Keeping Up with Parco!

10th March - 23th March

Hello there!

As you could see we are doing a lot of things in this town and its sorroundings! Now, let me introduce my self. I’m Karla, I was the fist volonteer of the 2024 generation and I’m been here for 9 months already. Well, what was going on in the last two weeks?

As usual, every monday we host our Speaking Club and, considering that Natalia and Ebru went to Venice to see the Carnival, I thought it could be a good idea to speak about the origin of it in the “speaking meeting”, as some of our locals like say. So, I did a little research and they shared some pictures about their trip!

On Friday we hosted the knowledge sharing and the closing of the week with the rest of the team. Eleftheria, from Bergolo team, shared with us her knowledge about origami and we spend that afternoon learning how to do cranes. Also Efe show us how to make tulips! In the second part of the afternoon we reflected a little bit about our week and we visualized ourselfs going throught it as astronauts in our spaceship dicovering new galaxies, dealing with some asteroids or being helped by friendly aliens…

That week we also welcomed the new volonteer, Lisandra, and we spent some time explaining her how do we work, the things that we do and why do we do it as we would like to keep alife this rural area trought cultural activities.

We planed some trips to visit diffent towns in the region and to take some pictures of them so we can promote this areas creating a turistic itinerary for Bormida Gotica Experience project.

Two weeks ago, Ebru and Natalia went to the “On boarding training” which is a training that every volonteer has to attend in the firsts months of their volonteering journey.

As I said at the begining I’ve been here for a long time so it was time for me to go to the “Mid Term Evaluation” a traning organized by the Italian National Agency that we receive when we are more of less at the middle of our volonteer experience.

I went with Eliza and Ari, our mate-volonteers from Bergolo. I was so happy to share this experience with them and also we had the chance to meet some volonteers we did the On boarding training with!

The trainers made us reflect in our journey as well in the challenges we faced and how we overcame them and the impact that we are having in the organization and in the local comunity.

They organiced team building activities that could have driven us to a self reflection of the things that we’ve learnt in this months as part of a team and how we can collaborate better in the work enviroment.

I really love this kind of initiatives because with simple dinamics as making a square with a wire with the eyes closed make us find a balance between each other and work fine as a team while having fun!

As a highlight I would like to share one of my favorites moments: to run with the eyes closed towards our team that was wainting to catch us when we got close to them. This made me think of how important it is to trust in ourselfs as well as in our team. And, also how we go across our fears and how we overcome the “dark” or uncertainty…

In the meantime, Spring has arrived! After a long winter we can finally enjoy the sun and see the trees and flowers bloming! I hope you guys are also enjoying this time wherever you are reading this!

Stay tuned for the news about our journey promoting this region with Bormida Gotica Experience!

Love,

Karla