Letónia

3500

Data de início: 02-12-2013

Data de fim: 02-12-2014

Vagas: 1

Duração: 12 mes(es)

Data limite de candidatura: 26-05-2013

Financiamento: Candidatura

Subsídio mensal (Dinheiro de bolso): 80 €

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Resumo: Latvia is a country in East Europe near the Baltic sea with 2.5 million inhabitants. The hosting organization is situated in a middle-size Latvian town located in the south-east of the state.

The distance from the town to the capital Riga is 260 km. But connection between these two towns is very good: a lot of trains and buses. 38 thousand people inhabit the town. They have different nationalitiesand the most part of them are Latvians and Russians. The town is rich of nature gifts. The area of the region is famous for its lakes and hills, forests and parks which are the decoration for the town and excellent opportunities of recreation for visitors and inhabitants.. There is a Higher Educational Institute, Music College, Art College, some technical and professional schools, seven secondary schools, a professional theatre, and museums. Our town is famous for unique ceramics and handicrafts and Latgalian traditions. Latgalian region is less developed economical region in Latvia but local people try to improve this situation and develop tourism and small businesses in Latgale.

In the town there are a lot of national minorities. So the people live very friendly in multinational and multicultural society respecting each other with mutual understanding. For the volunteers who come to our town there will be opportunity to live in the multinational society and get some experience and knowledge about new European country, Latvian culture and Latgalian traditions.

Perfil: We will be very glad to welcome a young European, boy or girl, from 18 to 25. She/he will have to be able to establish a real relationship built on empathy, integrity and consideration and most important trust with the residents and the staff.

We would like him/her to be dynamic and enthusiastic, to have sense of responsibility, ability to raise interest, readiness to become a friend and a listener for old people, ability to use own skills and experience. To organise his/her own activities, the volunteer should be able to plan his own work and to be autonomous.

The volunteers will have to show interest and sensibility towards old people and will be able to use and show empathy, integrity and to be considerate. All skills which can allow them to develop new animations in our centre are welcomed.
We hope they are ready to take creative duties and to be responsible and autonomous enough to propose, prepare and organize new activities and their own work according to these skills.

Tarefas: The main objectives of the day care centre are to provide help and human contact. As a consequence of the interaction between the young volunteer and the elderly residents there is a mutual enrichment which constitutes the basic aim of this activity. The project gives these old people the opportunity to get to know other cultures, customs and languages and at the same time to provide the European volunteer with a deeper knowledge of Latvia's past. It will also provide the pensioners with a sense of accomplishment at being both a teacher and a student.
By hosting young Europeans, we hope to extend their views on Europe, to allow them to get a better view of a newly entered EU country and what it means to enter into the European Union. It is also a chance for them to be part of a new community, adapting to a new language and allowing them to travel again or for the first time, providing them with a different outlook on Europe.

Role of the Volunteer
The volunteer will help the staff in the general running of the centre, to help in particular with the preparation of discussions and meetings which are organised on Tuesdays. They will also develop relationships with the old people through helping in and creating activities such as:-

- Organizing art workshops: painting, drawing, handicraft.
- Gentle fitness activities or sports games maybe to try and organize excursion to the swimming pool
- Playing music
- Organizing decorations for parties: Christmas, Easter, Valentine…
- Doing some handicraft: weaving, knitting, dying material..
- To go on excursions such as picking mushrooms, helping with the gardening, going to museums
- To provide language lessons around some games

The work time of the Pensioner Daytime Centre is from 8.00 a.m. - 5.00 p.m., 5 days a week, weekends are free. The volunteer will invest himself/herself in working with pensioner 6 hours a day, from 9.00 till 12.00 a.m. and to 1 to 4 p.m.

On arrival at the centre the volunteer will be given training and provided with an intensive language course in the first month that the volunteer must attend. After this if he/she desires we can organise regular language lessons twice a week.

The volunteer will have continuous aid during his/her voluntary project, because he/she will need a bit of support while he/she is working here in order to be able to know what to do and how to behave in certain situations. There is no specific course, but the volunteer learns through day to day activities. The volunteer will have the support of the tutor in his/her activity and a mentor who will help him/her with other issues such as accommodation, money, problems or adaptation to the community, this person is also responsible to provide any changes that the volunteer might need and will meet with him/her on a regular basis.

Our centre requires four volunteers who will work together, the expectations we have of hosting young European Volunteers are to make our people's life in the centre more interesting and enthusiastic, to help them to get a real personal and social wellbeing. We hope for the volunteers and our people to learn from each other, to get a mutual enrichment, to build some bridges in the same time between the young and the former generation, and between nationalities. So, they will have the ability to build strong and trusty links with the residents, to be available for them and to spend time to understand their desire and requirement, to incite them to take part in different activities by organizing and proposing more social and cultural leisure.
Our staff are very hard working and not always available to spend as much of their time as they would like to with each of the residents. We hope the volunteer will fill the gap by spending their time with the residents, discussing issues or just listening to them. We hope they will be able to develop communication in our centre between the residents themselves, and also between the residents and the staff, to become a communicable relay between the different entities constituting our centre, because each element has an essential role for the good work of our institution. So, by listening and being attentive, they will have to understand their needs, to organize some activities corresponding to these wishes, to help us to prevent the danger of isolation, marginality and lack of communication and finally to allow them to remain being active longer and to keep contact with the outside world.
To sum up, we hope in the same time to provide young Europeans with the opportunity to discover life in our country, to allow our people to touch our new reality by an enthusiastic way and to promote the European integration.
The volunteers will work there on week days from 9.00 am to 12.00 and from 1.00 pm to 4.00 pm. But sometimes the timetable can change according to the different events and celebrations organized in the centre (work in the evening, sometimes during the week-end, for example to accompany some excursions…)
On arrival at the centre the volunteers will be given training and provided with an intensive language course in the first month that the volunteers must attend. After this if they desire we can organise regular language lessons twice a week.

A typical working day:
9.00 am - 10.00 am: preparation for the day's activities,
10.00 am - 12.00 am: working with old people, helping the staff organize events
12.00 am - 13.00 pm: lunch
13.00 pm - 14.00 pm: development of new leisure activities
14.00 pm - 16.00 pm: Working with old people, helping the staff organize events

The volunteers will truly be considered as a member of the team. They will also take an active part in our work meetings, chat groups. They will be involved in the animation activities of the centre, as leading some discussion, workshops or preparing celebrations, and will have especially the task to incite the most isolated people to go to the group and to integrate it.
They will have to be company for our residents: Talking and listening to them, reading books, playing and organizing some games, going for walks, helping them to go shopping; talking to the people who are very ill especially those who cannot leave their bed or reading them the newspaper to keep them connected to the reality of the world they live in.

They will also be in charge of organizing and developing new social and cultural activities inside and outside the centre: to help in the preparation of celebrations, to organize different activities as games, cultural events and visits, arts and craft, daily and evening out. We are expecting and open to the offers the volunteer may bring from his/her own experience.

As a way for our residents to learn about other countries and traditions, another part of the volunteer's job will be to make our residents discover his/her own culture, by organizing different kind of animations: exhibitions, special weeks (for example a taste week, traditional week…), discussion groups, specific decoration, traditional cuisine from his/her country, language lessons… We can also imagine different events according to the own skills of the volunteer: if he/she is a musician, some small concerts, if he/she is a visual artist some exhibitions of his/her own creations…

A typical week/day will look as follow: preparation of the daily/weekly activities (30%), work on special events and celebrations (20%), organisation of animations about his/her own culture (20%), development of new leisure activities (20%), other tasks according to volunteer's skills (10%).

Documentação: CV + Carta de Motivação em Inglês