My
last day in Lithuania is already 2 months ago. However, in this blog
entry I want to recapitulate the last days of our European Voluntary
Service.
Saying goodbye to our students
The
end of our school year at the Panevezio "Sviesos"
Specialiojo Ugdymo Centras began with the "Last Bell"
("Paskutinis skambutis") on May 29th, a Lithuanian
tradition to celebrate the high school graduation of those students
who finished the 10th grade. Our school had prepared a diverse
program with poems, songs, dances, and speeches which was shown in a
theater near our school. It was a very emotional event, especially
when Laia and Emily said thank you and goodbye to their classes and
teachers for who the school year ended already one week earlier as
they belonged to the younger classes of the school.
The
same day we completed our volunteer passports, the Savanoriu
Pasai (maybe you remember them from our first days in Panevezys).
This time we went through all the steps again and checked what had
changed during the past 10 months: our weight, height, hair length
and color, how far we can jump, etc. Some of the tasks, like
recalling the names of a dozen students, didn't seem as challenging
as at the beginning of our EVS. ;-) Many of the students had prepared
drawings and cards for us to say thank you and goodbye and some of
them were very sad that we would leave soon. For me, the completion
of the Savanoriu Pasas was a good reminder of how the year had begun,
how close we had become with all the students throughout the year,
and an all in all more joyful than sad afternoon we could spent with
the children and youth.
Our
official goodbye took place one day later. All the students,
teachers, and other kollegues gathered in the school yard and the
principal handed us over certificates. Afterwards, every class and
volunteer drew or painted a film strip about their highlight of the
year. The strips were all bound together and are now decorating the
hallway of the dormitory building. At the end, we took a picture
together with every class, holding frames, funny glasses and
mustaches that we had prepared before, which was a lot of fun for
everyone!
Polish-Lithuanian Youth Exchange Project "Creative Passions"
From
June 5th-11th the project team had organized an exchange between our
school and a Polish special school. A group of Polish students came
to Panevezys and with the same number of our students we spend 6
amazing days. Every volunteer, project team member, and a few more
educators organized different art and sport activities, a short daily
language course to learn the most important words in both languages,
games, trips to Kaunas, Vilnius, Trakai and Kernave, disco and
international evenings, where the Lithuanian and Polish group and
every volunteer introduced their home country. From soap-bubble
making, over glass painting and rugby playing, to orientation game -
there was an activity for everybody's liking. I was amazed how close
the students of both groups had become despite the language barrier
at the end of the exchange and being able to spent all day with the
students for a whole week was a lot of fun. The Last Projects
The
outcome of the eco-club (Ekologijos Veikla) that I organized for the
students:
 |
| Crafting out of old magazines |
 |
| An experiment about the degradation of waste |
 |
| Creating a trash can out of a cardboard box, newspaper, paper rolls and plastic lids |
The
very last week of our voluntary year we created 16 different
postcards to advertise the EVS. In order to do so we e.g. took and
searched for photos and made up appealing sentences.
Additionally,
we painted a "volunteers' tree" on the wall infront of the
school's canteen, in whose circled leaves the photos of every year's
volunteers can be put as a memory.
Fine
