Alba de Pizzol | Italy | Long term ESC volunteer at Initiative et Développement Citoyen and Café Vert 2024-2025
Hello, I am Alba De Pizzol and I am currently a volunteer at the IDC host organisation.
I am 23 years old and I come from Conegliano, a city in northeast of Italy, an hour away from Venice.
I am doing a volunteering of four months and half here at the eco-place of Lastours.
When I applied for this volunteering I was looking to live in the countryside and experience a calm and more down to nature lifestyle and that’s exactly what I encountered.
As soon as I arrived I was pretty shocked by the change of daily routine and activities I was going to go through, but already after a month the camping had started growing on me, especially because of the other volunteers and the support that I received, and certainly also because of the beauty of this place.
I really enjoyed living far away from everything looking at wonderful castles and the Pyrenees surrounded by animals and nature.
Before arriving here I was living in Barcelona which is a pretty busy and noisy city, that even if it was tremendously interesting as a place to be with lots of people and things to do, it felt a bit overwhelming after a while.
I decided to participate in an ESC program because I had some spare time between my bachelor and my masters degree program which was going to start in March and I always wanted to do a volunteering experience.
Searching in the ESC portal the IDC organisation program seemed to have everything I was looking for: it was in France (I wanted to learn French), it was in the countryside or a relatively small city, it let me stay the amount of time that I was planning to, it had to do with nature and a sustainable way of life and the mushrooms project really intrigued me.
At first I was supposed to live in Carcassone which is the biggest city closed by, approximately 20 minutes by car, but then I got placed in the camping and I couldn’t have been happier.
The first days had been pretty rough because I needed to adapt. For example for the first month and a half I had no internet reception in the mobile home where I am leaving and I could connect to the internet only by walking to the reception or the community kitchen.
My first reaction was going to the reception any time I could because I felt I had no contact with the outside world anymore and so many things were happening around me without me being aware of it. Nonetheless I realised it was actually a way more peaceful way of existing to just focus on what was around me and under my control rather then having to be connected to people all the time, and I did that so much that I started to not look at my phone for entire afternoons or mornings.
In conclusion I am very grateful to have decided to come here and I am sure I am gonna be very sad when I am gonna have to say goodbye.
