mediart evs evt maris lepp greece vabatahtlik volunteer kreeka praxis

MEDIART – MARIS LEPP – 9 Months Volunteering in Seres, Greece

Hi! I am Maris and I am one of those, who decided to flip her life upside down and take part of EVS. Mine just happend to be in even more crazier Greece.

This whole journey was everything I never expected it to be. It was an adventure for sure. Adventure of a lifetime.

If someone would have asked me if I ever imagined that I will be living in Greece and call it my home, my answer would have been no. But yet Greece became my home.

How can I describe my nine months in Greece shortly? Exciting, developing, eye-opening, experimental, full of adventures and discoveries, challenging would be first words that come to my mind.

My colorful days at „Mediart“ project were filled with working in the local radio station Rodon FM 95 doing technical control for Morning Shows and creating live radio broadcasts of our own. Or putting my best photography and video-editing skills out there to create social media content and campaigns for UNESCO’s International Days. From time to time tasting the role of a journalist while writing articles. Every day we also opened our info-center for the youth from the local refugee camp to learn English, use computers. Together we organised events for the leisure time, which also meant hiking in the nature, football Fridays, movie evenings and so much more.

Our EVS experience was totally in our hands. Our organisation kindly gave us tools to use and create project on our own, which of course can be challenging at first when we just got to know the new country and work environment and people around us, but once getting a hang of everything, gives many opportunities. For me one of those opportunities was to make my own live radio broadcasts at Rodon FM 95. I remember how before arriving to Greece it was one of my biggest fears. How me – Maris, am able to speak in the radio. I had thousands of questions in my mind and repeated to myself that no, I am not going to do it. But here I am, nine months later with 105 broadcasts in my portfolio.

And for me the beauty of this kind of projects is the open mindset or optimistic belief that you can do anything if you only want to. It might be scary in the beginning, but you have this safe environment around you to try and learn. And most importantly you have around you like minded young people, who are motivating and supporting you in work and everyday life. Within last 9 months in Greece I met so many wonderful people from all over the world. People who’s stories have taught me so much about myself, about other cultures… Well, pretty much how life works in general. We are now world citizens with wider world view and perhaps little more open mindset.

Being an EVS volunteer in another country and dedicating 9 months of your life to do something meaningful in local community. The thing is you never know what the impact of your activities might be. It might be something really small, but still make someone elses life better. You can say I am a big believer that every person can make a difference in the world and that small acts matter. Our work with the youth who took part of our activities in PRAXIS Greece Youth Info-Center or at radio Rodon FM 95 is important and we gave our best. But most importantly we enjoyed. Enjoyed the experience, enjoyed the time with our friends, enjoyed our time in Greece.

Country itself offered so much! Spectacular places and views out of the best travel magazine, kindest people, worry-free attitude towards life, amazingly tasty food and suprises at every corner (here I am mostly talking about crazy traffic, double or triple parking). It is hard not to love Greece with all it’s beauty and with all it’s weirdness. I learned to enjoy life and take it siga siga (google it!).

Steve Jobs has said that the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. This is the reason why I took part of EVS, spending my 9 months in Greece, trying out different things, developing myself and mastering my skills. I believe that everything we do adds up and is beneficial for our future. It’s important to keep moving forward and finding in what we are best at. But if we don’t try, we will never know.

Is EVS experience worth it? Definetly. I wouldn’t change it for anything And yes, go for an EVS while you still can and create memories that you can share with your family, friends, everybody how awesome life can be.

Stay humble!

Check out from the video below how our daily life looked like in Serres, Greece.