Spring is coming, mid term training, pancakes

This week was short but really intense. 

On Monday, we made Russian Pancakes. It was a really nice moment. Later in the afternoon, we had our the first meeting for the Living Library, a project initiated by Georgiana that will took place in Rezekne Central Library, on 13th of March, betwen 16:00 to 20:00. The future books came to learn how to work in this event and to understand this nonformal method.

Everybody is welcome to discover many different cultures. A rich moment of sharing.

Tuesday till Thursday, Moritz, Paul and Clémence went to their mid term training in Ramava near Riga in a beautiful mansion. It were three really intense days, yet a great possibilty to share our experiences, find some solutions to our problems and brainstorm ideas together, and work on our ability to resolve conflicts. We learned a lot and had a lot of fun moments.

During this time Georgiana stayed at Rezekne. She presented her country with Tamara in one school during the "project week". It's a week in which each class make an other kind of activities and learn new skills. The yougster had to choose images from Romania and Italy and to put them in the corect place and after they learn about each of this country.

 Also, The school Jars-Adamovas internat pamatskola came to Jacis for one afternoon. Georgiana and Katja presented the different activities of Jacis, and animate a workshop. They created pencilsstands with jars and strings.

WelcomeJars-Adamovas!

The results of our work :)

All week, Georgiana had different kinds of meetings with the books of the living library and met a lot of foreigners who live in Rezekne. Also she created different crafting activities with small kids from the sunday school in the orthodox educational and cultural centre.

Sunday was Maslenica. It's a big event in the park to celebrate spring. You can play a lot of games, eat pancakes, drink tea and watch some performances. It was a very heartwarming moment.

Cats in bags, big plans and a weird party (9-15.02.2015)

We were debating whether to write a blog for this week, as we were unsure that enough things happened to justify this. Finally, we reached the conclusion that, every week, so many things happen, we just do not notice them any more. So this week, in this blog, we will turn our eyes to the usual and not so usual events of the week.

First off, there is of course an elephant in the room, or rather: "A cat in the bag". This thursday marked JACis' celebration of the Valentines day. Katja and Vija prepared the tradtional game for this day. 

Preparing love cards for ours lovers :)

Ready to meet the cat from the bag

Ten years in a row, the participants, volunteers and internationals were out to find their perfect valentines date. The game proceeded as followed: We were divided by gender, and then we had to answer/comment of different romantic questions. The results ranged from "surprising" to "hilarious". (Q:How do you get girls to notice you? A: Buy them expensive things!;Q:What would you do with 500€? A:Spend it all on sweets). The girls chose the perfect answeer from the variants offered by the boys. They shared love stories from chieldhood and worked a lot for preparing love message, love card for the boys - a lot of inspiration.

In the end, Moritz and Clemence were chosen the perfect pairing and won one of the prizes they had asked from businesses around town the previous days. It was, all in all, a very fun day, and at the end, there was cake to round everything off. 

Currently, Georgiana is working on a big project: We can not spoil to much at this point, but the event is aimed at all of Rezekne and will involve a big number of international people. The project aims to encourage the dialog between people, to break the stereotypes and to promotte tolerance among people from different cultures. We had first meetings this week, and soon you will learn what its all about.

Friday, on the weekly JACis movie event, we watched the incredibly quaint French movie "Le petit Nicolas". It was the first film not dubbed in English (but we had, of course, subtitles) and we learned many things particular the France, like pecking each other on the cheek for greeting (faire la bise). The film focuses on the titular character ("Little Nick") and his friends and family. Being based on the great books by Rene Goscinny, it draws from great material and combines many of the short stories into one coherent plot. It is definitely a great watch!

2 in 1 (26.01.2015 - 08.02.201)

The last 2 weeks went by very quickly for our project.
We were more than happy to see Vija and the other participants of the project "Culturball". They were very excited about their experience in Poland and they share with us a lot of beautiful stories. Friday they have an evaluation meeting in which they show as a lot of picture and movies from Poland and they told us about all activities in which they were involved.

On wednesday, Clemence and Geogiana worked a lot in order to prepare a short movie about EVS. They take a room from Zeimus special for this project and spend more then 8 hours with all the preparations. After this, Clemence worked a lot of put everything together.  In a few days, we will have the final result.

Because we are cooking a lot, Paul was thinking to colect all the recipes in a "book". We spend some hours to remember everything what we cook in the last 4 months but also to find the correct recipe for each meal. We will present the results at JACis soon.

On 5th of February, we organised an interesting treasure hunt for the youth of JACis - Photo OPS. For two hours two teams of 8 people each ran around in the city in order to take the most interesting picture and solve different tasks. They made poems with the enus of restaurants, they found some from Thailand and learned how to say hello in their language, they rebuild Rezeknes famous "Mara" with the members of their team, etc.
At the end they received a present for their work and Vija and Katja were expecting them with warm food and cakes :)

Build a snowman!

Take a funny picture on a playground

Find a cat or a dog and take a picture with it!

Find a stranger and learn to say hello in his/her language!

Find Tamara :))

Everything started with a picture...

And we build a snowman

In the others days we continued with our usual activities in schools - presenting EVS project, environmental activities and German lessons. Moritz and Paul have more and more student that are interested in learning German.

Learning about insects

Learning about insects

It was also the last week for Kike, our friend from Spain and Nastya, our friend from Russia. We were invited to their last performance in Jorik where we saw (for some of us for the 3th time) the play "Cats" and songs and dances of Nastya. We spend a lot of time with them in the last day and will remember them fondly.