A day in the life of the emPower students

23.03.2016 - 09:24 | Laura Lily Martinez

During eight months, young adults from all over the world live and study in the Children's Village. The students follow the intercultural training programme emPower, which targets young people who work for the parter organisations of the Pestalozzi Children's Foundation. Nine women and five men from seven different countries are living under the same roof this year. The 23 year old Laura Lily Martinez from Honduras talks about the everyday life of the students.

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Laura Lily Martinez and other emPower students. © Stiftung Kinderdorf Pestalozzi
The day of the Empowers is almost the same for everyone, it start between 7 to 8 am, everyone sleepy, taking shower, getting ready to go to classes, making our breakfast, some of us cook, others just take some coffee to wake up, and one of them running to the kitchen to leave the food list. Five minutes before 9am everyone is leaving the house to go to classes, but there is one of us that always are the last one to go to the class. Our classes start at 9am, most of the time we start our class with a war map to break the ice, after that we start with the topics of the classes, working in groups. At the lunch time almost everyone is starting with their task one of the start with the food list, at the lunch time 2 of them are in charge to take the food to the house, and each one is making their task. One of the biggest challenges that we have as Empowers is to make our tasks, like cleaning the kitchen, bathrooms, rooms and all the house, most of the fights that we had have are related with the cleaning and tasks that each one has.

«It's a big challenge to know how to say the things to the others and understand every different idea, opinion and way of thinking of each one.»

Laura Lily Martinez – emPower student
Also, it's a big challenge to know how to say the things to the others and understand every different idea, opinion and way of thinking of each one. Something very beautiful that the Empowers have is that we are very closed and we are always trying to help each other. At the beginning living together was easy now that we have 4 months is more challenging because sometimes we are lazy to do our things, also now with more things to do we don’t have too much time for us. Most of the time after classes we have to clean, make reports, or we have meetings so the only days that we have completely free are Saturday and Sunday, some of us go out of the house, others just stay in the house resting. At the same time is good to being like this pressure so we can learn how to use our time and to divide our tasks in the best way where everyone in the house can make something and also sharing our tasks. The way that we share our tasks is changing of tasks every two weeks, and we have divide weekly tasks that is changing every month and the other is daily task that is the one that we change every two weeks. One of the best things of living together is that we had learn to love, care and worry for each other, also to learn about each other culture, country, some different words of each country, food, and the different cultural ways of communication that each one in the house has. This is a very good experience where we are learning to be more tolerance, accept others opinion, ways of thinking and learn that everyone is doing good even if is not the way we want everyone is different but we have something similar that is what we do in our work and we want to make a difference in our countries.