“I am actually living the Mamma Mia life”. This thought was stuck in my head ever since I stepped off the airplane in September. I thought at one point I will get used to everything around me and nothing will feel special or new anymore, but that was not the case at all. This year was a roller coaster of surprises, highs and lows, emotions and happiness. The downside of roller coasters though is that at one point, your ride is over and you have to get off. That is where I am at right now.
After a year of living a life that I never could have even dreamed of, it is time to go back home and return to the life and the people I left behind.
Eleven months ago, I told myself that I want to experience as many things as possible and make sure that when I have to leave, my mind is not filled with thoughts of regret and the question “What if…?”.
What I can say now is that, without a doubt, I achieved my goal of making memories that last a lifetime. We, the other volunteers and I spent every single day together and there were often even days when I wasn’t alone for more than five minutes. Whatever we did, we did together and I am thankful for how lucky we were to end up here together. Throughout the year, we had many different people in the house who came and left again but only four of us have been here now from the beginning. It was not always easy because living together and being with each other 24/7 is something that can be exhausting at times but we made it work and I can now call these people my family. Our friendship definitely feels different than other friendships because the circumstances under which we met are something you do not experience that often. From one second to the other, we went from being strangers that have never seen or met each other before to sharing a house, a bedroom and a bathroom. People say that living together changes relationships; the bond either strengthens or falls apart. In our case, we created a new strong bond that quickly became a big part of my experience here, maybe even the most important one. Especially exploring a new culture together and sharing all those first impressions made it easier to adapt to the new life.
Whenever I had a difficult day in school, I knew that when I came home I could talk to the others and then quickly feel better and forget about it.
These two things, school and the other volunteers are what made my stay here so special.
I remember that on my first day of school, I was hoping that I will enjoy going to school but told myself that if I do not, I still have the others at least. Luckily, the school did not suck and it quickly became my favourite part of the day. Almost every morning, I was excited to go to school and see the children and teachers. I have to say though, the beginning was rough. My headmistress gave me the task to look after a child with special needs. He was in first grade so none of the teachers knew what the best way to interact with him was and part of my job was to figure this out. I spent the whole school day with him. When I arrived at school in the morning, the first thing I did was look for him. I kept an eye on him at any time which proved itself to be more difficult than anyone had imagined. In my first two months, the four hours I was in school were mostly spent outside. He did not like being in the classroom because he could not focus on the lesson and got irritated very quickly. I soon figured out that one of the only things that calmed him down were cats and it was very convenient that every now and then, there were two cats somewhere on the school property who quickly became part of the school and showed up every day. I did not think that I would spend more time with cats than with children but I was happy to do it because I knew that this was where I could be of big help for the school. I told myself that if this is what they need me to do I am also willing to do it for the rest of the year but luckily, after two months, we decided that it was time to try to get him adjusted to school life and to stay in the classroom. It was a very difficult start but together with my teacher and the headmistress, we figured out ways on how he can stay in the classroom. Over time, he got used to it and it gradually got easier, for him and for me, and I finally had days where I was more in the classroom than outside. Day by day, I was able to spend more time with the rest of the children of the first grade and then slowly started playing with them during the break because by then, I knew where the boy would hide and where I could find him if I lost sight of him.
Other than looking after him, there were days on which I did not have a lot of work to do in the classroom and I felt bored at times but chasing after the children during the break made up for it. Especially in the second half of the school year, the older grades started playing with me and from then on, I did not only spend my day with the children of the first grade but also with all the others.
Every time a teacher asked me to do something for them, whether it was decorations, copies or handicrafts, I was more than happy to say yes and seeing the children use the things I made for school plays in front of their parents (like Christmas, Independence Day, etc.) or other big performances, made me feel helpful and needed.
All of these good times made the last days of school all the harder. Seeing the children of sixth grade graduating, my children performing the school play we have been practicing for weeks and the teachers planning our goodbye dinner was emotional and sad.
Thinking back on my time at school fills me with happiness and I will never forget the little things, like the first time I got a hug from a child, the first time they drew a picture for me or the first time the teachers called me into the office to take traditional Greek sweets that someone brought for their name day.
Leaving my school life behind was not easy but I knew that it was going to end at one point, whether I wanted it to or not.
However, not everything ended at the end of the school year. We still had the other part of work, computer work, which, even though it was not as much fun as school, taught me a lot of things that I probably would not have learned otherwise. Seeing the articles that I wrote uploaded on a website for everyone to read is exciting and makes all the hours spent working on it worth it.
Still, even this part is coming to an end now.
I am leaving in less than a week and I cannot process the fact that in the split of a second, I will leave my life here as I know it behind because that is exactly what it is to me: a life. It is not just a project anymore or something I did between high school and university. It is a life that I have built up over eleven months with people I have met, things I have done and memories I have made. So many things have changed: I went from freezing inside the house to sleeping without a blanket, from getting lost in the city to blindly knowing my way around, from confusingly looking at locals to answering them in Greek and from watching Mamma Mia at home to actually living the life myself.
If I would have to do it again, I would not change a single thing because everything that happened, all the emotions I felt and the things I saw made my life here special and perfect in its own way: Strangers turned into family, expectations turned into memories, scaredness turned into experience and nervousness turned into happiness.
