Every month our school comes together for a very special kind of weekend. Two days dedicated to our school, to our home.

The building weekend is a moment for developing practical skills, for painting, repairing and enjoying time all together. Students and teachers join together to make a plan of what needs to be improved in our buildings, then we divide in groups and get down to work!
We can’t deny that it’s an exhausting weekend since it demands a lot of physical effort, but we also get the opportunity to join together with a common goal, improve our school, and make CICD a nicer place for everyone. It’s also a good opportunity for students to get to know each other, to connect with teachers and to get a bigger feeling of ownership of our school. Because all together, we make this community.

On this last month our building weekend was focused on repairing one of our accommodation buildings, the Malawi Building. A huge building full of rooms for future students that needed some painting, scraping and repairing! For two days our students and teachers focused on repairing some of the rooms and toilets which needed some love. And after the weekend those rooms look amazing! Ready for our future generations of volunteers.
The fact that the current teams will not really get to use this rooms doesn’t really matter, since our main goal is to spend time together, and put our grain of sand in this lovely place we call our home.

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Experience from OL in Tvind
Carlota from August team 2017

About taking the initiative.....

It was extremely interesting being able to visit Tvind last week for the preparation of the Olympic Games. I didn't have any expectations of how this week would turn out. But my final outcome was quite positive. I had the chance to meet people from Lindersvold, One World Institute, DNS plus EVS volunteers. We had the possibility to share our ideas and have fun.

Me, together with Demian from Italy and Miki from South Korea - all of us from different schools - organized the performing sports (zumba, dance, street art, circus art, trampoline...).

The things that I realised in TVIND changed completely how I see myself as a volunteer at CICD.
I realized that I spend too much time looking into the negative points instead of taking initiative to change things - it seems that I was always waiting for someone else to do something.
Without the volunteers CICD doesn't exist - we are CICD and we have to take CICD as our home and improve it day by day - by taking initiative.

This is the 1st step in becoming a Development Instructor.

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Ana and Ryma

About our experience in the projects, the only thing that we can tell you is that it was the experience of our life!

When you decide that you want to do something like becoming a Development Instructor you need to be sure that you are prepared to change a lot of things in your life.
Since we arrived here we improved a lot our English, we live surrounded by different cultures, different languages, different food, different way of living. 
It is amazing the things that we learned when we lived in a community and that we then could use when we went to the projects in Africa.

For us Africa was magic - the culture, the smells, the colours …... but especially the people. We worked with the elders, women and youth clubs in the community, to help improve the education and health - for example prevention of HIV/AIDS.  At the project you can develop a lot of new skills that even sometimes you don't know that you have, you become stronger, you will learn how to improve. 

If you are ready to learn, and to share your life experience, you are the right person to join our programmes!
You will see the real essence of the African or Indian continent, you will have the pleasure to meet some of the most humble people that you will ever come across in your life …. real fighters. And this will change you. 
To come here was a good choice for us, because first we learned and then we could put it in practise. A full experience.

“I am the master of my fate,. I am the captain of my soul”

I believe in change! My reasons to join

My 5 reasons for joining CICD:
1.    Because I believe in the change the world. We can do it.
2.    Leaving the comfort zone will make me grow and value things more
3.    I am learning many things about the problems around the world and also English
4.    I'm discovering the world and different ways of thinking. I like it.
5.    Search for new experiences

 I want to help and fight - my reasons from Dumi

...my reasons for becoming a volunteer are quite simple and pure. I am an empathic and I can feel profoundly what others feel.
Unfortunately, our world is facing many problems and when you become aware of that, you begin to understand how small you are...in that moment you have two choices:
1.    To be motivated and to try to solve some of the things;
2.    To feel discouraged and to give up without even trying.

It’s incredible, but the more obstacles I encounter, the more my desire to fight grows.
I know who I am and what kind of person I wish to became. I want to live a life worth living, to mean something good in people’s life and to create a change, a beautiful and significant one... We think we have time, but the truth is that the present moment is all we have.
Some of our duties as humans are to love everything on the earth, to help each other, to believe in something greater than us, to be greatefulfor what we have, to understand and accept all the things that comes and to take care of the world we live in. In the moment that we’ll realize that we are all a unity, will be the moment when will arise a revolution of humankind....I was reading a lot of information and watching many documentaries about the reality of Africa.

This are the grounds that motivated me to be part in this path of volunteering:
-The desire of helping the most vulnerable people, the children, especially...because they are the most innocent and helpless creatures.
-The lack of the elementary necessities (water, food, hygiene, sanitation, medical assistance, decent standard of living, education);
-The major difference between the rich and the poor (some bathe in money while others are starving);
-The diversity of diseases that lead to deaths (Malaria, HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, Dengue, Cholera, Diarrhea, Meningitis, Pneumonia);
-The willingness to fight for justice and human rights. To inform the people about the power they hold, but are unaware of, and to convince them to claim their rights ( everything that is related with the discrimination of race, social category, colour, gender, religion, beliefs etc.);
-The desire to know another world: other cultures, life stories, ways of perceiving the world, in order to understand and to learn how to accept and not to judge;
-The need for growth and development as a human, with the aim to understand what it means to be happy with less; to discover the joy of giving and sharing; to redeem my values and and to look for the true purpose of a happy and fulfilled life.