Poland had been on my bucket list for some time. I didn’t know a lot of things about this country, which is just next to Germany, some hours by train away from my hometown. Others had told me about its beautiful cities and good food. So basically, I was just waiting for the right moment, and it came faster than I thought. I found a final internship for April, and my semester was going to end in December, so I opened the ESC portal to look for a short-term volunteering project for my three-month break.
And there it was: “2 Months Volunteering in Rzeszów, Poland”, with an organisation called INPRO, from mid-January to mid-March. Sounded perfect! I had never heard the name of this town before; it appeared to be much closer to Ukraine than to Germany, and a quick Internet research indicated that winter was not recommended as a travel period for this region, but I decided to see it as an adventure, I applied, and I was accepted.
A new home and a new challenge
When mid-January arrived, I packed my biggest suitcase with more or less useful things, and I took a train - no, three of them, and another one after one night and some hours of visit in Kraków. Every time I heard someone speak Polish in the train, I was super excited, even though the first “Polish” person I interacted with in my train compartment turned out to be Italian. After a last effort that consisted of dragging my suitcase through the streets covered with snow and ice, I finally reached my new home: a warm flat where four of my five future roommates were already waiting for me with raspberry tea.
The group turned out to be a perfect match - luckily, because we not only live, cook and play together, we are also colleagues. After an introductory week at the office where the INPRO responsibles explained everything about our future tasks, we were ready for the central part of the project: the school visits. The goal was to present our countries to Polish pupils, aged from 11 to 19, to interact with them, make them speak some English and stir their curiosity about other cultures. That was basically all we knew when we went to our first school - in my case, it was a primary school, which I visited with one other volunteer.
This first visit felt like a very realistic crash test, and it went quite well. The pupils were friendly, just a bit shy, but we managed to make them participate. I was surprised by the small size of the classes, but that later turned out to depend on every school - the smallest class I have personally experienced had 5, the largest 31 pupils. Thankfully, the teachers are always very helpful, especially when the classes are too noisy.
Questions and answers
Concerning our presentations, they became better with every visit. By now (having finished half of the project), we almost know them by heart; we know which parts can be hard to understand and which parts are already familiar to most of the pupils. What I appreciate especially is that I am not only the “teacher”, I also learn a lot of things about Poland and sometimes even about my own country. For example, Polish families seem to make Christmas cookies, exactly like my family (mostly gingerbread). For Saint Martin’s day, they do not walk around with lanterns, but they eat a special cake. Another very interesting fact concerns the word “Servus”, which I added to the slide about my region (Franconia) as a typical word: Now I know that it is not only used for greeting in the south of Germany, but also in Poland and other Central European countries.
Sometimes I am impressed by the level of knowledge that the pupils have, like the one who could tell me the exact year of the invention of the printing press and the name of the inventor, or the one who told me how many litres of beer Germans drink every year. By the way, the most frequent question they ask at the end of the presentation is about my favourite Polish food. The answer is pierogi, of course, but also żurek and potato pancakes and fried cabbage and barszcz and …
Aurelia - A volunteer from Germany, whom we hosted for 2 months in 2026.