Last Tuesday, only a few days after our arrival in Tallinn, we were invited to come to a workshop day organised by Euroopa Noored, the National Agency for volunteering in Estonia. Of course, we went, always ready to discover new things, a new place we didn’t no and to meet other people who, like us, liked the idea of volunteering. All of the discussions and debates were in estonian and it could have been close to impossible for us to participate at all, if everybody had not been so kind as to change language so we could understand and interact in the discussions at our table. We liked it so much that we stayed almost all day.
We ate with a very nice brazilian girl, who had been studying in Estonia for 5 years. Her estonian was almost perfect, a good hope for us who have been “only” here nine months and have had time to forget half of it during the few months we were in France.
The day was also marked by the meeting with the famous Indrek Pelterson… What? You do not know him? But of course, the famous judo estonian sportsman which won medals in the Olympic Games. For french people, he would be the estonian David Douillet, an adversary that Indrek Pelterson admitted never to have won against. This judo man had come to speak about how the mind could influence events around you and how it was important to have clear objectives to be successfull. Out of sixty or so people, he picked on Amelie and I of course and soon it became a dialog. I am not sure how interesting it was for all the other people in the room to know “how do you see yourself in ten or twenty years from now?” but it was something to remember for us.
After that, seeing the estonian minister of education giving out prizes for the best projects in 2007, didn’t seem such a big deal. Ok, maybe it’s because we were not chosen, though we were nominated, as four other projects, in the cultural category. A prize would really have made our day !
