Evaluation seminar in Lomná

We are slowly approaching the end of our volunteering journey and it is time to evaluate our year in Czechia.

For our last seminar, all the volunteers got together again and spent 4 wonderful days in Dolni Lomna. There we had a chance to exchange our experiences, reflections, and visions of future. The surroundings of beautiful Czech mountains suited the mood and harmony within our group while we were analyzing our volunteering path and set goals for our upcoming lives.

 In the beginning, we started with traditional team-building to warm up. After we got more comfortable, we could present our activities, mini-projects, big project and days-with at our workplaces. We had a chance to see all of these things together and realize how much we worked over the year.

The seminar continued with a reflection activity on “hero’s journey”, where we envisioned our year as a story with us as superheroes. We learned that it’s not necessary to defeat a supernatural beast and save the world from apocalypse to be a hero. Because we all had to face just as difficult hardships and helped each other as well as people around us.

 Later, we had a chance to evaluate our skills and competencies that we gained or improved over the time. This will become useful when we decide to fill in YouthPass as a certificate of volunteering. On the same day, we got the letters that we wrote to ourselves on the on-arrival seminar. For each of us, it was an unique experience but we all agreed that we all enjoyed reading what our past selves had to say.

On the 3rd day, we had visitors - our supervisors! Some of us already know each other but we started to get to know the group with some ice-breakers. After fun games, we reflected on volunteering with our supervisors and answered questions together. In the end, we wrote letters to each other (supervisor-voluneer) and got printed photos as tokens.

Lastly, we started our day with gratitude and talked about everything that we feel grateful for. It was impossible not to get emotional and hold our tears. It’s true that tears aren’t always bad, in this case, it meant that our journey in Czechia was worthwhile.  (Gvantsa)