After a long preparation, on the 15th July the International Youth Volunteer Camp started. Ten international volunteers from Belgium (Géraldine and Alysson), Morocco (Safae), Spain (Jésus and Mar), Poland (Kašia), Finland (Hanna), Russia (Elena), UK (Alex) and Germany (Julia) arrived to Petrinja to rock the town for two weeks. 🙂
The Camp was organized by the Volonterski Centar Zagreb providing two camp leaders, udruga IKS providing lots of local volunteers and udruga mladih K.R.I.D providing sports activities.
As a welcome, we visited the major of Petrinja and introduced the countries we are from and we could get to know Petrinja through a guided tour organized by the local tourist office.
Every day in the morning there were activies for kids at Kupalište like treasure hunting, lots of running and jumping games, hide and seek, fimo jewelry workshops, making dolls, twister, sewing flags, origami, drawings, disco for kids and in the afternoons, workshops for youth were offered, for example hotdog eating competition, clay workshop, bag jumping, rope pulling, other sport activities and disco on Fridays.
Also, there were two actual physical voluntary activity, namely cleaning Petrinjčica. It was surprising what we found in the river, such as tyres, half of a bike, car door and a car seat and other stuff…
The second one was a painting action in which we made the walls in the building of K.R.I.D and colourful and beautiful.
Of course the Camp was not only about the activities but the volunteers had the chance to visit an ecological farm nearby with some special species of animals and domesticated bambies. J
One day, we all got on boats and rowed to Selište where we took a bath in Kupa and had a nice dinner at Palma`s house.
There were two big events, one was the Fišijada where the Croatian-Russian-Hungarian team, consisting of Darko, Elena and Anita, prepared a “heavenly” delicious although not good enough for winning the first price fish soup.
The highlight of the Camp was undoubtedly the Multicultural Day at Hrvatski Dom where we presented our countries through power point presentations and stands with typical products from the certain country. For the biggest surprise of the audience we presented a local folk song called “Oj Petrinjske uske staze”.
After a last big party unfortunately the Camp was over and the international volunteers left, hopefully not without leaving a footprint in the hearts of the youth of Petrinja. 😉