Hi, it’s me again, Helen from Germany. I am already in my fourth month here in Izmir, working with Pi Youth Association. It’s unbelievable how fast the time has passed and how much has happened. Let me summarize it for you:
Over the last two months, I’ve really started to get into a routine with the workshops and driving around the city every day. My workshops have also become much more diverse, meaning that I’ve now worked with nearly every possible target group of Pi Youth Association. From very young children, to primary school, high school, and university students, and even middle-aged women, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a variety of groups. Each group also had different levels of English or German, so I had to come up with new ideas and methods all the time.
I really can’t say which group I enjoy working with the most because each workshop presents its own challenges, but they can also be very enjoyable when the participants are having fun. For example, while younger children are often more difficult to handle, they are very expressive about enjoying the workshops, which makes me really happy. Students, on the other hand, are easier to communicate with, but are often much more reserved when it comes to providing feedback, which makes it more difficult to come up with engaging activities for them. Either way, I’m trying to make the best of it and will continue to do so over the coming months. ☺
One event I particularly enjoyed in the last two months was the German Cultural Night we organized with all the German volunteers. To be honest, it wasn’t easy to come up with a program that could summarize everything about Germany in just two hours, especially because we all had slightly different ideas of what “being German” meant to us and what we wanted to prioritize. Also, as Germans, we’re not exactly used to presenting Germany in an “advertising” way, since we weren’t exactly taught to be proud of our country.
However, during the process, we realized that there are indeed things we can be proud of, without being considered nationalistic (a term that has a negative connotation in Germany for obvious reasons). In the end, discussing typical German things, habits, and food with the other German volunteers was very enjoyable, and I was really happy with what we managed to present at the Cultural Night. Especially preparing and sharing some German food after three months in Türkiye, and seeing how much others enjoyed it too, was great! ☺
A highlight of the last two months was our trip to the east of Türkiye. We decided to take a day off to visit Gaziantep and Mardin before heading to Diyarbakir for our Midterm Training organized by the National Agency. In Gaziantep, we met volunteers we had gotten to know during our On-Arrival Training in October and stayed at their accommodation for two nights, which was a lovely old Armenian house.
They showed us the coppersmith bazaar, the second largest mosque in Türkiye, and took us to try the famous Gaziantep cuisine. It didn’t take us long to realize that this part of Türkiye is completely different from Izmir, not just because of the size of the city, but mostly due to the culture, which is far more traditional and less westernized than in Izmir. The same was true for Mardin and Diyarbakir, both of which were fascinating due to their ancient architecture and intriguing history. I highly recommend anyone visiting Türkiye to explore the eastern part of the country as well, and not just the famous tourist spots in the west. I would have loved to spend more time there to truly get to
know the place and its people, but for now, I’m just really glad that I at least got a sense of the incredible diversity in Türkiye.
