My Two Weeks in Germany! - Summer 2003

During my two weeks in Germany I learnt a lot about other cultures as well as work I was not used to. I was there for 13 days all together in a place called Holzerner See, near Berlin. Later on I found out this meant ‘wooded lake’, which should have been obvious as there was a lake on one side and a forest on the other.

My first job was to clean the top of an old hut (or so we thought). An hour into working we found out it was to be turned into ‘bat house’ so the top was to be left as it was (the way the bats liked it). Instead we had to fill in the gaps in the walls, which let the light in, by making mud out of water, dirt and straw. The guys were doing heavier work at this time, making a mini garden.

The next job involved splitting into two groups, with one half filling the holes in the windows and doors and the other designing a table tennis table room. We decided to paint the lake on the main wall of the tennis table room and on the other walls we painted flags, hand prints and wrote welcome and goodbye in all the languages of the volunteers.

Whilst the girls were painting the guys were making a fence for the bat house as well as a notice board with explanations in all the volunteers’ languages.

Our last job was to work together to make a fence out of logs and twigs. This was the hardest out of all the jobs, but also the most rewarding.

We didn’t only do work on the project. We also had fun and went to places like Berlin, Potsdam and Dresden. We also had use of the facilities, including boats, bikes, table tennis and volleyball on the beach.

Going to Germany opened up a lot of doors for me and I got to meet lots of new interesting people. I would recommend it to anyone. It was a lot of fun!

Katie Jones

Katie joined this project through the EVS programme

click here for more pictures of projects in Germany

click here for a country profile of Germany