When Extraordinary Becomes Ordinary

When I first arrived in Poland, almost everything felt new. A new country, a new language, new people, a new workplace and a new routine. Every day brought something unfamiliar or a new challenge.
Looking back now, I am surprised how much I learned from my volunteering experience without noticing. Even though my environment felt natural in the beginning, I got used to it. Now I am sitting here, not knowing how and when things started to change, but somehow I ended up as a completely different person. I think this is one of the most valuable parts of volunteering abroad.

Growth does not always happen through dramatic moments or life-changing events. Sometimes it happens so gradually that you barely notice it. The things that once challenged you become normal, and one day you realise that you have changed along the way.
At the beginning, living with people from different countries felt exciting and unusual. We spent hours talking about our cultures, comparing habits and sharing stories from home. Over time, these differences became part of everyday life. What once seemed foreign slowly became familiar. We stopped being “the German volunteer”, “the Italian volunteer” or “the Spanish volunteer”. We became flatmates… friends? We started coexisting and sharing our lives.

The same happened at work. In the beginning, every workshop, every task and every new responsibility felt significant and made me struggle more than once. Months later, I found myself truly being a part of my workplace. I felt like a visitor, but they invited me to sit at the same table and celebrating the same holidays together. Even though we still barely speak the same language, it all feels so natural. On my first day this would have seemed impossible to me, but luckily I got proven wrong.
Now, as my project is coming to an end, I find myself looking at my everyday life here differently.
The streets I walk through every day, the people I work with and the routines I built all seem ordinary because they became part of my life. But when I remember the person who arrived here months ago, I realise how extraordinary this experience actually was.

Looking back, I find it ironic that before this project I always told myself I never wanted to spend time abroad. The idea of leaving everything behind, building a new life with new friends just to leave it once again always sounded harsh to me. I think that’s what held me back for quite some time and made me hesitate even days before the start of the project. Even though I already overcame the first big obstacle by now and I regret nothing, I am still scared of moving on. Perhaps this feeling is proof of my biggest achievement in this volunteering project. Poland, especially Krakow, no longer feels like a place to visit; it is a place I can come back to.