A few reflections

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First a little about myself. My name is Hope, I am now 19, I come from south west England and I have been living in the Lioba Klooster for four months. These months have been filled with surprises and life changing experiences, some of which I will share with you in the following posts.
 I came here with few expectations, my life had been so full of passing exams and applying to university, that I had little time to really think about what the following ten months would involve. This may not have been clever, as in the first few days I was asked many times why I chose to come here, i didn't have a proper answer, but the truth is, it just felt right.

I am going to try and write every few weeks, about something that has happened in the last few months followed by a present thought.
Let me start with my first impressions, followed by how I feel now.

When I first arrived I was struck by the landscape, the never ending fields surrounded by water, and by all the bikes. I thought I had stepped into a stereotypical dutch dream. As I reached the monastery this dream became more beautiful. The old stone walls, the orchard laden with fruit, and the last few blooms of autumn flowers was what i first noticed of my new home. 
My next impression was of the people who would become very important to me over the next few months. The sisters and brother all greeted me with genuine interest, and welcoming greetings. I can tell you, that there is nothing that can make you feel more comforted then heartfelt smiles, and in those first few days, I really appreciated all the kindness I received from everyone i met. I now feel a part of this community, and completely at home here. I want to say thank you to everyone who has help with that.

 Of course there are challenging times, moments of boredom and feelings of anguish or loneliness but these are balanced out by the freedom and peace that can found in the natural beauty of this place. 
When ever I feel these emotions build up in me, i go for a walk or seek the company of the many special people i have got to know over the last few months. Yesterday for example i was missing someone and i decided that i wanted to share the beauty of this place with them through a few photos of the monastery and the sun setting over the sea.
Experiencing this made me feel so happy inside and i didn't want to be anywhere else. 
That the end of my first post and i hope the images make you smile as they continue to make me :)

                                                              Hope 

  

4 months - 4 impressions

Hi!

EVS here is still going on!

I am Antonia from Austria and I am one of the new volunteers for the School voor Vrede.

First, I want to say a big thank you to Ildi and Thuy and also Elina for the impressions they gave us with this Blog before we started here! I am still very impressed from your work here, everything I found from you in the pottery, in the small cupboards, your paintings, from people telling me from your great work in the AZC. And we still have Klintas and Ellies Pen box :)

Hope and I are here since October 2013 and for us lots of things already happened, but I want to tell you about 4 things, which are at the moment strong in my mind:

1. SURPRISES

I am kind of an always-trying-to-organise person and so I tried to organise a picture in my head of how my year here would be.

But it definitely came different.

The kind of work I am doing here is actually how I supposed it to be, but I was very surprised that our coordinator changed already after 2 months and the fact that I didn’t had the feeling somebody is working here in the School for Peace. But after a short shocking-period, I was happy that our new, very nice coordinator Anneke starts working here and would be here much more often.

One really nice surprise for me was that I could decide for two projects outside the monastery to work in. And for me it was always important to do a voluntary year in social environment to get experience. So I now work with the great kids in the refugee centre and with old disabled people in a day- care centre. Doing so many different things once a week is hard, because you need more time to get used to every working field again and again. But now I really feel quite sure everywhere.

And one of the nicest things- the monastery and the people here! I had no idea how it would be to live in a monastery. But I was so positively surprised by the openness of the sisters and the hartelijkheid (=heartiness).  About the help they offer when you need it, about their beautiful psalms in the services and about their always happy faces when they eat the food we have cooked and everything is always: LEKKER!

2. WEATHER

I knew already before I came that in the Netherlands it will be rainy and windy. But if I would have known that it´s so hard and never ending, I would decided to go to the south of Italy or somewhere very warm and dry :P

No, I actually really like northern countries and was curious about landscape and weather and of course the sea- it is so beautiful!

In October I thought I can manage everything like a rough, dutch girl- going by bike by every weather. But after doing this a few times by heavy rain and tornado-wind I was totally finished and hated my bike and the fact that I have to bike here to come from A to B. To not let me pushing down from the weather again I turned meanwhile into a cosy person, who stays at home or takes the bus when dutch winter decides to send wind and rain.

A great girl I met in my the EVS training writes a very beautiful blog about her evs time in the Netherlands and she found the most suitable words for describing the weather here:
http://mydutchdiaries.wordpress.com/2013/11/02/good-to-known-your-enemy/

3.  INDEPENDENCE

Ooh how I looked forward to experience life on my own without my family I lived with my whole life. Even if I feel sometimes a little bit homesick, because I just have a really close relationship to my family and my friends at home, I would not like to be somewhere else!  I know I have grown here personally. I feel so independent and free- away from all the commitments I had at home. I am responsible for what I am doing and manage and organise myself. I have already learned about new things, from the work in the AZC,  a new language, a new culture, life in a monastery and I am still discovering!

That’s a good feeling. I start to get the person I want to be :)

4. ENCOUNTERS

It`s hard here to meet people and to get to know other young people. Hope and I met some really nice persons during our evs training, but they live in whole Netherlands and you cannot see them spontaneous for a cup of coffee or just to hang around. Then I tried meeting young people, went out, talked a lot, everybody was nice but it was not possible to really get to know somebody.

First I thought:  “Oh I am so lonely, I have nobody to talk to “- but fact is that I do have.

I recognized that there are people around who totally care about me, are interested in me and gave me support: the sisters, the brother, nice dutch teacher, people who live or work here and know me, great Willemijn and her lovely family. Thank you!

I learned that Loneliness is part of an evs year and of course also in life.

And sometimes I do really enjoy being alone.

So I end my first entry - four months are over and 6 left. I am looking forward to them!

The weather was so nice on this February Tuesday- felt like spring. Hope and I cleaned the whole wing of the School for Peace and our apartment. Feels so fresh everywhere! :)

Love,

Antonia

 - we are awaiting you with much love. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slcYzUIPSD4

from EVSers with love

Études

1.

There is nothing gentle about the winter here.

2.

There is this thing in the EVS, the Youthpass, and it is talked about like the Resurrection: in mentions, vaguely portentous terms, and no one ever really knows anything.

It is, purportedly, the list of capacities that one manages to acquire during the EVS program.

The keyword is non-formal learning, and the list of competences, starting with obscure concepts like “communication in mother and foreign tongue”, and ends with the similarly fuzzy “cultural awareness and expression”.

I am not even sure why I think about this now, but the whole thing makes me feel indistinctly uncomfortable.

3.

They say that the sad truth about all this is that you may be pretty and smart, but that will not necessarily make you a good person.

I think the only sad truth about all this is that the concept of good has run out of substance in our postmodernist times.

4.

The thing I learnt that will not be on any certificate: to reconcile postmodernist thinking with religiosity, new age spiritualities and activism.

The latters are in fact so similar that it is rather disconcerting.

5.

My friend’s third appeal for status was denied.

I don’t think I should ever learn to cope with this one.

6.

Everyone with some academic background tells me that the place where I live is an ethnographic goldmine. I did start writing up some kind of a furtive clandestine field note, but the thing is that life here is actually quite mundane, so doing anything of sorts is pretty difficult.

But: I started a research project with the refugee centre, and I am very much excited. There will be proposals and methodology and results and conclusions, and I will be going around collecting stories legitimately. I don’t think it will contribute anything to my “character development” by me overcoming a “personal challenge”, but “becoming a good person” doesn’t speak much to me on these terms, so I don’t really mind.

7.

The hearsay is that the picturesque Egmond Binnen where we reside has a brazen nightlife with what you might call a pub culture, so Ildi and I ventured in town at night with all the swag of nameless revolver heroes after having watched some subversive neo-Western haze. We had fun.

8.

I seriously intend to write something informative for future volunteers. You know, we carry on, our present lives, our broken Dutch.

- Thuy

dear Indian,

i feel the lack of our cancelled meeting already. i am still talking to you sometimes in my head - now i try to convert a part of it into written text. hm. perhaps it is even better that i can share pieces of the chaos in my mind that i am continuously trying to organize only now, since i can give account of a basic change happening these days in my attitude towards perception.

to make it clean-cut, i have got into my stride to perform all my plans and tasks. i do not wait for myself  to be mature, prepared and well-skilled anymore. i wake up in the morning and it is just somehow natural that my day becomes so structured by its end without the smallest effort of constructing it -  i find it entertaining.

taking it by and large, my attention is divided into three more or less equally present projects (i do not like this word but now i am too lazy to figure out a proper alternative for it).

in this frosty weather one can hardly feel, but the spring is closer and closer, the time when we will start creating our garden and glasshouse in the yard of the monastery. i have no idea about cultivation. in turn, i have great wishes. this fact presses me to start an investigation on the related methods and techniques.

in the case of the kitchen garden i plan to construct a permacultural site with native species of plants and animals which needs to be planned carefully in the beginning, but becomes almost completely self-sustaining with time. I guess you know the system, but if you have some free time (i know that you rarely do) check this site: http://www.green-shopping.co.uk/ebooks/free-ebooks.html . this afternoon i'm gonna check the farmers in the neighbourhood, in the hope i find someone who is working with permaculture here. we have a common ground, soil and weather features - their experience is most precious. and i love to chat with farmers, indeed. ripping company.

the greenhouse: along with the plants i want to put fish inside. this set-up is the aquaponics that i was talking about to you in Toldi last time. if i really happen to start it, i will write you how that is going.

my other focus is on the work within the refugee camp. we have a lot of fun with the children in the open handcraft workshops, though we communicate in Dutch that is not my second language in fact. we have got to like each other. i have thought of inviting them for some afternoons to work with us in the garden. or rather playing around in the yard.

after discussing it with the sisters it seems that we, volunteers can be a link between the camp and the convent. i am glad that the community of the monastery is open to be involved in activities with the refugees though it is not that all clear yet exactly how. it is something that we have been working out these days.

i discovered after having started to work with these people that i have got to be committed to their case. it is something that just happened. i feel responsible.

the third subject of my focus is a concept that i have been working with in the ceramic workshop. it is related to fish with human heads. but for now this is all i want to say about it.

well, i got bored with writing. but you know that i have never really been fond of it. yep, one more thing... in this past few years that we have known each other i was rather motivated by the activities without taking care of their outcome. i discovered that i am interested in the results again. 

i hope it is going fine with you. write me when you feel like it. please email me your postal address - there has to be at least one postcard that has success in reaching you.

big hug,

ildi

ps. i am still not able to stand on the board.

This one doesn't have a title.

There is a certain inconceivability that pushes at my consciousness: a challenge, a demand – a constant quality.

Budapest is rumbling with student protests, but the drones of discontent fail to reach me.

This silence is a loaded one though, I should think. It is a wail, sometimes, a roar.

Someone once said, the suffering ones are without voices. Give them bread – give them words. Everything outside the discourse, by definition, cannot be conceived of; therefore, wails become real when are moulded into linguistic structures, given meaning, provided author and audience, congruity with the cultural history and the social narrative.

I hear many stories though. And stories beget stories beget narratives from which discourses (lives) evolve. There are some about fragmented pasts; others about resettlement and restitution. Also: fathers and sons, brothers, lovers. Man is a pair of limbs, broken bones, a huge existential void, and Meaning always residing just out of grasp.

I have nothing to add to the margins. Just that: right, maybe it’s true and everyone suffers a bit, and let us "convert neurotic suffering into an acceptance of everyday common misery".

But, there is this,

My dearest Sixsmith;

Unfinished is maybe just evolving and there is space for the unspoken.

I don’t know much about gods, but I reckon that ineffability is no joke.

 - Thuy