Volunteering and Mikulas

The 5th of December was the International Day of Volunteering that we celebrated in INEX with a day full of activities, from 9 am until 8 pm. There's the cover photo I made for the event, that actually I should take care of sizing it properly for next time -since the texts were a bit cut because of the edges.

In the morning, workers from the company SAP came to help us pack the gifts for the different people from Integra. Each person has different conditions so we made sure we were packing something that would fit them. Packages finally looked pretty cute.

Also a bit later few mothers from Presporkovo came with their children since we had one more Christmas workshop. It was mainly for them to have fun sticking small things in Christmas socks or painting some fabric puppets. In any case, the workshop was open to anybody, so also we had some last-minute gifts made by other potential volunteers who came to take a look to our kind of open-doors' day. That's was the afternoon program looked like, an open-doors' day when we explained in different stations INEX activities and how to get involve in them.

For closing the day, we had a great presentation about South Korea by Tomas and Michal. Why it was so good? Because they were wearing the traditional costumes from there, they showed us a quite complete photo coverage from their trip and by the end -the most important in any tea meeting about other countries, I would say-, they offered us a taste of there -I loved Kimchi, spicy white cabbage, very healthy.

Then on Friday we had the celebration of Mikulas in two different places. Firstly, in the morning, we went to Integra -this center for disable people. Matiss and I had a role in a little theater play we had prepare but unfortunately we were late and thankfully other volunteers replaced us. In any case, we help afterwards with opening the presents with the clients and -because of Sarah's absence since she is on vacation-, I enjoyed taking pictures of the event.

We came to the office for lunch and had a meeting to talk about why we arrived late to Integra. It wasn't really about that, since the explanation was just that we had had bad luck regarding buses connections and that we should have left the flat a bit earlier. In fact, the meeting was because the atmosphere in the office wasn't that good lately since we are kind of tired and a bit demotivated and it was influencing in our work. I had felt that I was being swamp while my colleagues wasn't doing so much, so for me it was a good time to speak my mind and solve this conflict -that I didn't realize I could solve by myself before. Actually, I felt quite more comfortable and relieved after we had this conversation so, in a way -just looking the bright side of it-, it was good that we were late.

With new energies we headed to Presporkovo for another Mikulas event, this time for kids. They prepared for us 3 different creative stations for the kids and we were in charge of supervising and helping them to create either Christmas postcards, scale Christmas trees with tracing colorful paper and using decoration pastry tubes for biscuits. In the morning it was more difficult that other volunteers joined us to the visit to Integra because most of them were busy with lessons or work but it was nice that some of them joined us in the afternoon in order to set me free of supervising one of the stations for taking pictures.

Then again, we also prepared for them a small theater play involving Mikulas and his presents for the kids. It's funny than in every play of this kind Slovak people involve also a devil who tries to still the presents from Mikulas and angels that will try to make Mikulas see he's being fooled.

Yaaay, in the end they gave us cake, a cute and tasty one, it was nice -and it was crazy to kind of compete with so many parents armed with reflex and phone cameras. We tidied up and I run to the bus station to go to Zvolen and visit Timour in his birthday.