Hi, I’m Baptiste, a volunteer from France, I’m 20 and I love traveling, meeting new people, and discovering new cultures.
Italy is like a children, I would say, a childhood dream for a French like me. My mission in Pesaro is to work for an association for kids’ activities in the artistic field, from September 2020 to February 2021.
Coronavirus makes lots of things complicated, as my job, the meetings with Vicolocorto, the Italian lessons, any activities or any party in bars and clubs, but we adapt, and we find ways to make the life and the volunteering as fun and useful as expected (if not more).
I wrote this today because there is something for me really important in life:
Lose yourself
The school system has been quite complicated for me: I quit at 17, with no idea of future, no real dream, or objective. I was really scared not to have the possibility to evolve anymore, and to stay intellectually and socially in the same place forever.
So I’ve choosen to do whatever but in an other country, one where I could learn English (so useful for the future, for jobs, for opportunities). I was 18, and I left France for Ireland, with no ideas of what to do, and a really bad English level. I’ve met so many people in the same situation as me, people who just took the first opportunity to do something they feel.
I was scared, and lost, but I think that being lost was one of the best things of my life, because that was the moment I was feeling the most free, I had ever felt.
Maybe too much lost at the beginning, I started missing my parents care, the French school and work system, all the things who limit you, to miss my friends, my culture (especially cheese), my country.
Those limits were the ones I wanted to be liberated from, and, when you are, when you’re lost, that’s the moment you have the opportunity to improve yourself, to learn from the situation, and to evolve as a human to a next level.
The opportunity I got there to start as barback in a bar, to later work as a bartender in one of the nicest cocktail bar in Dublin, and now even if I know I don’t want to work as a bartender, I know I would like to open my own place and to develop my own company.
Nothing is useless, there are no useless experiences, some can be bad, or good, but always meaningfull if you’re smart enough tu use everyone of them.
I will always remember the people I’ve met there, I’m still in contact with some of them, and still really close with few of them, but those few changed my life. In everyday life, their advices and their friendship help me to keep the will to do things, to evolve and to lose myself again and again, in as many ways as possible.
Even if I don’t know how my future is going to be, I know those few people will be part of it.
Today, October 2020, I’m 20 and I’ve been in Pesaro for 5 weeks. I know I’ve done a good choice coming here, I’m still evolving and some people I’m meeting here are already special for me. I start understanding now that we’re really lucky in Europe to have these opportunities.
Baptiste
Vicolocortini 