Hello everyone! As a volunteer for the European Solidarity Corps, each of us has to attend some training during the path. I already had a little training of one hour in Italy before departure with my Italian sending organization to be prepared and get some practical information. Then, once arrived in the country of destination, we have the opportunity to attend a longer and more structured training. In the end of November, although we actually arrived in Plovdiv in the beginning of August, we finally took part in it. Unfortunately, due to the Big Sh** (this is how I call Covid 19), the training has been carried online and we could not go to Sofia altogether with the volunteers from all over Bulgaria to meet each other.
I have to say though that the online mode proved to be quite effective for the training purpose. The live mode is better for the human contact, but as long as the tasks of the training are concerned, I believe it worked pretty well. We did it on BigBlueButton, an open source web conferencing software where it was possible to interact in a good order, with a chat on the side where everybody could express their opinion in the meantime without making noise.
The training lasted for three days during which we introduced ourselves to the others, we talked about our passions and about our volunteering projects, we shared funny stories about our stay here in Bulgaria (the fact that people here shake their heads in opposite ways with respect to most of the other European countries to say yes and no dominated), we learned more about other cultures and also other opportunities (traineeships and jobs) provided by the European Union, in particular through the Erasmus fund. For certain tasks we were split in smaller discussion groups: in one of these for example we discussed our dream reality and the relative obstacles to achieve it, in another about some products that we use in our everyday life (in my group it was a T-shirt) and what is their impact on the environment. We also learned more about Bulgaria through a quiz. We did a quiz about us, to check how much we read (as we presented ourselves uploading texts, photos and videos on a shared online page) about the others.
I really enjoyed the training days. I did not meet in person any of the other volunteers yet, but it was interesting to know about them, about their projects. We formed a Facebook group calling it “Banitsa in Covid times” and sooner or later we should meet.
The Youth Spot Bulgaria is funded by the European Solidarity Corps programme of the European Union. The European Commission’s support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
