Hello! I am Carlos, a 19 years old Spanish student, and this is my article about volunteering with Youth for Equality through the European Solidarity Corps in Trnava, Slovakia.
As I live somewhere, certain places slowly acquire meaning. Trnava is no exception. On the volunteering’s first day, we paced through the picturesquely medieval yet highly modern city unaware of all the memories the different streets, monuments and parks would forever conjure.
Over its long history, Trnava has spread well beyond the 13th century walls, now encompassing more than 70 thousand square kilometers for its 63000 inhabitants. These figures could have never saved me from the surprise of finding a lively, vibrant young city offering diverse activities for when our obligations ended: running and biking across the beautiful Slovak fields, swimming at the pool, strolling through the accessible streets and meeting locals at bars and billiard. The lush Hospodárska, Ružový, Janka Krála, and Tchaikovsky parks provided shelter from the heat and refreshing green spaces in which I felt reconnected to my surroundings and awed by nature. These feelings don’t usually come top of the list of expectations, but I gladly welcomed them.
If one enters Trnava through the North, after a Lidl store and the Aquapark they might find themselves in a lovely street named Hornopotočna. In that charming passage Marco and Yolan, from France, Timur, from Germany, and I did more than share an apartment: we truly lived together in friendship, taking care of the chores without formal schedule sheets, watching the World Cup (luckily without matches between our teams) and conversed plenty around the house and at the table. Over time, I grew greatly fond of my roommates: the energetic engineer apprentice, the glee to-be journalist, and the ironic political science student. As my first time living with peers, it set a high bar.
Further south and across the matcha café runs the pedestrians-exclusive Hlavá Ulica (Main Street) under the watchful gaze of St. Joseph’s Church, cooled down by a hanging water-diffusion system; one of the many signs along reads “Youth for Equality.”
In that office, from the very first day great efforts into building a team out of the volunteers established an atmosphere of creativity and free flow of ideas guided carefully through positive feedback by the organizing team. Non-formal learning and thoughtful workshops reinforced our motivation with knowledge, and the combination of similar ideas and values with different class, cultural and educational backgrounds fertilized the soil in which the seeds of the project would grow. As my first contact with an NGO, it wildly transformed my vision of them from “well-intented but unofficial” to “hard-working, flexible and creative.”
Out of all the green spaces in Trnava, the Ružový park stands out for its carefully grown flowers (ružový means roses) and gentle feel. I first knew it as a great spot for playing Dvouhlave Hraci Karty, then as the main stage for our project.
On its grass, we combined two weeks of brainstorming, planning and crafting into a two-day festival as part of the City Health Week. The nutrition, medical, sports, and mindfulness stations, fruit of our efforts, resonated with our personal experiences and knowledge, and working on them truly tied us closer and filled us with motivation as we saw our ideas turn into tangible products.
For me, this meant joining my scientific background with my experience in child care (previous volunteering activities, but mostly dozens of cousins) to transform accurate papers into relevant nutritional information for teenagers that focused on health rather than aesthetics. Finally, we dressed up the lessons as games.
As my time in Trnava runs short, I stand sad to leave but happy to do so with such lasting experiences: the many activities in the city and surroundings, the office’s fun-but-productive dynamic, our apartment up Hornopotočna, and the exciting project we delivered. I will always carry with me Trnava’s architecture, now painted with meaning, and, most importantly, the memory of all the wonderful people I have chanced so luckily to meet.
