Hello everybody !
We would like to introduce ourselfs, we are Pauline and Florent, the two new volunteers of SYTEV organization in Kysucké Nové Mesto in Slovakia. We both arrived from France the 1st of April and we gonna stay for a year. First of all there is Pauline, she is 22 years old, she study Art and she came from Brittany, a region in the west of France. After that there is me, Florent, I am 25 years old, I studied Political science and I am from the north of France. We are both member of the European Solidarity Corps, a program which help young Europeans to participate in volunteering projects from a couple of weeks to a year.
It is due to this program that we both found this one year mission in the SYTEV organization. During this year, we will organize and participate in some events for youngsters people of the Kysucké region and we will also intervene in french and english lessons in several high schools in Zilina.
During this whole period, we will also tell you about our work, our activities and the evolution of our life here by writing articles and doing some videos. And of course, we hope to discover Slovakia and its border countries as much as we can !
For the moment we have not yet been able to discover the country as we wish or start all our activities because of the Covid restrictions but things are starting to fall into place. After our arrival, we had to spend our two first week in quarantine which had been very long. But after this difficult start, we finally could go outside and start to enjoy the region. We visited Kysucké and the nearest cities which are Čadca and Žilina, and we also went for some hikes in small mountains around the city to enjoy the view of the nature. Recently, with the lower restrictions we were even be able to spend a day in Bratislava to discover this beautiful city where there is a lot to see.
We also have the chance to meet with all the people who work for the SYTEV organization : Lukas, its director, Matus, our coordinator, Tess and Zuzka, ours two mentors, who are really nice and help us every time we need, but also all the youngsters who participate in the live of the organization. And we started to learn Slovak with our teacher Zuzka to whom we wish good luck in successfully teaching us.
On a more professional level, Covid Restrictions prevented us from starting most of our activities. We were still able to start intervening in French lessons to help the teachers and to do activities and games around the French language but only in videoconference. We have worked with two different high schools for the moment and with the reopening of schools we will very soon start working with others.
We were also able to participate in some outdoor activities, for the Earth Day, we went next to Zilina with volunteers from other association and and the political leader of the region to clean the side of the road trashed by truckers, unfortunately it was raining so it didn’t help us. After that, we cleaned the river side near Kysucké with Lukas and some youngsters. This time the weather were way better and it was much more pleasant.
Now we can’t wait to start the other activities that we have already planned (language coffee, games nights, sport tournament…) which should happen in the next weeks. I hope you enjoyed this little introduction, we will keep you informed in a few weeks on video to tell you the rest of our adventures.
This activities was supported by the European union from European solidarity corps managed by IUVENTA in project Discover the Charm of Kysuce.
