I started in September, but it seems as if I started a long time ago.. And why? Because in this short period of time I got the chance to meet a lot of new people from all around the world, I learned a lot from them and also about myself. I come from a large family, but that is nothing compared to this! We are all sooo different and although we all have bad days sometimes, there’s something really fantastic about this community!
After waking up, I go to the promotion office. To raise my scholarship for the project, I help with promotion for our programmes here. My days actually look pretty similar to each other. I get in touch with the people all around the world and introduce them to our programmes. It might seem easy, but actually it can be pretty chaotic here, believe me. I try to improve my skills, meanwhile I gain a lot of knowledge about the programmes, the school and the people around me.
Then, if I am in the rota I go to prepare the dinner (imagine when we are 40 people!!), or participate in the cleaning action, but most of the time I go to the Gaia class from 5 to 6 o’clock.
Fortunately, I am in an amazing Gaia Team! After a long day we all have one study hour where we can learn about the environment while we do as many practical actions as we can. A few weeks ago we went to the nearest cities, Hull and Withernsea, to make a little investigation about the life of people in Britain. Our aim was to find out how people in UK manage to live, how hard they find to get a job or pay the taxes... etc. I will be in the Poverty Activist Team, so for me, it was quite interesting.
When it is not time to go out during the Gaia classes, we stay in the school and make practical things, like presentations or we share our knowledge with each other. One day for example we tried to make organic soap… well it was not a big success, but at least we tried! We also started to make compost again. The school had to stop doing it a few months ago. But now, we have a new strategy, so hopefully it will work better.
We also try to spend the study hour with learning about ourselves. We make presentations about things the team are most likely interested in and share those things with each other. Last time one of our students made a presentation about numerology. Another time we got an insight in the life of Frida Kahlo de Rivera, a Mexican painter, who mostly painted self-portraits. She used a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, post-colonialism, gender, class, and race in her society, and as an extra, we had to paint our faces. Even though the results were not really the ones people expected, we had a really funny and relaxing time together!
Besides the theoretical studies one of our main goals is to make the team stronger. We will go to the projects in Africa or India together in Trios, so for that we have to get to know each other as much as it’s possible and in case of misunderstandings we have to try to solve the problems between us. To deal with these team issues is hard, believe me, but this is the exact reason we are a strong and wonderful team! We support each other.
It has been a big change what we all undertook, but if we stick together nothing is impossible for us.
