Waiting for the spring (23-29 March)

Yes, indeed, we are all waiting for the spring but it's seems that it doesn't want to come. We have to admit that we were all shocked to see how the weather changes so drastically in these days and from some sunny days we went back to the rainy and frosty days .
Despite of the weather we had an interesting activity in JACis: We started to prepare our performance for the Russian day and, as otherwise this project would prove impossible Clemence and Georgiana decided to learn a little bit of Russian. It seems to be more difficult than we've thought....
On Wednesday the librarian visited us in JACis to present us the new online application for smartphones and tablets that allowd you to rent online the books from library. What a splendid idea. It made us to want to start reading books from our local library.

Next day was a big day - Pauls birthday. Happy birthday Paul, to your 19th anniversary! As a present Paul received a beautiful book with easy recipes that was appreciated by all of us. We already made plans to try some of them in JACis.
We celebrated this day in the theatre where we met Andris. Together with him we prepared a sketch with a lot of suitcases for the big opening of " Jaunatnes Cemodams"("Youth suitcase"). What is this? Well, I don't know if you remember but at the begining of our project, JACis participated to a big competition in the community. They won the money necessary to renovate a new space for youngsters. After a long work (6 month), a lot of papers and the help of students from Rezeknes Technical School the two rooms looked impeccable.

On Friday and Sunday we helped with the cleaning and decoration of this Center. We were very happy to see this room ready to be a place of gathering and exchanging thoughts for the locals.

On Saturday, Moritz and Georgiana decided to defy the rain and visit Ludza, the oldest town of Latvia. It was a short trip of 4 hours but a beautiful and relaxing one. They visited the ruin of the castle, the local museum and took a long walk along the big lake and through the town.

We finished the week with a cultural activity - we where invited in JORIK to see a new performance with an interesting show of lights, music and art. Tamara, Christoph and David our friends played in this show. It was very nice to see them on the stage and creating another kind of theatre.

Video workshop (16-22nd of March)

It was a special week. It was the holidays for the teenagers, so the time of work changed and we had different kinds of events.

During two days JACis was open for a special training: "How to make a movie" with Svetlana Strelnikova (From Rusia) and Agnese Ivane (From Latvia) . We learned through a variety of exercises. The training started by taking some pictures. We shot a little movie of 30 seconds about our city Rezekne. The first was an individual exercise. The second day, We were divided in groups of 2 and we needed to make a montage with a runtime of 2 minutes. This part of the training was really interesting, because with the same amount of time we made totally differents movies.

Wednesday :

We went to Jorik. It was the first meeting. We are preparing a performance for May about Russian poems.

Thursday : 

On the morning, Georgianna and Clémence went to the Youth Council in Zeimuls for a teambuilding exercise. It was a Teambuilding about Communication.

At the end, the teenagers with Tamara cooked Pizza. After that they went to the Polish school. They met the vice director and took some pictures of the class, for preparing the movie project of Clémence.

During this Time Paul and Moritz make decorations with spray painting.

Friday :

Jorik invited us at one performance "Melnais muks".

The Living Library, career day in Zeimuls and the history of divided Germany

Last week,the final logistics of the Living Library dominated our schedules. Despite the great feeling that this event would happen soon, we were really excited and, at times, even a little bit anxious about the whole thing. Of aforementioned final preparations, the biggest feat was definitely finding more living dictionaries, i.e. translators to help those books and readers who did not share a language. At this point we want to thank those people again, for agreeing to help us on such short notice. We also had a few final meetings to ensure everybody understood what would happen that friday.

Other preparations included inviting people, buying a lot of chocolate and other gifts and calming each other down periodically, aswell as carrying supplies across town and to many other things to share them all here.

Before the great description of the Living Library, there are a few other things to speak/write about:

On Thursday, we participated in a career event in Zeimuls. All Latvian Universities and many different employers were there to show young people what to do after school, and, of course, at no such event volunteering should be absent. It was a long day, but some people were very interested and we also got a chance to see what higher education in Latvia looks like. We had a little table with a whole lot of material, flyers, leaflets and we also had the possibility to show the video about EVS that Clémence and Georgiana produced.

At about the same time, Moritz had a German lesson in Rezeknes 5th Vidusskola, on the topic of the formerly divided Federal Republic of Germany and the Democratic Republic of Germany.

And now: The Living Library. First and foremost: It was a great event. We started the event at three, but previously we were  working on picking people up from the bus- and train station and getting them to their accommodations. The event starting with familiarizing ourselves with the locale, and going over the rules once more. Afterwards, we started off with one training session. The idea of Living Library is that two people, one being the book, talk to each other about one particular topic, in this case nations and stereotypes- for thirty minutes. It was a very popular event, which many people from the town and even county attended. In the evening, after the event ended, we had a big celebration in JACis and continued to show our guest the rich nightlife of Rezekne. What a day!

Registration desk

Vija is reading a book about Spain and she's using a living dictionary

Kids were very interested about Turkey

The reading room was almost all the time full

Books taking a very short break

Monitoring the books

Our catalogue

All the team at the end of the event: books, dictionary, librarians, organisers

A short evaluation with the books

And now, prizes for the participants

The party after the event

TV-week (2-8.03.2015)

We started this week with stories and legend about romanian celebration of spring. After we cooked a cakes from biscuits, Georgiana presented us the romanian tradition of "Mărţişor".

We found out the semnification of the red and white string that everybody wear it in Romania at the beguining of March. Also we had fun with the tradition of "babele" that tell us that people choose a day between 1st and 9th of March with will represent its "baba" (old lady). So the eather that day will be, so the year and mood for that person will be.

On Wednesday and Tuesday Georgiana organised two big meeting with the future librarian of the event Living Library. Now we can say that all the team are ready for the big event. It was a lot of preparation, discussion, planification. Each member of the team has a very specific role during the event and this week was very important for them to understand it.

Youth from JACis preparing for their task in Living Library

Youth from JACis preparing for their task in Living Library

Library's staff learning about Living Library

Preparing to be a librarian in a Living Library

Finaly we have the EVS movie made by Georgiana and Clemence. Their work was apreciate by a lot of people. The goal of this movie is to show in a simple way the steps that you have to fallow if you want to become an EVS volunteer. Also is a good way to understant what is EVS and to promote this program. You can see the video beneath.

Thursday was the "mass media"day. Two reporters from a local newspaper and a local television visited JAcis and were very interested about our job as a volunteer. They asked us about our task within the project and about our experience in Latvia and Rezekne. For this ocassion with one day before we decorate JAcis and we invited a lot of youth to take part in our activities.

In the morning a new schools decided to visit our center. The kids were very active, they played with us and were very interested in our activities. We did origami with them, talk about our job, play guitar, and had a lot of fun.