Last days

Every season has an end and this one feels quite close already.

Last Thursday we had the last creative workshop for Christmas gifts, only that this time we had the opportunity to create them for ourselves. I took advantage of the two hours and a half that we were there and prepare some little surprises for my mother, father and sister. I'm not sure if they'll like them but at least it will be something original that I made myself.

It was quite curious that almost nobody came to this session since it was the only one that we could take with us the gifts we had prepared. Besides regular volunteers from INEX we had this family, with both German parents but with this kid, Julius, who knows German, French and Slovak because of the mix of countries and family heritage he's been experiencing. It was funny to hear her mother explain how he mixes the 3 different languages in only one sentence when he speaks.

Then for the weekend I was with some EVS volunteers in a farewell party with Mariano as a host in Piestany. He lives in a building which is a former hostel and we didn't have a problem of space to sleep. He prepared some pasta al forno, hot wine and a lot of beer and more wine, besides Slovak strong alcohol. It was a nice party, I was glad I got to see this people before coming back.

Also, Sunday morning we had an alternative Christmas market with handcraft stands and a space without money, to exchange things. Many stands were also selling home made sweets or jams. All that with vegetarian kapustnica and cus-cus, all very nice and healthy, lol. Btw, as you can see the meals were prepared manually -or at least heated up in this kind of old fire cooker.

In the afternoon we had also a kind of folk ritual when these girls dressed in traditional costumes, they sang folk songs and melted fruit seeds in the fire and later put it to cold water in order to discover the name of their future husbands. It was very interesting to watch.

Then yesterday we had a Tea Meeting about Mexico by Samuel. He met the organization he made this workcamps with in the presentation they had in a tea house last March, so he also wanted to make his there, in Zamocka cajovna. It was all in Slovak but I was happy to see that I understand almost half of it and also Mirka offered herself to translate for me, which was better :P Also, he had 3 bracelets he made a little quiz to give them away to the public and I had one. He said mine was handmade by a native Mexican Indian, nice!

Then today we had the last meeting of INEX promotional team of the year. New badges design are finished and I happy I managed to do them by myself. I was quite skeptical at the beginning since I don't master Photoshop use, specially when it comes to create starting from nothing, but they turned out quite good in my opinion -and my colleagues. Will see what else is there to say in the promotional team and I wish them the best for next year.

That's all from now. Not the last post, I will write something more but not now. Hugs, hugs^^

Ali

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.