February 20, 2024
February 15, 2024
Not everything is a bed of roses either | Tampoco todo es color de rosa
Even when everything seems like a fairytale, difficulties also exist. It's important to visualise this aspect, so our expectations are realistic. No matter how much you like a place, people around you... Always, everywhere, there are grey moments; and if you are experiencing so many changes in your life, this can happen more easily, it's just logical.
- Lack of adaptation: Some people just can't do it. And it's OK. You dare to try, you realise that it's not what you expected and you look for a new plan. I didn't imagine it, but they are not few the volunteers that quit their projects for different reasons: work, lodging, problems with communication, lifestyle, misunderstandings with the organisation/s... Actually, we are two volunteers in Haapsalu at the moment instead of the four we were at the beginning. There were some issues and the first months were quite chaotic and tough in some aspects.
- Language barriers: Personally, I had always travelled to places where I could speak with local people, at least enough. But of course, they were short tourist trips, not a long-term stay. It's quite hard to have difficulties with communication 24/7, from the place where you work to the hostel where you live or the supermarket where you have to go shopping everyday... It's really exhausting. And in this particular situation, in Estonia, learning their language is not as "easy" as I thought. In our case here, this aspect is even worse, because we are learning Estonian, but we live in a hostel with Russian-speaking Ukrainians, so we don't have any language in common with them.
- Cultural shocks: I've always felt curious and excited about cultural shocks. You realise how different and diverse people are around the world, and that's so interesting. However, some of them might pose a problem for adapting to that culture when you move there. For example, I've found quite a lot of cultural shocks being here, but I'd especially point out two of them: the concept of food/eating and the way of socialising Estonians have. About the first one, as far as I've noticed by now, I see meals are nothing more but part of the routine: you eat because you need it to survive, that's all. It's simply a need, not something you enjoy. Actually, we have literally 15 minutes at school for lunch and people don't even use more than 5-10. Also, in general, I feel the food is OK, but not very very tasty, as if they don't care much about that. For me, this is shocking; I was used to have at least one hour to have lunch and it was a moment to relax, to disconnect, to socialise... I really try to adapt to this new concept of eating (at least for lunch), but I'm still always the last one! As well, regarding the way of socialising, I perceive Estonians are generally more discreet, individualist, introverted... than other people I usually meet, so it's more difficult to connect. Especially at the beginning, it was sincerely hard for me not to know if people around me liked me or not, actually I felt in some cases that they really disliked me. Even at present I sometimes have my doubts!
Fortunately, keeping all this in mind, I believe my roommate/workmate and I are quite well adapted and content with our experience here. We're happy at the school, we've met very nice people, we're trying to do many different activities, we've found the way to make things work in the hostel and we understand each other quite well, which is for sure something that helps so much for living comfortably. But above all, we're learning quite a lot from these challenges, which is the main point, as far as I see it, about this volunteering experience.
February 13, 2024
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