Irma starting a new adventure

My new place

My first month in Heidelberg!

I started my volunteering the 2th of October and the first thing that I saw once I came to Heidelberg was Hagebutze :P So...What is Hagebutze? Actually is my house, the place where I´m living with the other 2 girls (my flatmates) that are volunteering with me at the Werkstattschule. Hagebutze it´s a house project that seemed to me, at the first look, like a fairytale thing, where everyone is living happily together and actually it´s like this :D I really loved the place, the house and all the kind people that is living here. The next day I saw my working place, the Werkstattschule, and all my colleagues, I had a warm welcome and it was really great from the beginning. Everybody was so kind and patient while they explained me how all this project, that the werkstattschule is doing, are running.

My first week I was trying to see every project and to be part of everything, so I could see in which one I was interested the most. I can say that every project it´s ganz toll :D. I spend the second week with Läuft, that is a group of young people that are staying, learning, cooking and having a great time together, we went ice skating and we learned and cooked together, it was so great staying with them and doing several things, like photoshooting and long english talks.

Then I had my very, very first project in a school in Bretten, I had to do a wood carving project with the kids, I had a group of 4 students and I learned them how to carv and to paint the woo, it was my first time leading a group of students that weren´t speaking my language :D but I have to say that it was so cool, the childrens were trying to speak a little bit of english and actually I was trying to speak a little bit of german. I had really a great time with them, they were so interested in that project and so willing to do things, everybody was so kind with me and I really liked the time I spendet with them. so after this experience I think I falled in love :D with wood carving, and I started to do also little carvings for me or gifts for my friends. During all this weeks that I was at the Werkstattschule I was hearing that all of us will be doing a very big big project in a school, a private one that is called EI (the english institute), so we started the preparations weeks before, I had to do 4 big drawings with the theme of Alice in Wonderland (movie that I love by the way :D). It was so amazing this project and I´m really happy that I was part of it, me and Daniela (a girl that was doing the praktikum in the Wss) had a group of 8 students to do the wood carving for a bench and for some big wood cards to decorate the garden. I had to say that this time it was a little bit different with the students because we were always trying to motivate them but at the end all of us did a great work. The great thing was also watching all the other projects, it was such a creative environment.

So what else can I say :D it was a "bombing" start for me :D but I really love this kind of environments and everything that motivates me and all this artistique stuff.

November in the Wss!

My second month started with a video editing, I was editing a video that explains how can you apply to the European Solidarity Corps program and which one are the projects in the Wss, I really enjoy video and photo editing, photoshooting and also everything that is connected with social media and I can tell that there are so many things that volunteers can do in the Wss in the media field. During this month I was doing also the Box project, packing this boxes with some little tools and other stuff that the students can use to create their own projects from home. I think that this is so a cool project, it all started during the pandemics, since the schools were closed and the country was in lockdown, sending this boxes with inside this little projects that the childres could create at home is so great and also creative from them. Than I joined 2 school project, one of them was to create sculptures and the others was to build some game boards and I, Selin and the students had to carv some shields for this boards. It was the first time for me doing sculptures with concrete, it was so great to learn how to do face expressions and how to model the concrete in different ways, we learnt also which kind of colours you need to use for painting this sculptures. Working with this students was a little bit difficult because some of them wheren´t motivated at all and we where always trying to motivate them and to show them what can they do with the concrete and how creative they can be. Actually at the end we had a cool and süss moment with them because they really thanked us for our work and for the beautiful sculptures. The second project was with a school in Neckergemünd and we had to create some wooden game boards, in this project I had a group of students with Selin and did the carving and paiting. The students gave some ideas for the team shields and they draw and carved the shields, it was so beautiful to work with them because they were so into the carving and painting, they created also some things for them selves and with some of them I could speak in italian and help them more in the work. I can tell that november was so a full and great month