Volunteers United: 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!