Juan's experience

Juan's experience

Juan's experience

Hier kun je de ervaringen lezen van Juan, een vrijwilliger uit Spanje. Van september 2009 tot juni 2010 zal hij hier in Nederland wonen en vrijwilligerswerk doen. Ook in R17.

Hij zal hier wekelijks (of bijna wekelijks) zijn verhaal schrijven. Wat zijn de verschillen, wat zijn de overeenkomsten tussen de culturen? Wat vindt hij echt heel leuk, wat vindt hij maar raar?!

 On 5 October was one of the most important days for me as a volunteer and probably the day I felt very nervous; finally I was going to leave Spain together with David, another volunteer from Spain. Far away from my family, my friends and my normal activities. After waiting for several months I was going to start a completely new experience. Besides, I haven’t been outside of Spain before, therefore the feeling was completely new for me. At 20:00 hours I landed in The Netherlands, and my tutor and my host family were waiting there. I started to feel less worries during the flight, but the worry that I had that people were vanished when I arrived was fortunately wrong.
 
On the way we passed by Hoorn, the city where my tutor lives and we stopped near a lake, one bigger than all the lakes I had seen before. I could feel the cold, the temperature was rather different than in Spain.
Finally we arrived home at 21:00 hours, we ate a bit and David and I started to unpack all the stuff in our room. Now I started to think how it was going to be during these months.
This week we were very busy discovering the village, the places where we were going to work and meeting new people where we would do our voluntary work.


 
12-18 October
Practically I started with the project this week because the week before I began to get used to the new context, to meet new people.
Now I felt the problems related to the language, when I had to communicate with a lot of people and I couldn’t do it in my mother language. On the other hand David could talk better english than I could, he had had some experiences before in which he had had to express himself in English. Maybe for him though also difficult, this was a little different.
Completely cloudy, I had so many problems to make me understand even to say the easiest things. The powerlessness of can not talk with others made me sad, it was like to be alone most of the time though I could count with David.
By this time I began to help in activities for children and now I realized that I couldn’t talk with them either. Who would have thought about that, now I had to try in other ways to communicate with them, and not only this was the problem, because the monitors were old people and most of them couldn’t speak English, this was going to be more difficult than I thought before, my learning started here.
The first weeks were very difficult speaking about the language but with time it would change.