A Volunteer Point of View

 A spirit of tolerance and respect by interculturality is a significant topic to discuss under the personal point of view of each student to encourage their opportunities in their future commitments. It is not hard to understand that there are corroborative studies which show that the most eager for experiences and creative people are constantly searching for new spaces to develop their potential. Creating scopes where you can interact with other cultures, distinct languages, ways of thinking and variant struggles (in summary, other people different from us) means to build experience and creativity opportunities.

I am a Spanish volunteer, nowadays I am working in an European Voluntary Service in Arad, Romania. In my own experience, I am dealing with interculturality day by day, not just because I am living in a foreign country but also because I am working with other volunteers from different nationalities. Working as a group with people from other countries you learn to build strategies through discussions among different points of view that produce as a result better outcomes as well as an enriching learning process for the person concerned.

My volunteering consists on working with children in two schools, one Romanian and one Hungarian, the two of them in Arad. We do sports and we create daily activities to prevent children obesity and to show that physical activity is significant. In addition I work dancing Spanish traditional melodies and teaching Spanish language to a group of Romanian teachers.

In my Spanish language classes, besides of learning the most important aims for grammar knowledge, I always use non-formal education. We make games for them to know the habits and traditions and we compare them with their own customs with the purpose of acquiring lore about the culture, also for them to see the disparity at working in an environment in which not only students are learning, also I am uplifting through the outfit constructions that they use to solve the activity suggested.

When I work with the other volunteers creating spaces for games and events for children in the sports class, we share opinions among people from three different nationalities: Macedonia, Portugal and Spain. We develop activities that we used to do when we were children, and Romanian kids are so open to learn how to play or how to manage not the same things they are used to, they even ask us for the translation in our own language of some words and they make a big effort to carry out the pursuits we have prepared for them.

In brief, the adjustment to diversity as a growth and learning process is a personal achievement. Children who develop this kind of practices during their educational years will have seen their potential in linguistic communication skills, in social and citizen crafts and also in artistic talents as an adding part of their knowledge.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Romina Elisondo, Danilo Donolo (2014) : Interculturalidad, apertura a experiencias y creatividad. Aportes para una educación alternativa,Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto. Argentina.