Heili Ollin in Moldova

Heili Ollin

Volunteering “Next Step” project in Moldova

January-February, 2011

So, what is Moldova like? Picture a post-Soviet city with sad, grey apartment buildings with clothes lines dragged from one window to another. Policemen who wear green uniforms with ridiculously large hats on which shines a huge Moldovan eagle. A spotted laika-like dog biting a trashbag from the bin. It’s cold but not snowy like in Estonia, just ice on the roads. People are much more high-spirited here.

My international family in Moldova consists of three Brazilians: Guilherme, Miguelito and Day. Our first assignment was to design and deliver a team-building for the participats of the project. On the 15th of January I had my first training with Vergiliu, my local co-trainer, who has worked in AIESEC and a company called Orange (familiar to most Europeans). You can imagine that delivering trainings to older students than myself can be intimidating because I was just a first year and they were all about to graduate. Luckily the topic — proacitivity — is something that I know of and in the end we were all satisfied with the results. I should mention that before the training itself there were tranings for the future trainers. While Estonians are rather calm people, you can still picture people whispering the crowd, right? Or people who ask pointless questions all the time… During the training of how to deal with the disturbers I was mention something about a type of people who as a couple will do their coupley-stuff during the sessions. And never would I have thought that I would have two people kissing in the back row but there you have it!

Living in another culture, meeting new people and pushing my limits in another environment made me see my world a lot differently. Talking to people with so different views and backgrounds I started seeing a lot of new details and appriciate many thing I took for granted before. Moreover, I learned a lot about myself: how I will behave in a stange environment, with a different language in times of stress and tention. This has helped me define my values and review my perspective of my future.