Easter activities

So, Easter has come and we were super busy doing way too many things. Or not. Depends on how you want to see it.
Vincent went on his second road trip to Sweden and Denmark while Cristina was going to Spain to visit her family and after going to London celebrating her birthday. Pavel and me stayed in Stavanger with a whole week of holidays ahead. But even though most people were on vacation, we still had some activities going on. The first event was the Easter workshop for children on the first Sunday of the Easter break. Whoever came to the weekly Sunday café could join and make some paper eggs with glue and scissors. Both Cristina and Pavel joined with helping the children, so all in all it was a huge success.

But after Cristina had left, we had a rather quiet Monday including cooking with our friend Elena, an hour of excessive work out (it was not...just a bit hard for us) and relaxation. On Tuesday one of our most interesting activities of the year began: The first project of the organization "Open Hands for You", which consists of four or five volunteers, who want to organize events for and with refugees as voluntary integration work. They got in contact with the Frivilligsentral, where Jeanette and I work, quite early and since I was very interested in joining them, we planned the activities together. The Tuesday evening was a movie night for refugees between 18 and 25, all men. We rented Gausel Bydelshus, because it is close to the Stavanger refugee camp, where approximately 700 refugees live. After preparing everything around 55 people came and not only watched the movie, but also played games, ate popcorn and helped cleaning afterwards. They were really nice and you could talk to most of them in English or even Norwegian. They told us about their ways to Norway, the life at the "Asylmottak" and that there are not a lot of activities for them here in Stavanger. So we were very glad to have this shared evening while Aline, the head of Open Hand for You, was already planning the next event for this group.

But first we had another event on Saturday. We went to the Asylmottak, where we had a room for group activities on our own and started a similiar Easter workshop to the one on Sunday for children and their parents. Again they painted the eggs and put them up on the wall while the mothers made waffles for eating them later in the big entrance hall. It was a very big and lively event with way too many children running around and hopefully having fun ;)

Fur us it was great to see that you do not need a lot to do workshops and motivate other people doing activities. Sometimes it just helps to feel as a group and create a nice atmosphere. After this great week full of events we really deserved some days of holiday including hiking, doing nothing and for me also a few days in Germany. Now we have returned home and the last person to come back is Cristina tonight. Then we can say "Hi" to spring in Norway :)