"It’s been almost two months since we are in Karaman. It was extremely active and productive time, but what is more important the time of our life. 

At the beginning, we went to Adana, very very hot, but lovely city, to spend holidays with our friend’s family. Then we went on a camping to Mersin, another city, located by the coast. When we came back to Karaman it was the time to start planning our future activities, talk about our ideas and make them real. We met with local volunteers, discussed our plans and shared our opinions. In the end, our weekly schedule looks like this:

On Monday we have our English speaking club. Local youngsters are very keen on improving their speaking skills, because usually they don’t have such opportunity. Every Monday afternoon we meet in a park and speak in English about different topics. To make it more interesting we also play games or play instruments, so we have more fun together while practicing the language. On Tuesday and Thursday we organise polish and Spanish classes online. Because of pandemic, it is safer for us and for students not to meet face to face. Also thanks to the fact that classes are online, people from different parts of Turkey can participate :) Our students are kind and hardworking, but also very open, so we became friends with some of them as well.

On Wednesday and Friday our activities are flexible, which means that every week we organise something else for example game day, treasure hunt or bag painting.

It may looks like a week full of tasks and work, but in fact we have also time to spend with our friends from Karaman or to go on a trip and visit new places. By now, except the cities I mentioned above, we also went to Izmir, Çeşme, Alaçatı, Ayrancı, Niğde, Antalya and Alanya. Soon we are going to Kapadokya as well and hopefully it won’t be the last of our trips around the country. We visited a lot of amazing places, saw incredible nature and swam.

It’s been two months and it feels like forever. To be honest, I can admit that this project gave me possibility to develop myself and I can see how I’ve changed. Thanks to people I met here, I learned a lot, gain new experience and now I can say that they are my second family. I am very grateful for such possibility and I can recommend it to everyone to come here as a volunteer."

Kamila Żmijewska , 18.09.2020, Karaman