It’s not easy to blab with your friends at home, to be open, excited and in love with the world, to want to share that, but not to be able to say it. It’s not easy to be the only foreigner. To go somewhere where you’re not needed, where people function perfectly with or without you. It’s not easy to be a volunteer who actually has a feeling of not being needed. And it’s not easy to respect, despite the feeling. It’s not easy to have no friends and to know it’s futile to make new ones when you only stay for 4 months. It’s not easy to adapt, to form questions in another language when the thoughts flow in your mother tongue; it’s not easy to stay cool when you actually don’t understand anything around you. It’s not easy to be yourself and to let to be met when you’re the only one to be different.  It’s not easy to eat organic bread and butter and to be aware that where you come from, they don’t know about that, you eat what you can. It’s not easy to know you met paradise and you have to leave. …

It’s excellent to have nothing more but your body and face to express something. It’s extraordinary to meet people who pay attention, pay attention how much they consume, spend and throw. It’s extraordinary to meet people who are completely used to selecting and recycling the waste. It’s extraordinary to meet a life tempo different from yours and to adapt to it gradually. It’s extraordinary to meet people who have been and are so motivated that everything they achieved, they’ve done it with so much effort and unique, solid vision and determination. Motivated, strong, connected, united and inseparable. A truthful and magic whole. It’s extraordinary to meet people who help you get your faith back, who show you how it is done. It’s extraordinary to have the opportunity to observe and meet a union of individuals like that, to assist their meetings and have the opportunity to see how they function and complement each other. It’s extraordinary to breathe fresh air, to look at a tree, touch it and be aware it feels nice in its peaceful wilderness. It’s extraordinary to see what they really sell in the capitalist supermarkets. It really seems healthy, well arranged and irresistible. I couldn’t know the truth of it.

It’s extraordinary to smile at anyone and to get a pleasant feed-back. It’s hard not to feel like smiling, but have to, because here, it works like that. It’s extraordinary to eat healthy and abundantly. It’s horrifying to be aware that somewhere, a child will only eat a dirty piece of bread today. It’s extraordinary to “spend a penny” in dry toilets with flies around you that walk everywhere on your body and to throw sawdust instead of flushing. It’s extraordinary to see these improvised toilets that look so sweet and, at the same time are made to economize. It’s extraordinary to meet real women who become human beings, not women or men. Women who don’t care how they look, but what they do, women who represent an example, who are uncommonly sexy because of their moderately confident spirit.

It’s extraordinary to let the wind take you on a meadow or in a forest rich with beautiful trees. It’s extraordinary to breathe with emotions and fall in love again. It’s extraordinary to know that people around you respect the environment, as much as you do. It’s strange to pay attention to cheaper electricity at home, to cultivate a sense of economization elsewhere and at the same time, always have hot water. It’s disappointing to see a state well governed and a fulfilled nation, but come from a place with potential, but faith that evaporates slowly…

Written by Majda Todoroska who spent 4 months as EVS (European Voluntary Service) volunteer in France