Living with other volunteers: a good or bad experience?

During an EVS, volunteers need to deal with many things. One of these things, wich can be an easy one or not so easy, is living with other volunteers in the same house. Living with people from another country, with different habits and realities, is different from living with our family. In firs place, we need to understand that the people we’re living with don’t need to be our best friends, but deserve our respect and help if needed. We should know that they can have a different daily life and maybe something that we do can be offensive to them, so we need to be patient and try to adapt our habits to don’t disturbs other people. Like, if I wake up always in a good mood but someone likes to be quiet in the morning, I don’t need to talk with that person. It’s important to talk with to each other and make some rules, such as, organize the housework, to help us living together. And it’s also important that we know how to talk with another person if something is wrong. We don’t need start a discussion just because someone did something that we didn’t like, we can say how we feel about it and together try to find a solution.

The secret is always respecting our flatmates and try to get some time for ourselves, so we can rest and think clearly. I think that living with people from another country can be an amazing and enriching experience. We can share things about our culture and learn about theirs, we can share our experiences and the best thing is we can come back home with new good friends!