I'm Iryna Maksymiv, 24 years old, from Ukraine. Now I'm an EVS volunteer in Poland.
My European Voluntary Service project consists of many interesting elements that require my active involvement. Under the name “All together” the project is about teaching languages to unemployed people in the city of Bydgoszcz, Poland.
Description of the task we are doing is the following: groups are divided according to different levels of language proficiency, the classes are held four days per week, they are one and a half hour long, we work in pairs, the languages taught are English and Spanish.
We have been preparing materials during first two weeks of our involvement. I could say that we volunteers played quite a deal in the project creation and realization. I even caught the fraise that it might be one of the most serious projects in the history of “KIS”, organization with the aid of which we have launched it.
It has been four months I am involved in this project now. It is not easy task at all to instruct languages. One and a half hour of class is sometimes exhausting. There are many aspects of this job to be considered. It is very important to get prepared to each class and offer interesting learning methods to the people aspired to learn. First week was very much an adaptation period. Now there is a phase when it becomes a routine.
I feel lucky for taking participation in such a project. It gives me extraordinary opportunity to use all my resources, knowledge, ideas and give them the right direction. I can’t imagine the job I could do better than this being as a volunteer now. Besides that the opportunity to communicate and share knowledge with the students gives me overall observation of the society, people, country, habits, and different aspects of polish reality.