer : What volunteering means to me

This article is more a train of thoughts about my volunteering experience and what it means to me than a story about reel experiences. I wanted to share it in the hope that other volunteers can relate. Those reflections started when I took over the instagram page. I am now in charge of posting about our workshops, keeping you updated about our activities and making weekly and monthly recaps. To give myself ideas, I went to see the archived posts and I got lost in what the previous teams of volunteers posted. I felt so strange. I realised that this place, where I work, eat and sleep everyday, was used by people in the same situation as me before. They walked in the same streets, shopped in the same grocery stores and discovered the same Rustavi as foreigners. Maybe the children I am meeting during my workshops knew those other volunteers, and it’s more than probable that they will me...

Search This Blog