My first fairy tale month

 

Hello.

 My name is Fidan, I am from Azerbaijan. My 2-month volunteer adventure started on October 1. It's almost 1 month and I want to share with you what I've been through for 1 month, what happened to me and my experiences.

     When I say 1 month, it seems like a short time to me and even before I started writing this blog, I was stressed about my experiences and what I was going to write. But when I sat down and wrote a list of my experiences in general, I saw that it was not a little, I had a lot of memories in a month.

     First of all, I would like to give you information about the work we do here, and then talk about my experiences and the new things I learned as a result of this work. Firstly , let's start with kindergarten. Before coming here, I was terrible at talking, interacting and playing with children. I think that I can partially solve this issue by going to kindergarten 2 times a week. I learned how to communicate with them, how to get their attention. Now I can entertain them and enjoy myself with them.

    Secondly, we are part of the "share your food" project. Thanks to this project, we provide food and sweets to migrants who need food. For the first time in my life, I felt that I had touched someone's life and done something useful for society. When we bring food to them, their joy of seeing the food truck, the sparkle in their eyes, and their gratitude towards us are complicated emotions to express.

      Lastly, we are working on the social media of this project, which are related to Instagram, Facebook and YouTube channels. In my personal life, I'm not one to be very active on my social media accounts. That's why I was so new to even simple things like sharing a story or post on Instagram. Thanks to this, I learned things like posting, sharing a story, editing a video, making a poster or banner. Doing something like this, creating something out of nothing, I think, activates a completely different side of my brain, which excites me. and it makes my journey more fun for me.

      Now let's come to my social life, that is, to the places we go. It was only 4 days when I came here, there was the International Day, we went there. We met people from many different countries. It was a wonderful day. Since 2 people in our team did not speak Turkish, when we spoke to Turks, I was translating what we were speaking to them. Speak Turkish with Turks, speak English with them. There is another Azerbaijani volunteer in the team besides me, and I spoke to her in Azerbaijani. I think you can imagine my brain. All languages ​​were mixed together and I was also in a culture confusion. Then we took the stage to share our experiences in front of 80 people. I didn't know what to say when I got on stage. I was just thinking that I have been here for 4 days and I don't even know what I am going through, how can I inform the people? But it is strange that I noticed it here. For example, I didn't know what to write in this blog. At first you don't know what to say or write. But when you think about it, you see that you are experiencing a lot here despite the fact that little time has passed. There's always something to talk about, and even once you start, you can't shut up.

     

 And our dear friend Safa invited us to her family's house and her mother taught us how to cook manti, one of the most important dishes of Turkish cuisine. It was a very interesting day, everyone was very friendly and polite. Not just manti, but first we were welcomed with a very nice tea table. In addition, we prepared a sauce for the manti, and they served it with salad and “sarma”. Learning how to cook manti, preparing it, and then eating it, all of this together with hearty conversations, was amazing.

       Since we have 2 days off, we spend these days touring Ankara. One of these weeks we decided to visit another city and chose Eskişehir as the city. Because its name means old city and it has many historical places to visit, many museums and parks. Besides the sightseeing, I was also impressed by the city itself. Because it was really an old city, the houses, the buildings and the structure of the city were magnificent and they preserved this antiquity very well. You feel that antiquity as you walk through the city and you are constantly picturing the past in your mind. I felt like I had traveled through time. Also, the day we went was my birthday. Celebrating my birthday with my teammates in front of the fairy tale castle was like a fairy tale. This birthday will always be unforgettable for me as I am a lover of Disney animations and fairy tales.

 

We are planning to go to Istanbul and Izmir next month, and in my next blog I will share what I experienced there, what happened to me, and what I saw.

 

Thanks for reading till the end.