I, Victoria Hein, am part of the reformed parish of the small town Nagybereg since the beginning of October 2015 and until July 2016. I mainly work in the Roma Mission, which means that I wake up every morning at 7 am and go to the kindergarten for four hours. In the afternoon I help with youth groups twice a week. I also visit elderly women who I spend time with talking to and helping out. In addition to that I sometimes teach English to students of the local boarding school. The number of children we sing, play and craft with at the kindergarten varies from six to ten kids depending on the weather. After this short period of time I have already become very fond of them and know now that kindergarten teachers are certainly not to be underestimated - because telling a fairy-tale in a foreign language or explaining the difference between numbers and letters is in fact not that easy.

 

Before I came here I did not expect that people can be so thin while eating so much. As a matter of fact, we have someone who deliciously cooks for us, not to mention the amount of food. Interestingly tea seems to be the main drink around here, something that I thought I would rather find on the other side of Europe.

I guess I should be telling you something about the church here as well since it is practically my employer. I attend the service every Sunday, but so far I can only say that there are a few differences from my protestant church in Saxony. Despite my improvement in Hungarian (my starting conditions were slightly better than the others', since I am half Hungarian) the „church language" is still a bit too hard for me.

For when I usually talk to people they are all friendly enough to overlook my terrible grammar mistakes and speak extra simple for me. The fact that my Hungarian is improving so much is for the most part due to Viki, our language teacher, who deals with our linguistic gibberish every Thursday morning and tries to at least add some order to it. Seemingly she is quite successful.

I do not only go to language classes with the other volunteers but we also do a lot together outside of the program. We have already been up the Carpathian Mountains twice with the parish of Beregszasz; our last journey, however, led us a bit further away: straight through the Balkans.

Overall, we are doing very well here and I can say that I am certainly very glad to spend this year in                                                                Ukraine.