German high school, where I, Mariangela, Sabine, Michele and Nicola are going to work is actually named Liceul Teoretic Adam Müller Guttenbrunn. Before starting organizing activities in this school we had to present ourselves and countries where we come from. Three Italians, one Latvian, one Estonian, to say nothing of the facilitator (this is a paraphrase that refers to a book called "Three men in a boat, to say nothing of the dog").
Story behind is that we've been in Romania almost two months. We've spent it on different trainings (on-arrival training in Predeal, last week was training about how to write a CSR project and this week is training session about non-formal education), going sightseeing (Pe?tera Ur?ilor in Chiscau as an example) and exploring Arad. Working in schools was delayed because of some analysis we needed to give for to be allowed working with children and hazy idea of presenting something was almost forgotten.
This week on Tuesday and Wednesday was this day. Of presentation, you know. Other volunteers had had their presentations before in spite of analysis and they did pretty well. We couldn't be worse, but we faced a problems like two of us couldn't participate in presentation.
Our idea was not to be obvious, like hi, I'm Triin, I'm from Estonia and hi, I'm Mariangela, I'm from Italy, hi, I'm Sabine, I'm from Latvia.. but oh no, no Sabine and Michele. What do we say? That we are from two different countries at the moment, because Lativa is travelling in Greece (actually we can't be sure, because last time she wanted to go to Serbia and was sent back from the border) and 1/3 of Italy cannot also participate. We wanted to guess which countries we are from and giving some hints like there is a country (Italy in this case) and we ask "which one of these singers is not from our country" and there are variants like Eros Ramazzotti, Laura Pausini and Celine Dion. Obviously is the answer Celine Dion, because everybody knows she is French. Or Canadia. Nobody actually knows. But people in Romania know a lot about Italy and that would be easy. Latvia and Estonia are much more difficult to guess and I guess that noone makes much difference. Estonia's highest mountain is 318 meters, Latvia's highest mountain is some meters lower. Even one hour train ride away from Arad there is higher ground, so after getting this knowledge everyone must think that Estonia is pretty much as a swamp. Yeah, we have swamps and bogs, but they look as breathtaking in morning fog as mountain peaks with snow. And we have snowstorms and we have ice roads between continent and islands in wintertime. We were prepared to tell all that.
After that we tried to organize messed up wires between laptop and projector and found a place for papers taped together called "opportunities' panel" and our wonderful bright yellow mailbox. Our facilitator Andreea created remote desktop in my laptop for projecting slide show, but I couldn't manage anyhow windows to right desktop. I mean, I've heard about imaginary friends but I felt like I had imaginary desktop now. Anyhow, I don't want to mention names, but it was Mariangela's bright idea to hand out our quite fresh-printed newspapers. 9th grade children came to class room (which actually looked like a dungeon-cellar outside, but very cozy and nice inside) and then we were all doomed. Why, you ask? Because all our presentation was based on guessing who is who and where are we from. But it's written in newsletter who are we and where do we come! There was no plan B, our improvised plan B was to improvise.
It was actually pretty had to manage with three people, because we had somehow to cover part of these who were missing and to tell you the truth, no matter how you try to organize the team work, only two people of team were actually working. Finally our presentation wasn't what we planned, but we managed somehow and children (9th grade isn't children anymore, and not-school time they're not pupils or students either) weren't very active. That might have been because of several reasons, like when there is a teacher in the class they don't feel really comfortable or might take it as obligatory activity and all this story about EVS and volunteering and what we want to organize in schools was pretty new to them and needs time for digesting. We tried to encourage them to use mailbox if they are sorting out and understanding what we tried to tell them and probably they'll have some questions later. We'll see how much we get feedback and what we can and what we cannot do. We'll see. We'll see also about the other presentation tomorrow, maybe we can adjust it a bit better to real situation, maybe we don't forget not to hand out newsletters before.
