Summer in COOL Project, Razlog, Bulgaria

The summer holidays in Bulgaria are from the end of June to the middle of July, because of these long holidays a lot of kids are bored. IIC, the NGO which we are working offers the summer academy for kids between 6 and 14 years. Twice a week we are going to the museum and have a nice time with the Razlog Kids.

We are playing games, like the most loved game "Tomato Game", and sometimes we have project weeks like the science week. At the science week we prepared a lot of experiments and pictures with explanations. Another project was to clean a little village near Razlog. The kids liked it a lot and a local magazine reported about it. The highlight was the end of the Summer Academy. We prepared the whole week a treasure hunt for the kids with a lot of games, mystery’s and a lot of pirates and a big treasure full of sweets in the end.

If we want to plan the program for the Summer Academy we can do what we want and can be very creative. This is really COOL, because we have always very nice ideas for games, like for the treasure hunt. We prepared a big map which looked like an old pirate map.

On Wednesday we can`t do a lot of big projects like cleaning villages, cause in the little village are not that much kids. Therefore we're just playing games or doing pantomime and the others need to guess which e.g. animal it is. Sometimes it is hard to communicate with the kids, due to the fact that we can't speak and understand Bulgarian and the kids can't understand English.

In Razlog we always have a local volunteer who translates from English into Bulgarian and is a big help. In the little village we have no translator. However we have three volunteers who speak Russian and they translate in Russian and mostly the kid’s understand what they're saying and sometimes we try to explain easy games in Bulgarian.

Our summer in the COOL Project is often relaxed cause on Monday's and Friday's we are sitting in the office and writing reports, preparing the week or just doing stuff we want to do, e.g. writing personal blogs or preparing personal projects.

Anyway we have a lot of fun together and a great time in summer with travelling, the Summer Academy and BBQ evenings in our garden.