Youth exchanges bring together groups of young people from two or more countries, providing them with an opportunity to discuss and confront various themes while learning about each others’ countries and cultures; they help you learn new skills and improve your CV.
This is Ruba Terukova from Estonia and she is currently in Pula for her EVS project. We wanted to ask some questions to her about her previous youth exchange experience.
1. What was your topic of youth exchange? How did you find the programme? a friend’s advice or you saw it from a post or..?
1. Topic was tolerance through music. It was our project.
2. Why did you want to take part in? What was your motivation?
2. I had a music team and in our organization we had a volunteer who was musician(from Slovenia) so we decided that we want to come to his city and make some “noise”. So we wrote a project.
3. Can you give us more info about your youth exchange? How many people took part in, where you went, how many days it lasted etc.
3. 4 countries: Croatia, Slovenia, Latvia and Estonia. 24 participants. We went to Gore in Slovenia. It lasted about 8 days 
4. Did you reach your expectations? Why/why not?
4. well, yes, because we did a jam in Ljubljana and lots of people were listening what we were singing about and also we said some words about tolerance and our project. on the other side no, because in the end of project we did a concert for the small city where we were living and we expected more than 50 spectators but sadly here was only 15 (less than participants).
5. What do you think you got after youth exchange? What did you learn/ improve? Which skills did you acquire?
5. As it was musical project we all learned a bit how to play different instruments (i plays a bit cello – it is amaaazing). After that youth exchange i became more confident and tolerant as well as i get a lot of friends from different countries).
6. what about working with other cultures? Advantages/ Drawbacks?
6. it was pretty hard to work because we are musicians and its always an obstacle specially when we did multicultural groups. But on the other side we all learned how to get through the language barrier and understanding barrier. So it was really interesting to work with people from different cultures.
7. What was the most challenging thing during your youth exchange?
7. During this youth exchange i got period and it was very painful because of the mountains. But the main thing was that in my team was girl from Latvia and she was russian and she couldn`t sing songs on english and she was always angry about that and because of that i was freaked out.
Thank you Ruba for the interview! Hopefully this will be helpful for future participants. 🙂
Wanna learn more about youth exchange? Check this out!
by Gulsah Can
This article is part of “Cro – EU – Planet Earth” project which is funded by the European Union. Objective of our project is to inform Croatian youth and involve them in various educational, work related, volunteering and traveling opportunities. If you want to be updated on various opportunities “Cro – EU – Planet Earth”, please subscribe to our mailing list by sending us email on urbanamladez@gmail.com with title “Subscribe” and put in your name and surname and year of birth.