Back to Bikes

Eight days of peace, good vibrations, great people, endless learning, beautiful emotions, working and living with friends surrounded. Eight days of facing and solving problems of all kind. Peace, love and music; friends, joyfulness and bikes.  Was it Woodstock from 60s? No, but it was that awesome Erasmus+ project in Poland in Motycz Leśny, called "Back to bikes".  We’ve repaired bikes, repainted them and gave them to the community. How awesome is that? We’ve learned not just how to fix bikes, that’s just a little part. We’ve learned how to express ourself, how to understand other people and their cultures. How to be helpful and useful to people around you. And most important thing to say is, that we grew. We grew in knowledge of all kind. We grew within ourself and within group. Thank you all for beautiful experience that you gave to us. -        Croatian team                   ...

Being a part of this project really helped us a lot in so many ways and felt like our contribution toward the community was well received. On 20th of July our efforts came to an end when we organized the picnic were we were going to promote our event and the most precious thing of the week: the bikes. Our people from Croatia, Poland, Czech Republic and Romania came prepared with traditional food from their country being a very nice surprise for the locals. They were so excited that they even took some recipes of our traditional food. We also made a barbecue, we cooked some meet and some vegetables as well for all kinds of taste. The villagers’ enthusiasm and their eagerness to get involved in all our activities was a wonderful surprise for us as well. We had a fun interactive day filled with activities for our youngster participants and for the much older ones including living library, water fights, ‘kompot pong’, ‘fishing apples’, ‘fruit salad’ and so on. Our most popul...

Today we went to Lubartów to advertise our project. We spread leaflets to local society. On morning hours there was no young people on the streets, so we tried our best. Our target group is young people who like to ride bikes. After this we had chance to visit Polish homes and see how Polish families live. We also ate lunch with families of our Polish participants. They served national food like pierogi. When we were back to our venue, we were ready to prepare the picnic for tomorrow’s community day. We had planned everything so it was easy to prepare it. We only needed to practice some dances and games. 

There is nothing better then riding a bike you repaired for the first time We repaired bike it was well done we’ve learned something that was fun I’ve got a bike you can ride it if you like it has got new tires and brake wires Open methodology was great I want to see Razvan starting a flame Polish people don’t have facial expression I hope they are not in depression Blakei so jebenica (Bikes are awesome) give me some slivowitza! Polish food is tasty Hrvati je vole jesti! (Croats like to eat it) 

What was today morning overall? After dwo exhausting repairing sesions we finally managed to fix 2 bikes. Weather was really great before it started to rain. Even though it didn't change our attitiude. It was really great to have expert with us to help us overcome the biggest challenges ( Bikes were really happy about it :) ). Do you see any progress in repairing bikes ? Yes , We do. We managed to ride bikes which were fixed with our hands around the venue.  How about city game ? Yea ... Long story. Overall it was nice thing to get to know better city like Lublin. Have you had any problems during the city game ?   We had some small problems with interviews with the locals. Sometimes they were too afraid to speak English :( . What were you doing during free time ? We went for walk through the Old Town to try some polish food in pubs. We tried some polish beer and it wasn't bad :) What do you thing about project so far? "As every day passes i like it m...

The day started in the morning at 10 am with discussions about Erasmus + programme and the specific competences that were mentioned in the Yourhpass certificate.  Participants were given more papers with those specific competences and they were asked to describe the competence , how they can explain it , how is it used in daily life and what is the actual meaning and purpose of it in the certificate. Participants were attracted by this discussion as they had to prepare before a set of things they learned in 10 short words or sentences and to share it with the group in order to identify its meaning and importance. In adition to that , in the morning we also created a group contract with rules which they might like to be respected during this project in order to keep a peacefull field between participants and not to have misunderstandings, unpleasant situations or dissapointements regarding organizatorical issues. During the afternoon s workshop , which  was prepa...

The second day of the exchange was dedicated to know each other. Although everybody was tired after long journey the day before, we were ready to work. In the morning we had some name games outside of the building. We had an opportunity to check our memory. Fortunately, it wasn’t so hard to remember all the names because there are just 20 participants on the project.  After learning the names we could know each other more. We played “speed dating” game. We talked during one minute with one person about some topic, for example: “Do you connect your future with Erasmus+?” or “What is your favourite movie?”. Later, we could check our drawing skills by drawing the portraits of participants. Every person drew another part of the face so the results were quite funny. After the lunch break we could share our fears, expectations about this project and how we can contribute to it. We continued with some ice breaking games so that we could feel more comfortable with each o...

The project has started on 14th of July in Motycz Leśny near Lublin. Participants came from countries: -Romania (Evolution), -Croatia (Razvojna Udruga Ludbreg), -Czech Republic (Brno For You), -Poland (Happy Childhood Fundations), Where did general idea of the project come from and what is the aim of it? General idea of "Back to bikes" was created during project which took place in Croatia in August 2016. The aim of this project, as well as the aim of the first part is to encourage young people to work actively for the local community though many kinds of activities. The main objective is to repair 10 bikes and donate them to the public use in Motycz Leśny. What are we going to do? Thanks to the non-formal education methods like integration games and team building we will get to know each other better. We will also learn how to work as a team. We will use the language animation workshop to discover the language we don't know. We will also discuss differences a...