Hi everyone once again. Today Paula, one of the new Polish volunteers, wants to tell you about their experience at on-arrival training. Here’s her story:

For us on-arrival training was a really great adventure. The first amazing thing is a place of it – Slavske. It’s a little town hidden in Carpathian Mountains. This place is about 1300 km far from Donetsk, so we spent amazing 24 hours in the train. We were travelling at night and during the day we stopped in Kiev to sightsee. We found the city center really beautiful and rich. We’ve seen two monasters and Olimpic stadium. Wanted to see the Museum of Great Patriotic War but by accident we’ve seen the flower exhibition of the anniversary of christianization of Kievan Rus. Poor one! Really. Don’t go there and don’t waste 25 UAH. Then another 12 hours in train and we got out in Slavske.

The training lasted 5 days. We started with introducing ourselves and presenting our projects by painting the flags. We talked about AXA’s insurance and problems with visa. The training contained also workshops about intercultural learning and conflict solving. After the last one we actually found out that in fact we have no problem with our project and organization because we had nothing to talk about during this workshop while the other volunteers had really tough issues. There was also time for our own classes. Even Ola conducted one about dividing into groups.

We really enjoyed the training in Slavske. All the trainers were very nice and opened for our needs. We can’t forget about a food because there was a lot of it. Have to say that it was delicious one; ) The other thing that we are really grateful for was a trip to mountains. Going by railway for some volunteers was a very tough one. Particularly for these who are scared of hight. Last but not least, we like all or almost all volunteers that we met in Slavske. They are great people doing their EVS mainly in Ukraine but also in Belarus and Moldova. Greetings to all!

Then during the rainy night we got into the train to Odessa to see this beautiful city and to finally after two days of journey set ourfoots on Donetsk soil….