I’m Lucia Ferrao and I’m doing volunteer work in Nyiregyhaza, Hungary in the Kozpont association.
I’ve been here for 5 months and I admit that has been the best 5 months of my life. I arrived in Budapest on the 3rd of September at 1 AM and my coordinator was waiting for me at the airport. We had like 3 hours by car from Budapest to Nyiregyhaza, so when I arrived at home it was almost 4 am.
The next day I met my housemate Joele and he saw me all over the neighborhood and it was super beautiful. Then we went to the lake close to our house and I was super shocked because I didn’t imagine it would be this beautiful. Then we went to the city center and the association and there was a party so I met everybody and my second housemate Timi.
At night we went to a music festival in the city center and there I met other volunteers from another association.
I have tried to summarize my first day because for me this day was amazing due to all the people I met. After this day my life in Hungary was super fun and incredible.
We traveled a lot around the country, we went to a lot of places like Tokaj, Eger, Debrecen, and of course Budapest. During the training in Budapest, I met a lot of new people whom I still have a relation with and that’s why I used to go a lot to Budapest because I have a place to sleep there and also I didn’t go to my country at Christmas. After all, I stayed with these friends of mine in Budapest for Christmas.
One thing I enjoyed was the Hungarian classes in Debrecen. My housemate Nico and I used to go twice a week to Debrecen with our friend Maja to the Hungarian classes and we enjoyed these classes a lot because the teacher was super good and we had so much fun there. Also, Debrecen is a very cool city because it is a university city so there are a lot of young people and they have very cool restaurants and coffee places.
My work as a volunteer consisted of being a Spanish and English teacher in primary and secondary schools, and it was my first job like this so at the beginning I was super nervous that’s why I used to go with Joele to the classes. I didn’t enjoy the classes too much sometimes because I’m not prepared to be a teacher so I was super lost because a lot of times I had to be alone in the classes without any teacher.
One of the things that I feel the most fortunate for is my friends but here I make a separation, I have my housemates and my other friends. I’m very grateful for both of them. I enjoyed my time at home with my housemates, we used to have so much fun during the dinners. For example and going to miss going to the kitchen at 8 and helping Joele make the dinner (he used to make pasta because he is Italian). Another thing I’m going to miss a lot is when in the mornings we used to wait for the bus with the 4 of us together and some days were super funny.
Another thing that I’ve missed is going to Debrecen with Nico during the weeks. We created some traditions like going to eat at Bonita and on the return, on the train, we used to buy Kürtöskalács and share it. And also we made a friend in the train station of Debrecen, one girl who sells the tickets heard me speaking Spanish and she was living in Spain for a while so we used to go to buy the tickets in her place because she was super kind. And normally on the train to return to Nyíre, Nico and I started to teach each other German and Spanish.

In general, I have to say that I’m very happy with my decision of coming here for 5 months because at the beginning I was very scared and lost, I used to say to me that was what I’m going to do in Hungary … but now I see that it was the best decision I’ve ever made.