Monika’s and Fine’s Midterm-Training – Halftime

From the 10^th to the 14^th of March, Monika and me had our midterm training together with 16 other volunteers (many of whom I hadn’t talked to a lot before, so it was great to get to know them more) near Vilnius, this time at Bebrūsų Dvaras. The natural surroundings were enchanting: a lake, a forest, and the next town quite some ways away. 

View onto the lake

The midterm training is -similar to the on-arrival training- mandatory for all long-term EVS volunteers and takes place at about half of the time spent in the host country. During our 5 days there we dealt with topics as

• Review of the time since our arrival, creating a graph of our feelings during the EVS
• Dreaming about and planning our future (after EVS and up to a time span of 7 years), also creating a collage
• Lithuanian mentalities, through talking about topics as “role of men and women in society” or “working habits” from our own experiences
•  “Pushing our borders”: exercises as running blindfolded into a wall of people or letting us fall from a table and catch by other people, to help us to deal with situations in which we are outside of our “comfort zone”. (During the EVS every volunteer most likely faces situations in which he or she does not feel comfortable e.g. while being confronted with different traditions and habits, a new field of work and responsibilities, etc. During the year one might learn to deal with or get used to those situations and in that can expand his/her comfort zone.)

Even though our midterm training was calmer than the on-arrival training –probably because we knew each other and already lived in Lithuania for a while- we did a lot of fun activities besides the “project-related” tasks: sauna evening with jumping into the still half-frozen lake, bike riding, setting up a "Lithuanian flag" (it was actually a casual scarf) for the Independence Day on March 11th (independence of 1990), making candles, shooting with bows and arrows, playing board games and dancing in the evenings, and –one of the highlights- having an international dinner for which almost every represented country cooked a dish. As you can guess, there was a lot of delicious food and a lot of new tastes. The countries represented were Romania, Austria, Ukraine, Macedonia, Serbia, Spain, Bulgaria, Latvia, France, and Germany. We also visited the only etnocosmological museum in Lithuania.

Setting up the Lithuanian flag

For me it was good to make a stop, take time to think about the time that passed, and get new ideas for the time that’s left. For many of us it is hard to believe that half of our EVS is already over. The past 6 months went by so fast, a lot of things have happened, we met many new people, went on trips and gained a huge range of new experiences already. For Monika, Laia, Emily, and me three months are left till the end of our project. That doesn’t sound like a lot but I’m sure they will be as eventful as our EVS has been so far.

Fine