Our last week, 10th to 16th of Augst 2015

It is a special occasion, dear readers: This marks the last blog entry of the majority of the volunteers. Next week, Moritz, Clemence and Paul will leave, letting Georgiana alone in JACis, for a while at least. Moritz will go to Sweden, Clem to France and Paul to Germany. As they say in Germany; "Everything good has an end, only the sausage has two" (That is a real thing).

So, understandably, we were all incredibly busy preparing to leave, writing elaborate youth passes, photo books and packing huge pieces of luggage, just as we filled the figurative luggage of our minds with many different memories. Many things will have to stay behind, it is almost sad, but we will have space to gather new experiences with the help of what we achieved here.

But enough of the weird pathos, here is what really happened this week: We went kayaking on river Rezekne, starting about 13 km from upstream from the city. We separated the group into teams and had them solve amusing problems about their fictional European voluntary services, for example saving penguins in the Arctic, survive on the dark side of the moon or bringing teeming flora into the driest of deserts.  We stopped at a beautiful cottage, had a snack and then powered through the rest of the way, often getting out of the boats the push each other over rapids and fallen trees blocking our progress.

On Friday Georgiana and Clemence visited Aglona in one of the most important religious celebration from Latgale. They were surprise to see so many people coming from all over Latvia by car, by bicycle or just by foot in a long pelerinaj to see the procession for the day of Virgin Maria.

 

Summer camps (3-7 of August)

This week was really really special: we took part in two summer camps, we prepared a lot of activities, we had fun and we learnd new interesting things.

On Monday and Tuesday we spend time with the children from the Orthodox church within their camp. In the first day we split them in 4 groups: one of the group played interested board games with Moritz, another group learnd to creat mandale with color string with Georgiana, another one played with frisbee, balls and made bubbles from soap with Clemence and another one where participating in a face paiting workshop organized by youth from JACis.
At the end of the day, after so much work we enjoyed a fresh icecream coktail, with banana and peach. Very tasty :)

The second day, Vitalis came with a lot of ropes and created a small adventure park in the yard of Ortodox school. We helped him with the equipment for kids and safty arrangements. The last part of the day we cooked our traditional German bread.

On Wednesday and Thursday we went in Razna Sanatory, where kids with special needs had a camp suported by the Association "Angels with us". We worked in teams with youth from JACis. We split in 4 groups and we created a treasure hunt. The trail had 4 stops where eachone of our team were expected the kids with differets activities. We also spend time with kids, just playing with them. As it became a tradition, we cooked again our german gread and some barbeque and we lance the fire ballons.