EVS Stories: Truth is stranger than fiction (III) – by Martina and Rafa

If you have to compare your volunteering experience with a movie or a book, which would it be and why? Here is what two of our volunteers answered:

Martina Lolini – Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

I always wanted a beautiful and joyful Volkswagen van, maybe colored, maybe only yellow.  Physically I don’t have it, but after I started the EVS I felt like I was driving an old and yellow Volkswagen!

I was asked:《if you have to choose a movie to describe your EVS, which movie would you select?》. Well, for me it’s quite easy to make up my mind. The answer is Little Miss Sunshine! That’s why my EVS is like a yellow, old Volkswagen that carries me around!

I’m not here for a beauty contest (for sure not!), but my experience is very similar to Holly and her family’s situation from the movie  (of course, based on my interpretation of the movie 🙂 ).

I started the EVS with some expectations and after I arrived some of them have confirmed, some of them not and new ones born. Like Holly, I always have my family and my friends to cover my back all the time, but this experience helped me to better know myself, to find my certainties, to feel good with my way of doing things. It is, above all, about discovering me and my world!

I’m not at the end of the movie, my EVS is still in journey time (revoking the movie) and I don’t know how the ending will be. But I hope that, like Holly at the end of her story, I will be able to dance and to make myself and the people around me (both Italians and Romanians) proud of my performance!

Rafael Cano – Avatar (2009)

If I have to compare my life before and during the EVS I am doing in Baia Mare (Romania) with a film, for sure I would choose Avatar.

Summarizing a bit, I used to feel in Spain like the main character: he is in a wheelchair for life, and so he decides to move into a special mission in another planet in order to investigate a new energy source.

Being metaphoric, I was feeling I would miss a year in Spain before finishing my degree in Universidad de Córdoba, but I found another chance: to move in a different country, with very strange people (for me), without any idea on what to expect about this “new planet”.

For me, this new people, Romanians, are like the inhabitants of the planet, the decision of doing my EVS here is like the escape way of the main character and finally. The energy source they are looking for in the film is (compared to) all my goals and expectations in here, like learning Romanian, learning about the teachers and professionals. I’m working with, and overall to raise myself in the best way I can, taking good and bad stuff in order to know myself a bit better and to grow up as a person.

Last but not least, actually these are the best things in an abroad experience for me, I want to profit about the stuff I didn’t imagine I would live in here, like it’s happening to the main character at the end of the film.

Martina Lolini (Italy) and Rafael Cano Malagón (Spain) are hosted in Baia Mare by Team for Youth Association, in the “Life Skills for Rural Education” project, an European Voluntary Service, financed by the European Commission, through the Erasmus Plus Program.