I did a six-month volunteering experience among the European Solidarity Corps between September 2020 and March 2021. During this period, a global pandemic was occuring and I had to adapt to the special conditions that appeared because of this.
How was the situation when you started you volunteering ?
During this special situation of a pandemic, it was a good moment to give some help to people but we didn’t know what could happen and how bad the Covid-19 would affect the project. Initially, our project was to intervene in a special school, an after school, and in a library. Unfortunately; when we arrived the covid situation got worse and worse and all the schools started to close and our field of action got reduced a lot, so we needed to find alternatives.
How did you adapt to this situation ?
To help disadvantaged peoples which situation was really difficult to handle by themselves, we gave our help as we could while intervening in an association called “Vis de Copil”. We played with children, helping with the food and clothes distribution.
We could still go to the after-school, we went there during the time of the project twice a week. Our job there was to give English classes and to play with them. We always tried to teach them also some French and Spanish to include an interculturality notion.
The project with the library got completely canceled but we found an alternative which was using our skills to create content on the youtube channel of the library.
This content was reading videos in different languages with Romanian and English subtitles. We also filmed interviews of volunteers to talk about their project and the experience to promote the European Solidarity Corps.
Conclusion
In a project like this in this kind of situation, you have to adapt. We find out that the best way is to think together and to put our skills into acts to find solutions and alternatives. We can always help.
The life of a volunteer in another country while a pandemic from a personal point of view was not so disturbing because we could still travel inside the country.
As an end, I can say that volunteering during this pandemic is still possible and much more needed.