HELLO GUYS! It’s Annalisa from Italy, here to describe my Erasmus+ experience in Portugal. 

From 10 to 17 August me and my friends Sara and Marco attended an Erasmus+ Training Course project at Fundão, a little town in Portugal, a project called “E-gamechanger – digital tools for youth workers” thanks to our send organization Romagna+.

We were a group of boys and girls of different ages from Italy, Lithuania, Spain, Poland, Latvia, Turkey and Portugal and the host organization was made of three boys from Portugal: they were our teachers during the entire course and became our friends.

In this project we acquired skills that allow us to maximize the use of digital space because nowadays Youth Work needs to keep up with the current times, in fact digital tools can support us in all aspects of our work. We learned about team and organization management, digital marketing, EU platforms. In fact digital skills enable us and in general youth workers to work in international partnerships more effectively for example promoting brands and missions and finding new partners for a company or a project. We analyzed aspects of Youth Work which can be digitalised and how an increase digitalisation in our field of work can benefit it too.

Every morning we started the day with a rich breakfast at the Hotel Samasa which was our comfortable accomodation. We said each other good morning in all our languages and we had international breakfast with a wide choice of sweet and salty very good food, thanks to it we were full of energy.

After breakfast we went to Fablab Business Incubator of Fundão and started with “energizer” activities: we had fun with a little game or dance to wake up better and recover energy. Then we had lessons with the Portuguese team made of Edu, Andree and Rodrigo. During the lessons we improved the knowledge and skills regarding digital tools that can support us across all aspects of our work, we learnt how to use NFE tools, EU platforms and gamification tools. In particular we used Loquiz, Miro, Menti, Google Workspace, Canva, Salto Youth, Buffer, Discord and Social Media Channels.

After lessons and activities we had lunch in the cafeteria of a school but we didn’t like the food there, it was a bit bad. After lunch we had a little rest and then we re-started lessons of the training course until 7/8 pm. Then came back to eat at the cafeteria for the dinner. 

During the first night we attended a party at the public swimming pool of Fundão and we were white dressed because there was this dress code. We had enjoyment all together, we danced and listened to music by the pool: it was a nice quiet evening we passed as a united group for the first time. 

From the second day after the sessions and dinner we had intercultural nights: guys from 2 participant organizations per night prepared games, dances and typical food from each country. In these nights we had a lot of entertainment and we discovered culture’s characteristics of the nations of origin of our friends participating in the project. During these nights we tried to immerse ourselves in different cultures always learning something from our friends.

The last night the host organization brought us to a FADO show in a typical Portuguese house where they offered us their house wine. FADO is a genre of Portuguese folk music, recognized by UNESCO as an intangible heritage of humanity and it was amazing and interesting to know this kind of music so important for Portuguese culture.

For the come back me our italian team decided to leave from Oporto so we visited the city together discovering its beauties while another part of the group went to Lisbon to visit it and came back home from there. 

This Erasmus+ was a really agreeable experience and I can’t wait to live a similar one again. In this kind of projects is always pleasant to find that although each of the participants comes from a different part of the world there are always common points that allow us to be part of a group and be happy together.

SUCH AN AMAZING EXPERIENCE!