ESC IN SPAIN: MY LIFE CHANGING EXPERIENCE! Volunteers say
Clelia has recently concluded her volunteer period with the European Solidarity Corps! She sent us a gorgeous photo collage and told us how she experienced her ESC year!
Let's give the floor to Clelia:
"Experiences, misadventures, emotions, people were the ingredients of my Spanish adventure.
My name is Clelia and I have just finished my European volunteer experience in La Coruña (Spain).
Before leaving, my life in Italy seemed more or less perfect. I lived in a beautiful city in southern Italy, my work satisfied me and at the same time I was active in volunteering, within the same INCO organization in Molfetta, thanks to which I had the opportunity to cultivate my passion: traveling and learning about new cultures . Being in contact with young people from different European countries, for me, was a bit like traveling while staying in Italy.
Despite everything I felt that something was missing in my life. I have always dreamed of being able to live an experience abroad and I had not yet managed to realize it. I was 26 and thought I couldn't wait any longer. I discovered the European Volunteering project and I realized that it was finally time to make a change in my life. I said to myself "Now or never". I left everything and left for the north of Spain.
I carried out my project at the “Fundaciòn Paideia”, supporting the “Youth and Mobility” department in the management and promotion of projects aimed at the job placement of young people, with a particular focus on European volunteering. Sharing my experience with other young people, helping them in the search for their own volunteer project to give them the opportunity to experience what I was also experiencing, filled my heart with joy.
But European volunteering is not just the project in an organization ... it is much more!
It is meeting people from all over the world, with some of whom you build relationships that you know are stronger than time and distance.
It is discovering and integrating yourself into a new 360 ° culture. I will never stop thanking my friends and their families for their warm hospitality, ready to let me enter their world and learn about their traditions. The top of my cultural integration ?? Dance the "muñera", a typical Galician dance with period clothes!
European volunteering also means having a suitcase always at hand. No matter how long the journey took, whether it was by plane, car, train, bus, boat ... I was always ready to go, to take advantage of every single opportunity and discover my new country far and wide.
Leaving alone and living a year abroad for the first time, meeting people and having friends all over Europe and all over the world, learning and speaking a new language never studied, collaborating in a new working context, discovering and making my own new culture was a dream for me that came true. Before leaving I had a thousand doubts, to date I can say that European Volunteering was the best choice of my life!"
