TIME FLIES

Time flies! Almost 7 months in Latvia... 7 months!!! I just can't believe it. I remember so good the day I left: it was 31^st of July and my plane had left at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, so I had to have lunch early (what early means for people from Spain, here I have learned that early and late are two VERY INACCURATE words). My family and my friends came with me to the airport, it was hard to say goodbye. Then I had to stay for more that 3 hours in the plane but I was not as excited as I thought I would be, I was sad to leave everyone there.

Now, 7 months later, I feel that Kuldīga is my second home. My life is here; I have my friends, my flat, my job, my hobbies... I am happy, very happy! Of course it is not always that I am shining of happiness, I have my bad moments too! But I feel good here, and I guess that is what really matters.

Last week we had the midterm training for EVS volunteers. It was a lot about reflexion and looking into oneself. I liked it very much and I realized many things! One of them is that I have changed a lot since I came here (actually my life has changed completely so of course I have changed too). In the training we had to draw a time line from the moment we arrived until now, with all our ups and downs. I think my drawing looked very good, it started quite down but it just went higher and higher, with some small downs in between. One of the reasons of that is because I feel that everyday I get more and more adapted to this country, my Latvian skills are improving and communication with native people is improving as well.

Another thing we had to do in the training was to think how we can improve our projects. It is easy that by this time the EVS becomes monotonous, we don't have so much initiative as in the beginning, nothing new really happens. But the trainers we had have much experience and they know that this usually happens so they asked us to think of a project, something we can do in our last months because yes, more than a half is already gone. I don't know from where I had the idea but suddenly I realized that there is something that I am missing very much: theater. I gave up theater 3 years ago, and I miss it very badly, very very badly! So I thought that we could organize a theater festival in Kuldīga. I have many ideas for it in my head, but now I need to talk about it with some people and find someone who helps me in the organization. But I am really excited about it and I hope we will manage to carry it out.

And at the moment this is not the only project we have in mind. In the Youth Center we are planning to organize a youth exchange for next summer and with Zura we want to organize one event that will involve the participation of many other volunteers in Latvia, plus, we want to make a dance combining Georgian and Spanish dances. So actually we have many projects in mind, all of them look good, all we need is to work hard so that we can enjoy a good result!

Tiksimies vēlāk,

Claudia.