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Raising the mast

EVS Dnevnik, nekategorizirano, stari blogi, , , , , , , , , ,

Ena izmed nalog, ki so del mojega prostovoljnega dela tu v Cartageni, je tudi EVS dnevnik. Tega naj bi pisal približno enkrat mesečno. Prvih nekaj zapisov bo v angleščini, kasneje, ko se izboljšam v moji Španščini, pa upam, da bom lahko kaj napisal tudi v španskem jeziku.

This year’s late spring is slowly getting in and with warm weather looming at the gate, the volunteers in this EVS project are getting new and different tasks.

As the sailing season is coming close, there are more and more tasks in the harbor, connected to the sea and boats. Some time ago, we took a boat called Cuncun out of the  watter to prepare it for the new season. We cleaned it’s underbelly scratch it well with sandpaper and re-painted it with a new coat of protective color. There was also some work on a boat called Colorines. An old motor boat, that was on dry land on my first visit to Los nietos is now in the watter looking as good as ever. There was a lot of work done by the volunteers from Cartagena, european volunteers helped just a couple of times. Some of the things that needed to be done were closing the propeller opening  (done on dry land as I mentioned on one of the previous posts), installing bowsprit (bauprés) in the front of the boat, preparing the mast with the pulley at the top, cleaning and painting the whole boat, adding anti-slippery sand  on the walking surfaces, making new tops for the hull openings and other things. Just yesterday we rose up the mast and fixed it firmly to the boat. With that the boat is sea-worthy and ready to go sailing what we plan to do today. I have to mention again, that most of the work here was too detailed, hard or complicated so unfortunaty we couldn’t help as much as I would like to.

We also started working in the social center. That work was mostly in the library and teaching English to children. We put our new designing skills to practice when we were asked to design posters. The first batch was for English classes and the second for the sailing course that will happen in the beginning of May.

We had another course in Spanish, these time the topic was photography. As documenting the summer boat races is be a part of our job, we need to know how to make good photos. The mentor in the class gave us some basic pointers about photography and how to be a bit better that average.

At the beginning of this week we went a bit out of town, where we stayed for most of the day. The purpose of the trip was to prepare the program and games for the summer school for kids that live in Santa Lucia and Cartagena. There will be two summer schools, each lasting a week. Together with the kids we will learn about the sea and the effects that humans have on it.

We spend a lot of our time also on Spanish classes that have been delivered by our mentor Carmen since our stay here began. We are slowly building up our Spanish vocabulary and slowly starting to communicate a couple of sentences in Spanish.

Settling in, going to school and painting a boat

EVS Dnevnik, , , , , , , , , , ,

Ena izmed nalog, ki so del mojega prostovoljnega dela tu v Cartageni, je tudi EVS dnevnik. Tega naj bi pisal približno enkrat mesečno. Prvih nekaj zapisov bo v angleščini, kasneje, ko se izboljšam v moji Španščini, pa upam, da bom lahko kaj napisal tudi v španskem jeziku.

Tu je torej prvi od teh zapisov:

First week on my EVS was comfortably slow. I arrived to Cartagena on Sunday, 8th of February, late in the evening. I met one of my co-volunteers, as the second was not yet in the city. I settled into my new room and than we went out to see the city and have our first caña y tapas.

The day after my second coworker arrived. During the week we got familiar with the neighborhood that we live in, learned a little bit about Amigos de la Vela Latina, the organization that we’ll be working for and had a tour of the city.

We also had our first working experiences within the project. On Wednesday afternoon we drove to Los nientos, where our organization has some of it’s boats moored. One of them is an old fishing boat that was donated to the organization. It used to be a motor boat, but now it’s being renovated and turned into a lateen sail boat by the members of the organization. The plan is to go north with it sometime in the early spring, so it has to be ready by then. This requires some basic maintenance, like painting all parts of the boat, but also some more serious modifications. The opening where the propeller used to be has to be closed, the keel has to be lowered and strengthened, the motor and the opening that it sat in has to be closed, the mast has to be prepared and set in place … The volunteers were working on the simpler part of the operation. We had to paint the mast, the boom, the rudder and some other parts. As the whole boat is made from wood, protection against strong sun and salty watter is crucial.

On Friday, we got the second taste of our work here. We went to a local school, where we had presentations of our home countries to the kids studying there. The school is in poorer part of the city, so some of the kids there don’t have as many opportunities as the rest of us. They might not be able to afford to travel around and meet people from other nations, so this was one of the rare opportunities for them to hear about our countries directly from their citizens. It was very lovely when one of the girls came to us after presentation. She told us that she moved here from Ukraine and was thrilled about listening about our countries. This kind of feedback was a great reward for the hours spend preparing the talk.