Villa Blogpost January 2024

A new year and a new project is starting in my ESC. From now on, every month there will be an update on this blog, listing all the experiences I’ve gained and just generally giving information about what goes on in my life and all the other volunteers’ lives during our time here.

My name is Adam (he/him), I’m 24 years old, I come from Hungary and I volunteer in the Medienwerkstatt office within the Villa in Leipzig, Germany.

The Villa, being a social center, houses many programs and activities for people of all ages, in the Medienwerkstatt we mostly organize workshops for children and teenagers. I was actually kind of excited to start the new year, because in the upcoming months I will have a lot of new individual tasks to work on. The creative freedom and support that the Medienwerkstatt team provides for this is really inspiring too, because basically I feel that the feedback is more positive from them, if the content I create shows that I had fun making it. To give more concrete examples, we started publishing a new podcast with my colleague, Lena. We go around the Villa just interviewing people about how they got here and what they do, and this has been a great way to actually have meaningful conversations and make long-lasting memories through the recordings. I was feeling that our Instagram page was also lacking the human aspect, only posting pictures of graphics and text, and even though it’s great to communicate information with our followers, I also feel way happier looking at our page now that we started taking pictures with people and posting them regularly. Many international projects are starting this year that I’m excited about. The Medienwerkstatt, together with Shokkin Group and other organizations from Europe, are working on developing educational board games and escape boxes, and I’m becoming more involved by helping with the translation and testing of the material - and hopefully traveling abroad in the next months to have in-person meetings with our cooperators as well. I’m excited to be a part of this and see how this project will develop in the future.

The fact that 2024 is well on its way, also made me think about my personal goals this year, what I would like to accomplish and what work I will have to put in to reach them. Since September, when the volunteering started, I felt like I would like to stay in Leipzig under any circumstances, after the one-year ends. This is still very much a possibility, but now that I experienced living abroad for the first time, I also became more confident in myself that I can do this, and I started wondering what it would be like to live somewhere else in the continent, maybe more close to the sea. It would just be nice to experience the open-mindedness of the people in Spain or Portugal, and experience that lifestyle too. It’s no secret that the German people can be a bit closed off at times, but once you get to know them, they also have a really good humour and can be had truly honest conversations with. Of course, we also have an amazing volunteer group here with very diverse nationalities, and we also came up with some shared goals with my closest friends from the group. With Bohdan, who lived in the Villa last year, but stayed in Leipzig, we decided to run the Hamburg marathon in April, which is a 42-kilometer race, so we started training already. I’m really happy that other people from the group also picked up running recently, so we formed a small running club and can go training together multiple times a week. It feels amazing to be honest, even in the -10 degree weather that was in the city for the past weeks. I was also thinking of starting to save money, to be able to buy a simple road bike in the spring, to explore all the lakes and forests that surround Leipzig.

The group dynamics are pretty well-formed at this, I would say. We often do parties together where everyone is there, who started volunteering in September. It also helps that seven of us live together here, on the top floor of the Villa, so there is always nice company to hang out with and the flat is a really comforting spot too. After going home for the holidays and slowly approaching the halfway point of our year here, I definitely came back with a larger appreciation for the environment and people that we have here, and I can feel this on the others as well. We had a lot of birthdays in December and January, so it was a great opportunity to spend time together and form strong bonds. My birthday was also this month and I got such a nice present from the group, gymnastic rings, which were an amazing upgrade to my workouts. We also love visiting döner and pizza places in the city, luckily there are literally hundreds of them, so it doesn’t look like we’re going to run out in the near future. My favorite currently is Aspendos Grill on Jahnallee. It bothers me a bit that right now we spend so much time at home during the week. Usually by the time me and most of my flatmates finish work, it’s already dark, and as I said before, it's -10 degrees, so we don’t really feel inspired to leave the living room. I’m a hundred percent sure, though, that when spring comes around and the weather will turn nicer, we’ll be outside every day.

I hope I was able to paint a nice picture of my and my friends’ life for all the lovely people who read this post, and I’ll be aiming to go into more details and answer every question in the following blog updates. See you soon!