Giorgi aicina!

Preparing for the russian culture (19-23rd of May)

The main focus of the 3rd week of May was on practise of our russian cultural performances for the final show on the Day of russian culture on Monday 26th of May. This was a project that we were approached with by our local russian theatre JORIK. The aim was to gather some international people living in Rezekne and make them (us) perform something from russian culture. The  initial idea was to have us learn some poems of russian authors and perform these poems in our native languages. However this has soon evolved and in the end our performance included a traditional russian group dance, short acts in russian, singing russian songs and of course, performing poems in both russian and several other languages.

And so we practised... Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday (dance) AND Friday. Plus we added an extra rehearsal on Sunday just to be sure our acts are in TOP shape. We would have also rehearsed on Thursday but we decided to make a JACis team and take part in a KROKA orientation run around Rezekne organized by the local HEI Student Council. What a crazy idea, running all around Rezekne for almost 3 hours, performing tasks and all that in 30 Celzia temperatures. 

Our Friday JORIK practise was however after work so before that we managed to spend a few sunny hours in the park, playing frisbee games, inventing some ourselves and a game or two of petanque. Friday was also a day when Prokop had a final English lesson with one of our regulars, Karina, who was to write a final English exam the following week and guess what... she got the best score from her school! Congratz Karina.

5-11rd of may

I'd like to tell you what happened the first week of May  and how volunteers worked in JACis.

The first week of May started very interestingly. Prominent Russian theater actor Anders came and offered us to participate in a poetry evening.

Zeimulis volunteers - Anna and Carmen, Polish school volunteer - Karina, theater volunteers - Nastya and Enrique, Erasmus student – Gulish, together with JACis volunteers got involved in the project. Rehearsals were very interesting and entertaining.

At first during rehearsals there were too many faults, but in the end the actor's commitment and our hard work yielded good results.

On May 5, we went to the theater, where they divided as into groups and hended Russian poets’ works. I chose a very famous poem “Morning Caucasus” by Mikhail Lermontov.

On May 8, we attended the art day, which took place in Rezekne Central Park. Pilars and Lucy had

different costumes of birds, which was sewn from fabric and papers. Unfortunately, a lot of nice and interesting costumes were spoiled by latvian rain.

On May 9, we were rezeknes at Rezekne’s third high school, where we held our last lesson. As always, there were an interesting

JACis organized another charity trip to Lepu Kaiak. We had prepared a variety of entertainment for children. Games were very interesting for the children. 

We did perfomance  cartoon "Shrek" characters and the childrenhad fun. We planted trees together with bavshvetb.

We overlooked from the tallest tower of  Latgalia and I can essure you that there was a very nice view. It was ver interesting for us.

The three days before the hollidays

This week was one of the shortest we had in JACis - only three days. On the other hand however we tried to make the days we have as good as possible.

On Monday we busied ourselves and a few kids in JACis with a game I like to call Comics Jam and learned in Bulgaria. It's a process if making different comics but instead of creating one alone the people have to work together -drawing one picture of the story and giving the pepper to somebody else. This way the stories become even more interesting and funny.






This Monday the Jam was rather small but I have plans to make it into a bigger event.

On the other day, Tuseday, Prokop did his workshop - how to make a flowerpot out of used stuff, in particular - used plastic bottles, coffee beans, pepper, etc. I think the flowerpots turned to be pretty interesting and the kids liked doing it. What do you think?






The same day we collaborated yet again with 'Angels with us' and went to Zeimuls to work with disabled children. This events are always interesting and even a little bit emotional for us, as working with this kind of children is difficult but educational with the same time and definitely can fill you up with humbleness.

Friday was anticipated they from the volunteers of the project "Connected by rivers". Why? Because this was the day four Polish people, two volunteers and two leaders, from the project come to Rezekne for a meeting.


I asked Agita, a Latvian volunteer to the project, to tell me a little bit about her feelings to the meeting.
' I really liked meeting with the Polish people who worked on the project ‘Connected by rivers’. To this day the only contact we had with them was through the internet and it was interesting to see them in person and to be able to talk about the project. Together we walked around the Rezekne town and we were really pleased that they liked it and appreciated the new cultural centers.
I could tell they are really nice people and we all hope to meet again in the future – trough the project and not.'

We, the EVS volunteers in JACis however, after meeting with the Polish guests decided we have to still work with the JACis kids and, leaded by Georgi and Prokop, take them out to for a play of football. Where we do this event all the children really enjoy it we can see how passionate they are for the game. The competition between the two teams was great.
Let just say that in the end our team won ;)