Gvantsa found us immediately after we left Galeria Krakowska, a place that awakens panic in me. Always overcrowded, thousands of stores and in the end, you just hang out there because you are bored, watching people passing by while thinking of their stories.

It is quite an amusing thing to do and come to think of it, isn’t it fascinating to see a city less as a place far away from nature and older days, but a gathering of stories of thousands or millions of people. Somehow you are connected to a lot of them, playing just an unimportant role in the background, but for this time you shared the same story with a stranger.

Maybe the woman who is running after the bus just had a fairly important job interview and now that she missed her ride is desperately thinking about what to do to be there In time, so she can pay the rent and someday travel to Jamaica because she watched a documentation once and now it is her dream to lay at one of its golden beaches while enjoying a cool drink. But life hasn’t been nice to her and she is struggling to even keep her head over water, living from day to day thinking of how to spend her money wisely.

Of course, we will never know, though it has something magical, to see a city as a place were dreams come together and you never know if you are the reason somebody is achieving it or not. Maybe you are the one person which has a blue jacket and this guy says to himself, that if the next person I see wears a blue jacket than I’ll tell her that I love her and by doing so, he sees you wearing your brightest blue, giving him the signal, that destiny seems to favor his plans. You will never know because he won’t tell you but maybe you are the reason somebody else married, later on, had kids or just had an amazing relationship for a while.

Speaking of colors. It is really hard to not see Gvantsa in a crowd as a result of her neon orange jacket. This girl is somewhat of a model, with her beautiful brown eyes and curls, falling down to her shoulders. Usually wearing her slightly bright chestnut-colored coat and her black glasses, if itis not raining. I have to say though that I kind of pitied her a little bit, due to my mood which was explosive and loud, going from one topic to the other in the speed of Eminem’s “Rap god”, out of joy and relief to see the other ones, after one whole week.

While we all saw each other again, falling into their arms and hugs, not planning on ever leaving them, I realized how precious those people already became to me and I had no idea how even more important they would become to me over the next months. While embracing everybody’s attendance, though we thought nobody was there in the beginning, a new message popped up in the group chat, creatively named “The Shitty Ones”. I don’t know why or what drove us to choose such a name, only that it was not going to be changed for a long time.

The message was from Asser, the volunteer from Egypt, who arrived 1 day before and was now waiting for us at Poczta Glowna. We decided to pick him up and then go to the flat of Anthi and Rocio, because they have a living room, and believe it or not but to have a living room is a real rarity in volunteer flats, making the kitchen the new living room normally.

There we were supposed to meet with Kübra too because she would come directly from my flat to this one. Turning around the corner at Poczta Glowna we saw an Arabic guy standing next to the tram stop. His deep black and madly curled hair were held in form by some spray I guessed, while his dark eyes found ours.

Asser is a fun guy who always has a story to tell dealing with him or his country. Also, his English is perfect so that there were absolutely no communication problems from his side to ours. As a matter of fact, nobody of us speaks Arab, and the ones who think that Turkish and Arabic have anything to do with each other, let me tell you that they absolutely don’t.

They might have influenced each other through lending words but the grammatical structure as the use of sounds is way, way, way off from Arabic.

Text by Sebastian, a volunteer from Germany, participant of the project “reACTogether” but also the support of the project “Mobility for Solidarity”.

The project “reACTogether” is organised within the framework of the European Solidarity Corps and financed by European Commission.