Last year, for the first time, we sent a group to the GapYear project for youth exchange Time to Act 3.0, and now the time has come, a year later, to send a new group to 4.0! Gap Year Portugal is the Portuguese NGO that promotes the concept of gap year in Portugal and that helps everyone who wants to do it. And in addition to this, they also started with Erasmus+ projects to help young people from all over the world develop their soft skills and get to know themselves better and the power of getting out of the comfort zone and learning with the world.
Iti: It was my 5th project, but again, it surprised me! That's the beauty about doing the projects - you can have expectations but you never really know, how it is going to go. People make the projects amazing, and each time, the connections are so valuable. This project was very inspirational and a bit spiritual to me. It made me wind down a bit, relax, think and live in a moment, a good change of scenery to busy every day life.
It gave me motivation to go back to realness and keep rocking! Since I don't live in Estonia, I was happy to see my own people too, and represent Estonia. Of course, Portugal is beautiful! My favourite moment from the project was when we all cooked together, it made us really close. As we say in Estonian "Armastus käib kõhu kaudu".
We were jokingly saying that we have been brought to a reality show when we arrived at the accommodation because it was so cool! 😅 We had a pool and for the first two days couldn´t really get further from it (of course we were actively participating in activities as well but during it dreamed about swimming).
We got to practice empathy every day and the highlight of the week was the intercultural night where everybody got to show their national dances, games and we could eat real Ukrainian dumplings which were made with love at 2am in the middle of the night. - Helen
Thank you, malta! Malta? Wait for the episode 5.0! 🇵🇹
Text: Helen Kärt Käbin, Iti-Marleen Plink
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