Monday, 22 August 2022

HELLOOO

Hi! My name is Bálint Horváth. I am currently in Turkey, in Ankara where I am doing a 2-month short-term volunteering project. My sending organization is Compass Organisation from Hungary, Kaposvár, and my hosting organization is Ander Association. I have been here for a months and so far my days are going very well. We went to pack and distribute food to refuges, and we also visited our office a couple of times, where, for example, we got to know more about Erasmus and ESC and we also took part in Turkish language courses. There was a holiday period in Turkey called Bayram, so we were free from 7 July until 14 July. We are not a huge team but volunteers from different countries.

From the second half of July our tasks changed a little bit. On Tuesdays we are still going for food delivery but on Thursdays and Fridays we spend our day in a kindergarten in a summer camp where we are with children and their Turkish teachers. We are separated from each other which means all volunteers are in different classes with around 10 children and their teachers. The age of the kids is around 5 years. They can speak English a little bit but they are a bit shy to talk to me so sometimes I can hardly understand them. Despite this, I really enjoy my time with them because even if we cannot communicate with each other very well the experiences I get there shows exactly that a common language is not always necessary to spend a valuable and enjoyable time with someone. Also, people are very kind there so I am looking forward to going there again. There is another reason why I am excited about next week: on Monday, 1 August new volunteers are coming so I can meet new people again and hopefully I can make even more new friends.

In our free time, we go everywhere in Ankara, we have already discovered a lot of things in the city. On 10 July, we travelled to Eskişehir, which is a small city 1.5 hours far from Ankara by train. Our team is really great, we get along very well, we talk a lot, play card games and have so much fun together. Thanks to this, I could make many new friends in a really short time.

This is what happened to me in July. I am still very happy to be here and I really hope a same good or a better August is waiting for me.