Mid-term seminar in Poland

In the middle of February all the volunteers hosted by Slezská Diakonie placements joined together to attend the mid-term seminar. The purpose and main focus of this week was to reflect on the past volunteering months and plan our path ahead. We spent 5 days in the beautiful mountains of Istebna in a small guesthouse and as one of the volunteers noted (and everyone agreed), we all felt like we were on a family holiday.
I do not know if it’s a common thing among volunteers or not but all of us are on good terms with each other - we make plans for our free time, go on trips together, visit each other’s cities, etc. This is why we took team-building activities on the first day to another level by forming one big group instead of  smaller ones. It happened naturally that we refused to compete against each other and united to complete the task together. By the way, we failed! but the most important thing is participation (or so they say) and more seriously, we stayed side by side till the end instead of blaming each other for the failure. I’d like to believe that this exact point is the most important and that’s what our coordinators intended too.

As the 2nd day of the seminar was St. Valentine’s Day, our day started with a small workshop about giving and receiving love as well as our primary and secondary love languages. Then we were asked to show love to a random person from the group taking into consideration their preferences. This was a great activity to become more considerate about other people’s perspectives instead of focusing on our own and not crossing our boundaries at the same time.

On the same day, we took time to look back at our lives after coming to Czechia. We had to think and answer questions such as ‘What did I learn from the placement or from living on my own?’ ‘How did I enrich my workplace and how did they enrich me?’ While it may seem like we think about these questions every day, it’s totally different when you reflect on them and write them down. Later, we had a chance to discuss it in pairs and learn about different perspectives.

In the evening, the stage was all ours and we presented our voluntary work, placements, and past mini-projects. With this info in mind, we then planned visits to each others’ workplaces as we have the privilege of ‘day with.’ Even though some of us have already taken advantage of this opportunity, I feel like this activity gave us a further boost to plan mini-projects together.

The third day was dedicated to getting to know the local Polish culture and to assimilate as much as Georgian, French, German, Turkish, and Spanish volunteers living in Czechia can manage. The day started with a visit to the Pasterský Dům, where we attended the cheese-making workshop. But the most liked part was when we had a chance to taste the local cheese as well. After that, the chariot with horses stopped in front of us and we travelled back in time while enjoying the views of Polish mountains. We stopped at the restaurant for lunch which looked like a hunter's house with a huge fireplace and creepy animal statues. After ¨getting to know¨ the traditional food, we went to see the chorus of local dances and songs. The day was finished with all of us dancing together with kids and laughing a lot at each other as we couldn’t dance properly despite kids being amazing teachers. This was when it first hit us that children's dances shouldn’t be that difficult for young people in their twenties and it’s not normal that our muscles were burning after this short workshop. It was only the other day when we realised what our usual day looks like and what was the problem there.

On the last day of the seminar, we touched the topic of demotivation and how we can overcome it. It is very important to be aware of this almost inevitable state of mind as each and every one of us will have our ups and downs. The only thing we can do is to be prepared for it as much as possible. Another valuable takeaway was to overlook our daily routine and think about what we would like to change. It was very unexpected to realise that very few of us are actually taking care of their mental health. Facing this fact as well as aerobics exercise that followed pushed us to make plans together to improve our mental and physical fitness.

In the last part of the seminar, we had an open space for developing a big project by mutual collaboration or our own mini-project. It was a valuable experience to coordinate ourselves and plan something big. The dynamics of this process was very interesting, especially how we put all our ideas and interests together and came up with 2 different projects with different plans, objectives, and target groups. I will not give you the spoilers but I can tease you that both of them will be amazing as long as we don’t lose our motivation; and even if we do, we already know how to fight it :)

The seminar, or “family holiday” as we called it, was closed with the devotion and evaluation. We all felt sad for having to say goodbye to each other but we are also excited to be back to our daily lives with more energy, will and motivation.  (Gvantsa)