Hola! I am Carlos, and to tell you few details about me, I am coming from the South of Spain, Malaga. My passions are sports and travelling, so I studied Sports in the University and I have had the opportunity to live in other countries before Poland.
When I decided to join the ESC IntegrART 2020 – 2021 project in the High School “Liceum Ogólnokształcące nr XXVII” it was April, 2020 (in those days we were living a lockdown because of Covid-19). Everything was super uncertain and of course worried about the project. Thanks to the organization, everything went well, we have had a great communication and always fast answer to solve some doubts before coming.
Once here, I discovered that we were going to live literally in the best place in Krakow, right in the center, in a very nice flat. Of course, it also meant that we were going to share the room with other flatmates from the project. Personally, I prefer to live in the center and share a flat than live far away like other volunteers from other organizations and have my own bedroom, but of course this is a personal taste.
The project works like this; In the first two weeks you have time to settle, open a bank account, new SIM card, supermarket, etc. For this you will have a Mentor, who is someone from Krakow that will help you at any time with many things. Then, you will meet your Work Coordinator, in my case she is a teacher from my school, and we were working together all the time in the school. In the meantime, you will meet more people from the organization. You have to work 30 hours per week, and you will gather around one month of holidays per year.
Coming back to my project, I studied Sports in the University, so the project was about to teach or collaborate in Physical Education classes and other tasks. Sometimes we cannot control our environment and this time happened to me, my flatmates, and everyone in the world. Because of new waves of Covid-19, the High School closed and online lesson started. It means that I had to start the project working online. As you can imagine, Physical Education online it is not easy, so my work coordinator and I had a meeting and checked which possibility we had and how to develop my project online. We agreed that based on my skills I will have 5 subjects and the students can join at any time when they have free time between their normal classes. In this way I was conducting classes related to Spanish, Travelling, Volunteering, Graphic design, and Physical Education. I was always supported by my work coordinator, she was very important all the time and without her the project like this would have been impossible. I am very glad to have had the opportunity to work with her. She is great professional and private.
In the middle of May, finally the school re-opened, and I could come back to present classes and teach Physical Education until the end of the academic year.
I can say that this year was “strange” for everyone due to Covid-19, so I hope next year the new volunteer will have another situation. Saying this, I do not regret the project and giving online classes at all, I have learnt a lot about teaching online, among other new skills.
I do not want to extend more, I only have very good words for the project, the people who works in, the people that I met in Krakow, and for Krakow itself.
To summarize Krakow, I just need to say that once my project end, I will move to Krakow. This is enough to say. 😊
If you want to contact me: carlos.canales.roman@gmail.com
