Logis de Louvranges de Caritas (Ndack Mbaye & Ilaria Moccia) This activity took place in the "Logis de Louvranges", a Caritas centre and lasted 11 months. This reception centre hosts female asylum seekers with or without children in individual apartments. It is the second time this centre hosted EVS volunteers. The main objective was to create links between European youngsters and asylum seekers in order to reciprocally enrich both resident and volunteers and make them discover new horizons. This project will allow volunteers to develop new skills as empathy, intercultural communication, tolerance, listening capacity and mutual understanding as well as to discover how the reception of asylum seekers works in Belgium. Selected volunteers, Ndack Mbaye and Ilaria Moccia came from different regions of Italy. During their project, they have worked with the service of leisure activities to carry out activities for the children and the women of the centre. Their main tasks were: - to help with the organisation of the daycare within the centre and to suggest activities for children (0-3 years old); - to co-lead and to co-organise activities for children (creative and artistic workshops, sports activities,...); - to develop a bicycle workshop (lessons, rules of the road, loans service,...); - to co-organise workshops with families and women in order to improve communication and community harmony (cooking - workshop or any other activities that volunteers want to organise). - to help the newcomers to get to know the place, to help them with administration issues, to use the public transportation, to handle a budget Due to some changes in the Belgium asylum policy at the federal level, the situation with the host of asylum seekers in Belgium changed a lot during this project. The number of asylum seekers dropped dramatically and most of the centres were filled at about 60% of their capacity and a some centres even closed. As the "Logis de Louvranges" of Caritas can host about 24 women with children, the capacity became very low during the stay of the volunteers and it created less work for the volunteers. One of the volunteers, Ndack Mbaye lost her motivation due to this situation and decided to leave the project after 4,5 months. Fortunately we had the chance that Ilaria was still very positive and presented a constructive attitude, she was quite enthusiastic with the idea of discovering new areas in Caritas project during this transition period. She has shown a great evolution during her stay. YMCA Bitola (Caroline Dujardin) The project has been realized in the city of Bitola, Macedonia. It was a long term EVS project with twelve months of service starting in July 2014 to June 2015. Due to the renoucement of the first Belgian volunteer, it is Caroline who had been found to replace her. She finaly started in October 2015 and finished on 31st August (one month before the official ending date) because she found a job in Belgium she could not refuse.Caroline did a 11 months of service and worked together with local volunteers. The objectives of the project were: -Promoting cultural diversity as added value to the domestic culture - Working with the creative forms for self expression by including the topics into newsletter articles, videos and on-line dissemination - Raising the awareness on European citizenship and opening space to think and act - Promote youth activism - Promote volunteering as option for gaining working experience. The project started with getting to know the cultures and their specifics, including values, traditions, language, music, etc. and basic training on management with computer applications, cameras and other equipments which will be useful for the later phases of the project. Later on it focused on team work on the international and the local volunteers commonly working on making impact on the local community by working on concrete activities and finally at the end - promotion of the results that we created. Caroline did a wonderful project, she deeply got involved in the organisation technicaly and humanely.