EVS on arrival training in Flekke
10th to 16th October 2005

 

Report of the training

The training course took place at the Red Cross Haugland Rehabilitation Centre in Flekke, Sunnfjord. A beautiful location, situated in the Flekke Fjord together with the Red Cross Nordic United World College, a international college with 200 students from over 80 different countries. A suitable place for a on arrival training course.
We had all our meals in the student canteen and some contact with the student community was established.

A on arrival training course is supposed to cover many areas. The participants will be learning about another culture, another language, conflict resolution, rights and responsibilities, the EVS programme etc etc. All this in a short week.

Maybe the most important aspect of a training course such as this is that the volunteers that come from many different countries get to know other young people that are in a similar situation. During this intense week each volunteer get a large network of friends, friends that may be visited during the year in a strange country. Due to this the training team place considerable effort into creating a sociable and inclusive athmosphere throughout the training course.

During the training we had a lot of outdoors teambuilding activities, mountaintrip, kayaking, canoeing, wilderness camp, archery, exploring Dale. All these activities involved working together as small and larger teams, thus leading the people to get to know each other better. One of the activities that the training team missed the most was spending time in the the kitchen and preparing different foods together. This will definately be included in later trainings.

 

We were very lucky with the weather during the training course. only one day with continous rain and several days with sunshine. However, during the half day we explored Dale all the volunteers got to test their wet weather gear. The instructions on what to bring was quite clear, if you can stay dry standing in a shower for 10 minutes you will be OK, most were fairly dry after exploring dale for 5 hours. The local volunteers, Andrea, Lisa and Sandra got to show their home village and even had some guests for tea.

 

One of the activities were kayaking in the Flekke Fjord, this was a very popular experience, several of the volunteers expressed interest in taking this as a hobby. Even though the water was fairly chilled (8-9 degrees C) this did not stop some of the most eager people to take a swim in the fjord

Valérie	Carmen	Sigrid	Aurore