No final do SVE (Serviço Voluntáriado Europeu), Ananda Cooperativa Cultural teve uma reunião com a Ana e além de outras atividades fez-lhe a seguinte pergunta:
"Qual foi a melhor aprendizagem que trouxeste deste SVE de 9 meses em Tenerife?"
E a Ana respondeu:
«««O SVE marcou a vida para sempre. A pessoa que foi para Tenerife não foi a mesma que voltou. Voltei mais auto-confiante, menos timída e com vontade de fazer muitas coisas e de me mexer. O que mais aprendi foi a não parar, não importa o qual mal estão as coisas estão, o importante é não parar. A crise começou em Espanha tal como começou em Portugal, mas eles decidiram não parar e não se queixar de tudo. Continuam a sair, a ter ideias, a ir a formações, vão dançar e não oçjam para o passado, vivem o presente.
Esta foi a maior lição que aprendi, não podemos parar e que sempre podemos aprender mais alguma coisa.
Ana »»»
June 5, 2014
May 28, 2014
A very much needed Update :) (part 2)
Continuing on my update, we head now for the month of March.
March was a very busy month. It started with the crazy fun of Carnaval :) Here everyone gets together in Santa Cruz and just party all night, for a week! Everyone gets dressed in different costumes (usually one or each day) and go out to the streets dancing and drinking. The streets are so full and chaotic that moving from point A to point B is a real challenge. But what really shocked me was the "bathrooms". If you really needed to use a bathroom, you couldn't fine any, people would just "hide" behind cars and do their business. Quite disgusting, but efficient, no big lines to wait to go the bathroom.
After the Carnavals it was time to get back to work, and we jumped into this amazing project called Wish. This project brought together islanders from all over the world. There where people from Malta, Iceland, Indonesia, Salomon Islands, Santa Lucia and, of course, Canary Islands. The main goal of the project was to let non-european countries know about the EVS program, and, ideally, start to send volunteers to their countries and vice-versa. I was responsible to take all of the photos and also giving some information about EVS from a volunteers point of view and also information about Youthpass and the key competences of it. They were here for 10 days, and it was great fun, it was amazing to find out about the different cultures and different people that inhabit this amazing world. We sometimes live so much inside our own world, that we forget how immense it really is.
So we leave this amazing project, and with just one day to rest, me and Edyta travel to another island of the archipelago: Fuerteventura. Here we get involved in another project. This time it's about invasive species in different countries/islands, in the case of Fuerteventura we wanted to raise awareness to people about the squirrel, a species that was introduced in the island and that is causing damage to the native birds and flora. With us we young people from Poland, Finland, England and Canary Islands. We made a lot of activities like hiking, kayak, workshops and we gave out flyers to people on the street, warning them not to feed the squirrels. I was exhausted, but it was worth it. I came back a couple of days before the project finished because I was starting a new project with kids. I would be giving a workshop about creative writing to kids between 9-13 years old. And this leads us until April.
The 1st of April was the first day of my writing workshop. It was a good start and the kids really enjoyed it. The rest of the month went smoothly, with the usual workshops from i-responsables and the english workshops in scouts. Meanwhile we were planing a Multiplier Course, still connected with the Wish project. It was an eight hour course to give out information about the Wish Project and also about EVS and the changes that came with Erasmus+. This course toke place on the fourth of May.
May started with
my birthday party :) Great party with friends. The next day was the day of the Multiplier Course. We started a bit late, but at the end we had around 20 people there. It was a good day and people left happy with the information they had received and congratulated us on the success of the day. Like in April, the rest of the month great, with the workshops. We slowly said goodbye to the people and to our many activities. I said goodbye to my kids from the creative writing workshop, who said it was a shame that I was leaving so soon and then gave me a story that they all made, and chocolates too :)
It is now my last week in Tenerife and I'm slowly packing my stuff, wondering if all my memories from the past nine months will fit in my suitcase. The people I met along the way I will never forget, nor the experiences. I will treasure these past nine months forever, and who knows, maybe I'll be back ;)
March was a very busy month. It started with the crazy fun of Carnaval :) Here everyone gets together in Santa Cruz and just party all night, for a week! Everyone gets dressed in different costumes (usually one or each day) and go out to the streets dancing and drinking. The streets are so full and chaotic that moving from point A to point B is a real challenge. But what really shocked me was the "bathrooms". If you really needed to use a bathroom, you couldn't fine any, people would just "hide" behind cars and do their business. Quite disgusting, but efficient, no big lines to wait to go the bathroom.After the Carnavals it was time to get back to work, and we jumped into this amazing project called Wish. This project brought together islanders from all over the world. There where people from Malta, Iceland, Indonesia, Salomon Islands, Santa Lucia and, of course, Canary Islands. The main goal of the project was to let non-european countries know about the EVS program, and, ideally, start to send volunteers to their countries and vice-versa. I was responsible to take all of the photos and also giving some information about EVS from a volunteers point of view and also information about Youthpass and the key competences of it. They were here for 10 days, and it was great fun, it was amazing to find out about the different cultures and different people that inhabit this amazing world. We sometimes live so much inside our own world, that we forget how immense it really is.So we leave this amazing project, and with just one day to rest, me and Edyta travel to another island of the archipelago: Fuerteventura. Here we get involved in another project. This time it's about invasive species in different countries/islands, in the case of Fuerteventura we wanted to raise awareness to people about the squirrel, a species that was introduced in the island and that is causing damage to the native birds and flora. With us we young people from Poland, Finland, England and Canary Islands. We made a lot of activities like hiking, kayak, workshops and we gave out flyers to people on the street, warning them not to feed the squirrels. I was exhausted, but it was worth it. I came back a couple of days before the project finished because I was starting a new project with kids. I would be giving a workshop about creative writing to kids between 9-13 years old. And this leads us until April.The 1st of April was the first day of my writing workshop. It was a good start and the kids really enjoyed it. The rest of the month went smoothly, with the usual workshops from i-responsables and the english workshops in scouts. Meanwhile we were planing a Multiplier Course, still connected with the Wish project. It was an eight hour course to give out information about the Wish Project and also about EVS and the changes that came with Erasmus+. This course toke place on the fourth of May.May started withmy birthday party :) Great party with friends. The next day was the day of the Multiplier Course. We started a bit late, but at the end we had around 20 people there. It was a good day and people left happy with the information they had received and congratulated us on the success of the day. Like in April, the rest of the month great, with the workshops. We slowly said goodbye to the people and to our many activities. I said goodbye to my kids from the creative writing workshop, who said it was a shame that I was leaving so soon and then gave me a story that they all made, and chocolates too :)
It is now my last week in Tenerife and I'm slowly packing my stuff, wondering if all my memories from the past nine months will fit in my suitcase. The people I met along the way I will never forget, nor the experiences. I will treasure these past nine months forever, and who knows, maybe I'll be back ;)A very much needed Update :) (part 1)
Hola chicos :)
sorry for the unforgivable delay in my blog, but i'm just not a very "blogy" person. Well, here come the updates and highlights of my EVS project since the beginning of December.
December starts with a great
night called Noche en Blanco. In this night all of La Laguna comes alive, they light up the Christmas lights, all the shops are open and there is music and all sort of activities in the street. There were people dancing in the streets, so i toke the opportunity to lean some moves of "swing" :) it was a very fun night!
I also made a Christmas tree for the flat :)
We did a couple of more workshops this month, but the Christmas was just around the corner and i had to start pacing to go home for the holidays. The short time that I was in Portugal for the holidays was great, I spent almost all of the time with my family. I was back in Tenerife for New Years Eve. We went for dinner and then went out to dance in Santa Cruz. The streets where full of people, everyone looked amazing. It was a real fun night spent with my awesome flatmates and friends.
January was a really slow month. We didn't have workshops because the calendar for the new year hadn't been set yet. But we still did a couple of things :) The scouts invited me and Edyta to participate with them in a parade. It was called the Cavalgata de los Reyes, and we had to dress up for the occasion! They gave us costumes of the helpers of the 3 Wise Man, in Spain it is them who give out the presents, not Santa Claus.
In this month we also started planing to cultivate a small piece of land that was offered by Aida, a spanish volunteer who had just finished her EVS in Hungary.
We also continued with our english workshop with the scouts, and I went to visit the Museum of Science with Márti (one of my flatmates) and a friend of ours, Matteo, an italian astrophysicist that is finishing his masters degree here in Tenerife. He was like our own private guide. It was lots of fun to discover about the universe.
Finally at the end of the month, me and Edyta had our mid-term evaluation. We travelled to Málaga in mainland Spain. when we got there, we then had a 40min drive by bus to get to our final destination, Los Molinos. Here we met the other volunteers that came from all Sapin. We where about 120 volunteers. Though out the week I got to meet some of them, it was impossible to talk to all of them. They divided us into groups and that made it easier to get to now some of the people. The week went on great, with lots of activities and a lot of food (maybe too much food). Some of my favorite activities include the night we all had to present the region of Spain we were living in, the afternoon we spent in a town near by called Antequera and the last night where each person could show a dance or a song from their own countries. To check out the fotos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL4279704CB9FBFC44&v=0w-lDCuXAiw#t=271
February. Right after I came back from Málaga, the next day I was already on a boat with Márti to go visit Gran Canaria, another island of the archipelago. We toke some vacation days and stayed there for five days, five incredible and relaxed days. We went to the beach, we went hiking (and got lost, but we found a really nice guy showed us right way to go), we made dinner for our hosts, we visited the capital of the island and a lot more :) It was really something that we both needed, just to relax and enjoy another island.
Finally the new calendar for our workshops came and we started working to have everything ready. We had to start gathering all the materials and making the necessary experiments and adjustments to make sure everything would go right.
Finally the workshops began after almost 2 months of waiting. :)
sorry for the unforgivable delay in my blog, but i'm just not a very "blogy" person. Well, here come the updates and highlights of my EVS project since the beginning of December.
December starts with a greatnight called Noche en Blanco. In this night all of La Laguna comes alive, they light up the Christmas lights, all the shops are open and there is music and all sort of activities in the street. There were people dancing in the streets, so i toke the opportunity to lean some moves of "swing" :) it was a very fun night!
I also made a Christmas tree for the flat :)
We did a couple of more workshops this month, but the Christmas was just around the corner and i had to start pacing to go home for the holidays. The short time that I was in Portugal for the holidays was great, I spent almost all of the time with my family. I was back in Tenerife for New Years Eve. We went for dinner and then went out to dance in Santa Cruz. The streets where full of people, everyone looked amazing. It was a real fun night spent with my awesome flatmates and friends.January was a really slow month. We didn't have workshops because the calendar for the new year hadn't been set yet. But we still did a couple of things :) The scouts invited me and Edyta to participate with them in a parade. It was called the Cavalgata de los Reyes, and we had to dress up for the occasion! They gave us costumes of the helpers of the 3 Wise Man, in Spain it is them who give out the presents, not Santa Claus.
In this month we also started planing to cultivate a small piece of land that was offered by Aida, a spanish volunteer who had just finished her EVS in Hungary.We also continued with our english workshop with the scouts, and I went to visit the Museum of Science with Márti (one of my flatmates) and a friend of ours, Matteo, an italian astrophysicist that is finishing his masters degree here in Tenerife. He was like our own private guide. It was lots of fun to discover about the universe.
Finally at the end of the month, me and Edyta had our mid-term evaluation. We travelled to Málaga in mainland Spain. when we got there, we then had a 40min drive by bus to get to our final destination, Los Molinos. Here we met the other volunteers that came from all Sapin. We where about 120 volunteers. Though out the week I got to meet some of them, it was impossible to talk to all of them. They divided us into groups and that made it easier to get to now some of the people. The week went on great, with lots of activities and a lot of food (maybe too much food). Some of my favorite activities include the night we all had to present the region of Spain we were living in, the afternoon we spent in a town near by called Antequera and the last night where each person could show a dance or a song from their own countries. To check out the fotos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL4279704CB9FBFC44&v=0w-lDCuXAiw#t=271
Finally the new calendar for our workshops came and we started working to have everything ready. We had to start gathering all the materials and making the necessary experiments and adjustments to make sure everything would go right.Finally the workshops began after almost 2 months of waiting. :)
November 12, 2013
In the Heart of the Sea
Hey,
so this last weekend we went to the island of La Gomera to do a workshop. We were going to make some games out of recycled material and then play with them with the people that had come to the workshop. Unfortunately no one came, so we took the chance to visit the island. During our visit we stumbled across a film site for the new movie "In the Heart of the Sea", they weren't filming here yet, but you could see a lot of the set already ready for filming now in the middle of November. You can see a lot of pictures from the set in this website: http://lagomera1.blogspot.com.es/2013/11/ron-howards-heart-of-sea-getting-ready.html
Since we didn't have the type of access to be able to get very good photos, here's our best one:
It looks like we, all of the sudden, landed in a different island :)
November 4, 2013
Life in Tenerife II
Hey there,
although it doesn't feel like, it's already been two months since I'm here in Tenerife, and it has been great! Lots of fun and lots of new people.
This month we had our on-arrival training here in La Laguna, and voluntaries who are here in the Canaray Islands, from all over Europe came to La Laguna. There were people from Germany, Holland, Austria, Poland, Italy, France, Hungary, Greece, Serbia and me from Portugal. This lasted a whole week, and we had a lot of fun, our trainers were Ana and Javi, both from main land Sapin, Andaluzia. they were great! Everything we had to know or learn about EVS they thought us through games or little competitions between groups.
During this training we got the chance to exchange ideas and no bout the different projects in the islands. It was great, because we also got new ideas for our project and vice-versa. The interaction was just amazing and an experience that I will never forget.
In the mean time, after our training, we had to get back to our normal life of workshops. We started a new one in which we recycle old T-shrits into something different, like scarves, bracelets, etc. In our first workshop with clothes there were only 4 people, but it was great all the same. When there are smaller groups the interaction is different and more personal, with larger groups we can't always be sure that the people fully receive the information that we give. But no real worries, it is always good either with small or big groups :)
although it doesn't feel like, it's already been two months since I'm here in Tenerife, and it has been great! Lots of fun and lots of new people.
This month we had our on-arrival training here in La Laguna, and voluntaries who are here in the Canaray Islands, from all over Europe came to La Laguna. There were people from Germany, Holland, Austria, Poland, Italy, France, Hungary, Greece, Serbia and me from Portugal. This lasted a whole week, and we had a lot of fun, our trainers were Ana and Javi, both from main land Sapin, Andaluzia. they were great! Everything we had to know or learn about EVS they thought us through games or little competitions between groups.
During this training we got the chance to exchange ideas and no bout the different projects in the islands. It was great, because we also got new ideas for our project and vice-versa. The interaction was just amazing and an experience that I will never forget.
In the mean time, after our training, we had to get back to our normal life of workshops. We started a new one in which we recycle old T-shrits into something different, like scarves, bracelets, etc. In our first workshop with clothes there were only 4 people, but it was great all the same. When there are smaller groups the interaction is different and more personal, with larger groups we can't always be sure that the people fully receive the information that we give. But no real worries, it is always good either with small or big groups :)
September 29, 2013
Life in Tenerife
In this blog I want to tell the story of a portuguese girl in the wonderful island of Tenerife. I applied for an EVS (European Voluntary Service), for those of you who don't know what it is, it is a programme financed by the EU, in with youth from all over Europe can participate. In my case me programme will last 9 months, but there are many other fantastic opportunities. For more information please feel free to look into my organizations website: www.islacreactiva.com :)
I arrived in Tenerife on the 31st of August and i was blow away by the beauty of the city of La Laguna, with it's very colorful streets and in worm-welcoming people.
Since I've been here, I've already done so many great things, either in my project either on my free time. My project consists in organizing workshops about responsible consumption, saving and about how we can benefit from helping the environment. We organize workshops about how to do simple things, like making creams from aloe vera, soap from recycled olive oil, marmalades and how to make furniture with carton.
The best part of these workshop is the interaction with the people, and the opportunity to learn the language, since you have to talk to the people, and they don't know any language besides spanish, but it's great. And also the look on peoples faces when you teach them the most simple things on how to save, or how to do things environment friendly, is always of surprise because they never imagined that the most simple things can make such a difference.
And at the end always traditional photo with the participants for future memories :)
And not only do I have the opportunity to try to make a difference, but I also get to enjoy the island and all of its beauty:
Bajamar:
Punta de Teno:
Punta de Hidalgo:
I arrived in Tenerife on the 31st of August and i was blow away by the beauty of the city of La Laguna, with it's very colorful streets and in worm-welcoming people.
Since I've been here, I've already done so many great things, either in my project either on my free time. My project consists in organizing workshops about responsible consumption, saving and about how we can benefit from helping the environment. We organize workshops about how to do simple things, like making creams from aloe vera, soap from recycled olive oil, marmalades and how to make furniture with carton. The best part of these workshop is the interaction with the people, and the opportunity to learn the language, since you have to talk to the people, and they don't know any language besides spanish, but it's great. And also the look on peoples faces when you teach them the most simple things on how to save, or how to do things environment friendly, is always of surprise because they never imagined that the most simple things can make such a difference. And at the end always traditional photo with the participants for future memories :)
And not only do I have the opportunity to try to make a difference, but I also get to enjoy the island and all of its beauty:
Bajamar:
Punta de Teno:
Punta de Hidalgo:
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