A message from the Workcamp

Hello people!

This is my third day here at the camp in Fraipont, Belgium. I have a little time to use the Internet, so I decided to leave a post and let you know how it's going here.

I arrived on Monday and met my first volunteer-mate at the station in Fraipont, a lovely small town. She was from Korea and her name is Jihye, that's what I understood after talking to her for 20 minutes :-) Her name was kind of difficult to pronounce. She is very kind and optimictic, although she is not very talkative. She speaks English a little and French un peu :-)

There is also a guy from Japan. These two countries, Korea and Japan, are so far from here and these two guys are in Europe for the first time so I guess it's pretty interesting to come to a workcamp which takes place somewhere in Belgium rather than a regular visit of an european city.

I am actually with two Slovakian guys so it's not as exotic as it might look :-) When we are alone we talk in our mother tongues (and we of course understand each other) but we want to practise English so we talk with the others. I regret not studying French in July. I wanted to improve what I had learnt but because I knew that the spoken language of this workcamp will be English I didn't study anything. I regret it because French is used here a lot so I could practise. I decided I will continue learning French.

Yesterday we repaired a wall and painted it and today we made some decorations and drew on it and because each floor of this building has a different theme which are actually elements such as a water, an air, an earth and a fire, we painted the water floor. We also painted chairs but when we came back from lunch we found our paintings destroyed because some children from the Centre played with it a little bit ... that was kind of sad to see our work's been destroyed ... children are supposed to be angels, aren't they? :-)

There are lots of trips in our programme. We are going to visit Brugge, a nearby city with many canals. And we are also going to a Chocolate Factory! Sounds like fun! We will go to Liege as well. This city is popular for its football team, I think. There will be a concert and maybe we will visit another Red Cross Center, that's not sure yet.

We had a discussion with doctors from this Centre who talked about an asylum seeking
system in Belgium. I will write about it later because I don't have much time now. But the important thing for me was that I now want to know how it goes in my country...

I will continue later ...

Zuzka