Testimonio Alejandro Medina | 26 años

A tour around Petrinja as volunteer

Since the first time I arrived in Petrinja I started learning a lot of things, professionally and personally, enriching my person.

My volunteering started in a poppets’ factory where I learned driving the machines and creating clothes for them: it was a really funny activity because it allowed me to develop my creativity.

When I joined the association and started knowing the city, I could understand how the region was deteriorated; his roads, buildings… So I decided to propose an action called “Petrinja Life and Colour” to add a fresh, young and colourful view of the city. The goal of my project was to make the citizens active in the city, painting and colouring some important spaces.

Then I met a 16-years-old girl called Amaia; she was in her last year of school and from her birth she had been on the wheelchair. She is very nice, smart and creative; she was interested in learning my language, Spanish, because since her childhood she had been listening to Spanish songs and watching Spanish TV series. So I became her “language tutor”; it was amazing and I could speak my mother tongue and we completely understood each other. We met twice a week, sometimes in the association, other time in her house, speaking about every kind of topics, from actual problems to our experiences… and sometimes I taught her grammar, vocabulary, numbers, time…

I’m satisfied for all the things I learned during this experience and for the little things I did for the community that could contribute to make society more fair and equal.

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