Living to work or working to live? / My Experiences ( Part 1 )

teachblogger (63)in #life • 6 years ago (edited)

Crossing point

As a person who is really close to be 27, I have started questioning my life more often lately. Am I working a lot? Do I forget that I live only once? Oh wait, you may live once but you need money too, so what is the solution? Welcome to new crisis of young people! This is one of the biggest problems of new generations. we all need to work to gain our lives, but when we are working, we have to sacrifice things in our lives. Why do I have to wait all year just for 15 days holiday? I am extremely confused at this point of life. I sometimes think that I should quit my job and start a long journey which might help me to live the way I wish, but then I remember that when I come back to my country, everything will be too hard for me again, so maybe I am a bit timid about this issue.

Volunteering

I am working as an English teacher at the moment. I always try to encourage my students to live their lives in the best way possible before they are lost in working life, because that is my life story. 2 years ago, I was a volunteer in Kranj, Slovenia which helped to improve myself a lot, in different fields. I had a year where I noticed that life is not all about money, it is about great memories that you share with your friends. The work that I was doing in Slovenia seemed so meaningless for some people, but that wasn't like that. As you can see in the photo above, I was spending my days with children from different nations. Some of them couldn't speak either English or Turkish, so we had to understand eachother by the communication tools that we created with our warm and real feelings. I had to be so creative and outgoing to gain their trust because they hadn't met a person from another nation until that time. It was really great experience for me and money didn't matter at all.

Culture Exchange

One of the best things as a volunteer is to educate children by letting them have access to other cultures. As a person from Turkey, my main focus was to create awareness of new cultures for them. I organised lots of different projects. One of them was about the presentation of my country. I asked them to draw or write what they know about Turkey which helped them to activate their prior knowledge. As you can see in the photo above, they made some posters, that photo is another great memory from my volunteering experience. I sometimes remember those times and come to the edge of quitting my job! Should I really do that?

Spreading valuable information

Not all people are as lucky as me. I am completely aware of that. One of the duties that I was supposed to do in my volunteering was to create awareness of life opportunities for the ones who were completely far away from them. As seen in the photo above, I was going to some youth and special-care centers to present my experiences. I was telling my travel stories, the activites that I was doing with students. During my travelling, I had a chance to see many countries, found many easy and cheap ways to travel so they were learning these things from me. I could see how happy they were when a foreigner came to their center and shared life experiences. It was another unique experience in my life!

An Amazing Experience

Are you satisfied with your life and achieved your childhood dreams? I am so thankful for having a chance to be a volunteer in that country. I came back to Turkey with a lot of great memories. This post is the first part of my notes, I will be writing about other aspects of my life experiences in my following posts. I will try to encourage other steemians to go on an adventure as I have done. I hope , you have enjoyed reading my posts. Thanks for reading!