Hello there again, it’s Helen, a long-term volunteer at Pi Youth Association from Germany. After nearly six months in Izmir, I’ll give you another short summary of my experience in this third blogpost.
It’s hard to believe that this blog post already marks the half-time of my volunteering experience in Izmir. The past six months probably have been the most exciting time of my life, even though I have now reached a point where I’m just enjoying the everyday life and simple things of living in the city with amazing people around me.
I like the fact that going to the busy Sunday Bazaar, which was a new cultural experience for me in the beginning, has become a routine now. It makes me happy that I can actually tell people where the izban is going when I get asked by a local. And I love coming home to my flatmates to discuss the day and share the newest gossip.;)
What also has become a part of our routine here are the weekly Turkish lessons, with which I finally feel like making a bit of progress with my Turkish. I’m still far from having proper conversations, but I hope that by joining additional Turkish Conversation Clubs with local volunteers I will at least gain some more confidence with the Turkish language by the end of my volunteering.
The workshops I’m organising with Pi Youth Association are still enjoyable, even though we struggled with participant numbers for some time. I appreciate the variety of places we work with at this point and that I have consistent as well as new workshops where I can engage more with the participants or try out new games and methods. Especially the number of workshops with younger children increased, which I started to enjoy more than I would have expected. Maybe because I feel more encouraged to speak Turkish to them knowing that they don’t care about my language skills.
However, my highlight of the workshops was that my flatmate Laura and I finally managed to organise a Yoga workshop at the office of Pi Youth Association, which we hopefully will continue to do every week.
With 15 other internationals and also multiple Turkish volunteers, getting bored in Izmir is basically impossible. You might think it’s harder to find things to do in winter, but in Izmir, that’s definitely not the case. In the past two months we did not only go to bars, clubs, concerts and football and volleyball matches of Buca and Karşıyaka, but also did a bicycle tour on the coastline, played football and volleyball in Bostanlı and went hiking in Balçova. On top of that we finally visited Ephesus and the beautiful town of Şirince. It is those group activities that make my life in Izmir very special and I am very thankful to have met those incredible people here, who are always up for exploring new things in and around the city.
The images attached to this blogpost can only capture a tiny part of the wonderful memories I made in the past two months. I did not expect the season, which is considered cold and rainy here, to be in fact sunny and enjoyable. Being used to depressing winters in Germany, I would even go as far as to say that this was probably the most amazing winter I’ve ever experienced!