Balu und Du

My experience with the Bale und du project was a quite positive one for many reasons. 1) I love children and working with them 2) I like challenges 3) I really like interacting with people. I believe this was a good course for me because of these things and because I love traveling so much. I could not wait to get a chance to interact with the locals and understand what mentoring means across borders.

I have to admit I was quite nervous at first, especially because I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO SPEAK GERMAN! Communication was limited at first because of this which was quite frustrating for me since I like talking so much! I wanted to say something but I could not find the words and as I tried to practice the little German I knew, I very quickly got intimidated and reverted back to English. Most people in Germany speak English very well which is good for people like me who would not be able to communicate otherwise but I also think that it can be a problem as well. Because I knew that people could understand me when I spoke English, I have to admit that I wasn’t trying too hard to speak proper German. Things changed after our first week of “German language survival course”. The children were adorable as all children can be and the balus were all incredibly nice so trying out my German skills was not that scary any more. “Ich bin Sara” I would say to the kids and they all kind of giggled because of my terrible accent probably, but I am sure they could understand me! Lol.

The most helpful part of the project was definitely the individual interview I had with the balu Christoph. He gave me lots of insight on simple things about mentoring a child that comes from a complicated household or that has issues at school… I was fortunate enough to participate in mentorship project when I was in high school so I’ve had some experience, but never with something as intensive as the Balu und du project. Honestly, I wish we could have gotten to visit with the mentors earlier in our stay, I believe it would have helped us establish more of a relationship with them and therefore possibly improve our experience with interacted with the children. Talking to the kids still remained a challenge for me, they were all very responsive yet you can’t really form a bond without communication. Also, our past experience with the kids from Tallahassee wasn’t that helpful to us for this project because they differed too much. With my mentee Ariel I established a bond only by virtual messaging of emails while with the mowglis words did not play a major role while body language did. Overall the experience was interesting but for sure challenging.