H2O Cultural Heritage and Migration – Sirlen Vodi and Lisett Tiido – 2 months team volunteering in Greece

Name of the project: H2O Cultural Heritage and Migration

Date: 30.05.2023 – 28.07.2023

City/Country: Thessaloniki, Greece

Hosting Organisation: USB

 

 

Sirlen Vodi

I am Sirlen from Estonia and this summer I had a chance to participate in a volunteering teams project for two months in Greece, Thessaloniki.

Being my first volunteering project, it was an amazing and eye-opening experience. The topic of the project was cultural heritage and migration, emphasis on Greece and Turkey. We had participants from France, Italy, Slovakia, Turkey, Greece and Estonia. Most days, we worked in a media lab called Balkan Hotspot, where we had workshops or worked on articles, short films and other ideas we came up with.

The most memorable thing from this project was filming a short documentary about abandoned houses in Thessaloniki. Even though we did lots of different activities and I got to challenge myself in many ways, this is the thing I am proud of the most. We got to explore the city and its history from a different perspective. Also, we had many adventures and unexpected turns of events during this process, which only added to the experience.

Looking back, these two months went by so quickly, because there was just so much to see and do. I got to explore new places, participate in different activities and many other things.

I had a chance to meet and work with interesting people from different countries, and I also got the experience of sharing a house with them.

One valuable thing was to see how things are elsewhere, get to know the culture and the people. The experience of living somewhere completely different was very interesting, to say the least.

Overall, I look back to this experience fondly and I am very grateful for the chance I got.

 

Lisett Tiido

I’m Lisett from Viljandi, Estonia and I’ve been lucky to have this experience by volunteering in Greece. It was such a big opportunity to participate in an ESC volunteering project that got me out of my comfort zone. I spent my two months in Greece, in a city called Thessaloniki.

My project was called H20 Cultural heritage and Migration. Our main focus was about the Balkans and history. We also had to write one article about the subject to the Balkan Beats Magazine and I wrote about deportation in Estonia in 1945. By the end of our project we made a video about Abandoned building in Thessaloniki. In those two months we also helped other volunteers, went to Stratoni Seahorse park opening and to Kalimara for the beach cleaning.

This project gave me so much more confidence mainly speaking in English and also I met so many awesome people around the world.

 

This Project was financed by European Commission’s European Solidarity Corps Programme.