To Better Understand Who We Are And What We Are Doing Here: No Limits to Learning

In the middle of December, connected to EVS programme, the Italian National Agency arranged an on-arrival-training for all evs volunteers who are doing their service in Italy. We volunteers of Mondo Nuovo were informed about the training in November 2011 and also in November 2011 the papers about trainings (schedule, participants list, trips) were sent to us. The training took place in Rimini, between 12-20 december. There were 30 volunteers from 17 different countries. In the framework of this on-arrival training we had a 7-days Italian language course. The language course was given by two teachers in two different classes. The first class which I attended was for beginners, the second one was for intermediate and upper level students. For both groups the language course was totally 24 hours lessons. During the lessons we were taught the basic italian daily speech, the main tenses, the main phrases, how to use question phrases etc. İn the end of the lessons we had a final test. During the 7 days, there were different activities. These activities were devoted to the following topics: “intrapersonal communication”, “communication conflicts”, “evs motivation”, “intercultural communication”, “rights and liabilities of evs volunteers”, “particular phenomena of italian culture”, “italian gestures”, basic information about italian history and italian republic” etc. During the activities volunteers were not passive, on the contrary all the activities were interactive and all volunteers were active. Also the activities were quite funny and emotional. It means it was not boring. İn addition to that, there were two different italian movie nights about mafia and social organisation. After these 8 days, we were given 24 hours of Italian lessons and after the lessons I realized my Italian got better. On the other hand during all the activities I learnt that there is no limits to learning and I was shown what prejudices I have.

Nejdet