Everything Is Possible has just released the magazine of Comic Sans, our latest project. This is our way to celebrate this brilliant Grundtvig Workshop which gave teachers and other professionals supporting adults around Europe the opportunity to learn how to use comics as a tool for teaching literacy.

Comic Sans supported by ECORYS UK and the Lifelong Learning programme of the European Union took place between the 2nd and the 9th November in Leeds (UK). During one week, participants developed skills and knowledge in photo comics, hand drawn comics, animation and other methods.

The Magazine:

Come to our office in Leeds if you want a printed copy!

This Grundtvig workshop is funded via the Lifelong Learning programme, which has been replaced  by the new European programme Erasmus+ in 2014.

This is it, we’re on our way. Feeling simultaneously nervous, apprehensive and totally, utterly excited. In some time I will be in Peru, in South America, in the continent I have so desired to travel to for so many years; the continent of wild jungles, breath-taking mountainous expanse, of colourful culture and ancient civilisations. I wonder how different I will be in 10 months’ time, what I will have seen, who I will have met – how much I’ll learn from throwing myself into the unknown. The uncertainty of travel is what makes it so exhilarating, that sense of not knowing what could happen – the imagination runs wild, there is the possibility for everything in the unpredictable, unlimited potential in what has not yet passed.

Our journey is a long one; it will take over thirty-six hours door to door. The first leg of the journey is from London Gatwick to Madrid (with a welcome unexpected upgrade to business class), and then we’ll fly 13 hours from Spain over the Atlantic to Lima where an 8 hour layover awaits until our final domestic flight to Trujillo, our home for the next 10 months.

We’re Fin and Katalina from West Yorkshire, 21 and 19 respectively, volunteering in Peru with SKIP (Supporting Kids in Poverty), an NGO, UK registered charity and US registered non-profit that works with impoverished families primarily in El Porvenir, a suburban district of the northern Peruvian city; Trujillo. The charity aims to provide holistic support to families, tackling the problems that prevent them from escaping poverty from every angle. From children’s education and school/materials funding, through economic development via microfinance loans and business management assistance, to providing therapy and social work services.

Fin and Katalina photographing jewellery to be catalogued, made by the SKIP mothers

We land, exhausted but elated, pick up our bags and hail a taxi to our accommodation. We drive through streets of ramshackle adobe houses and narrow dirt track alleys, derelict buildings interspersed with countless new constructions, fluorescent posters plastered on corners. A grey hue covers everything; grey dirt, grey dust and grey clouds overhead. We pass painted houses, bright yellows and rich blues, Peruvian women with shrivelled faces – the deep lines of decades of experiences, men pushing carts full of construction materials through hordes of yellow taxis, kombi buses with decorated exteriors, beeping at passers-by, trying to find their next fare despite locals already spilling out of the sides. The taxi passes the main square Plaza de Armas, grandiose towered buildings with white painted doorway arches and elaborately grilled windows surround the plaza, laid with stone slabs polished to a reflective sheen by human feet, a statue of stone carved figures poised as a centrepiece.

The volunteer residence is a hive of activity – with around 20 living here at any given time, there is never a quiet moment – and between family dinners, pub quizzes, nights out and days spent on the beach, always something fun to get up to. Inhabited by people from all over the world, words of various languages can be heard spoken as you walk through its rooms (or shouted, by some of our Italian colleagues). The volunteers are in constant flux, new arrivals come as others go – it’s bittersweet living here, we’ll be saying goodbye many times in the next few months, but greeting many more. There are dozens of new people to meet (and a tonne of names to remember!), all of them have given us a warm welcome to SKIP and we’re feeling at home already.

Our work here primarily involves teaching in the SKIP education programme, inside the El Porvenir centre and at public schools around the area. The programme offers supplementary education to primary (ages 4-12) and secondary (12-17) students, before and after their mainstream schooling each day. Mainstream education is split bi-daily in Peru, primary students study in the mornings and secondary students study in the afternoons, SKIP participants fill in their time pre/post school with additional study. Programme subjects taught include communications, mathematics, art and English – the latter being our main area of focus until our Spanish improves. In addition, we’re dipping into economic development, sports, helping with homework and I’m assisting running photography/film workshops on Saturdays.

I’ve been teaching up to a dozen English lessons each week to both primary and secondary students, and with little teaching experience and sub-par Spanish it has been incredibly challenging to manage the classes. But when everything goes right and a lesson comes together, it’s a very rewarding feeling to see the students engaged and making progress. We try to teach through conversation, music and play – to engage the children’s senses and to learn in a more enjoyable way than just reading from textbooks or copying from the blackboard (as they often have to do at school). I’ve learned so much already and can’t wait to see what the coming months will bring.

We’re growing quickly attached to the children here; they greet us with big smiles and hugs despite having only known us for a few days – we play twister and snakes and ladders in the area de juego at the end of the school day, push them on the swings and get beaten at French skipping. One child is addicted to being spun around on my shoulders “Una vuelta! Una vuelta! (A spin! A spin!)”, we laugh as we both teeter from the dizziness and fall down together – it’s uplifting to see so much happiness and joy for life despite the abject poverty many of these kids live in, usually without running water, electricity or even roofs over their heads. It’s hard but rewarding work – intense, engaging, exhausting but inspiring – and there’s nowhere else on the planet I’d rather be right now.

Fin Shields, long-term EVS (European Voluntary Service) volunteer

Visit Fin’s blog: http://finshieldsevs.tumblr.com/ 

Project supported by the EACEA and the Youth In Action programme of the European Commission.

Testimony from Andrew Ritchie, Everything Is Possible trainee, about his Leonardo Da Vinci Mobility project in Aruba.

“This is the life”, I tell myself while on a small, tropical, desert island clearing pooh from my hairy little ass!
My early morning commute by bicycle to volunteer at the Arikok National Park is comparable to cycling towards an over-sized hand-dryer, but I wouldn’t like to imagine how this windy little country would feel without that strong breeze.

I help the Park Rangers with their daily chores. Beach clear-ups, general upkeep of the surrounding area and as much as I do appreciate advice on poisonous plants I do, however feel that we could work a little on our timing with such issues now that my face resembles a ruptured scrotum. Everything my venom-smeared little fingers touched that day became a hideous mass of rash and swelling. After an ill timed toilet break I took on the appearance of a porn-star Popeye!

My afternoons are spent volunteering at the Donkey Sanctuary where I’m kept amused by 64 cheeky little fellows Hell-bent on making life difficult, getting in my way and commandeering the wheelbarrow. I am getting pretty good at giving the speech to tourists about our work here and exactly how a guy from Scotland wound up in Aruba with possibly the coolest job on Earth. You could say I can talk the hind-legs off a donkey -sorry-!

The apartment I’m living in for the next six months is owned by Deseree, the woman who runs the Sanctuary. It’s perfect! I have lived in a variety of conditions during my travels but I have to say that this is the best set up by far. It’s my own little house with everything I need and I do find my cooking/cleaning skills improving dramatically.

Overall I am a very happy man here even though the visa people are trying their best (by not trying at all) to make it difficult to extend my stay here. I’ve had painkillers work faster than these people and I honestly think if I took some of our donkeys, stuck a tie on them and put them in that office they would not do any worse than those employed right now. The words ‘get your ass in gear’ have never seemed more appropriate!

On one of my days off I strolled down to one of the many great beaches that surround this Caribbean island and got talking with an old local about island life and the donkeys of Aruba:

“These days its all cars,cars,cars. Cars bumping into each-other , people getting hurt..I remember not so long ago when it was all donkeys. Donkeys,donkeys, donkeys. Everywhere donkeys and what happens when a donkey bumps into another donkey? You get more damned donkeys”!

Andrew Ritchie, Leonardo Da Vinci Mobility trainee

Leonardo Da Vinci Mobility project

part of Empowered From Within

and supported by ECORYS UK

and the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Commission.

“I’m really glad I went on an European Voluntary Service ( EVS ) and would encourage others to do so, as even though my contribution was just a month, I feel that the children will have gone away with some valuable knowledge of how to look after the environment, and will be able to pass this on to others.”

Hi I’m Grace and I went to Georgia for a month this summer, on my first European Voluntary Service ( EVS ). It was an amazing, and really worthwhile experience, and not only did I get to meet and work with some great people, I got to immerse myself in a different culture.

The project that I did was in Zugdidi, doing an eco-club in a local school. This meant running workshops with other volunteers from Europe for local children, organising flash mobs in the city centre and taking part in beach clean ups. The aim of this was to raise awareness of local environmental issues, such as looking after the beach, looking at how to recycle waste items and enabling the children to educate others.  We also spent time educating them about our different cultures, as there were volunteers from Poland and Slovakia, as well as England. We received Georgian lessons, a few times a week. I really enjoyed these and they were incredibly useful, as many Georgians don’t speak English.    We found that although the children who we spent time with were enthusiastic about the environment, many of the older generations were oblivious to the impact their littering had on the environment, and our group often saw litter being thrown to the floor instead of the bin. One of the flash mobs we organised involved us emptying large bags of empty bottles onto the street, where we then stamped on them and put them back in the bag. Actions like these seemed to get quite an audience, and were a fun way of getting a message across to the locals.

It wasn’t all work though, and we had a lot of spare time to see more of the country. I took part in group excursions to a forest in the mountains, to local beaches, and a few of us hitchhiked to a monastery.

I’m really glad I went on an European Voluntary Service ( EVS ) and would encourage others to do so, as even though my contribution was just a month, I feel that the children will have gone away with some valuable knowledge of how to look after the environment, and will be able to pass this on to others.

Grace Wilkie, EVS ( European Voluntary Service ) volunteer in Georgia.

Project part of YOUth In Europe

and supported by the British Council

and the Youth In Action programme

of the European Commission.

My name is Luke Fisher and I have just returned from a 4 months Leonardo Da Vinci Mobility project in the north of Sweden. The project was based in an organisation called IDEUM in which I worked in the carpentry and metal workshop. Before I went as preparation to a taster day and I completed an induction in carpentry in Bradford with my sending organisation.

While I was there we worked on everything from rest cabins for the mountains and ski runs and outdoor BBQ’s to prayer benches for a physiotherapist. Prior to this project I had only done wood work in school so it was quite different to anything I had done before. I was trained how to use all the different tools around the workshop and aloud freedom to make mistakes and learn from experience. One of their sayings was ‘you learn from your mistakes’ another phrase you will hear allot in north Sweden is ‘fika time’ but that just means coffee break (unless you speak Italian).

Lunches where a communal time of the day where everyone sat together around a big table and had a chat. It was a great time to get to know everyone who is working in the building even if you don’t work with them.

In your free time there was allot to do as you are surrounded by snow or ice. During the winter most activities are more extreme like skiing or snowboarding and snowmobiles and ice hockey (which is bigger than football over there!) to skeet shooting and ice fishing all of which I tried while I was there. The organisation also put on activates like visiting a new town or to go watch an ice hockey game and team building games which help you get to know the other volunteers. But if that wasn’t enough you can always go to them and ask to do an activity and they will sort it for you, like me and a group wanted to go visit a town for the weekend and stay in a hostel so they gave us a car and said ‘enjoy, just don’t enjoy it too much as we need the car back in one piece’.

The night life is very different, the village is about the same size as the village I live in, in England but where we have 8 pubs in our town they have 1. It is very expensive to go to the pub so most people drink at home then go to the pub a couple of hours before closing just to meet people and arrange to go back to someone’s house for a party.

The people in Sweden in general especially the youth of the population can speak English as they get allot of English tv and video games, but I found they are very shy and don’t often like to speak English (unless they are drunk then they will speak to you for hours!) but all in all I found them very friendly and welcoming being welcomed into many people’s houses weather it was for a party or just to go and chat with their family and eat tea with them.

I think from this project I have become a lot more confident which is in no small part down to my carpentry mentor who was very encouraging and always very helpful. I have also learnt a lot of skills in carpentry and I am trained to use all the heavy machinery from the workshop thanks to this Leonardo Da Vinci Mobility. I also feel more ready for work as before I went I was on benefits for over 6 months and didn’t really want to work but now I feel like I am ready to work and allot more confident that I could get a job I desire not just something to pay the bills.

Luke Fisher, Leonardo Da Vinci Mobility trainee.

Click here to discover the project.

Leonardo Da vinci Mobility project part of Gaining  Through Training
and supported by ECORYS UK
and the Lifelong Learning Programme
of the European Commission.