Spain
participants
The goal of this activity was to lift the spirits of the children who had to spend the Christmas holidays in the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu by giving them warm and loving handwritten letters from our international students and local high school students.
We contacted the volunteering department of Hospital Sant Joan de Déu to ask for permission to give them some letters written by our international friends. The hospital asked for 200 letters written in Spanish or Catalan, which we delivered on the 21st of December.
We organised a themed tandem evening in which all of us wrote a letter: our international students had the help of ESNrs to translate their letters into Spanish or Catalan, so they also got to practice the local languages while preparing the script for their letter. Furthermore, the students of an ex-ESNr's high school really wanted to take part in this activity and wrote plenty of warm letters to the age-like children in the hospital. Also, some ESNrs from other cities in Spain also wrote their letter in their computer and sent them to ESN Barcelona volunteers so that they could handwrite these for them. In the end, we managed to have the 200 letters and went to the hospital to deliver them so that the target group could have them delivered by Santa on the 25th December.
