Anna Placement report

What is your name?
Anna

What is the name of the company you are working at?
Offshoots Permaculture Project

What is your role in the organisation?
I am a volunteer at Offshoots and work closely together with the site manager and other volunteers.

What are your daily tasks?
My tasks are very weather dependent due to the facts that Offshoots is a community garden, Horticultural work like weeding, sieving compost or watering plants are as well part of my daily tasks as helping to deliver environmental workshops to school and college groups, volunteers and community groups. I´m involved in coordinating and supervising volunteers and support the site manager with applications for fundings for new projects. So I do both brain work and practical work.

What are your achievements so far?
I realised that my language improved because I´m able to talk fluently with English people and I even understand strong Lancashire accent. I learnt really much about managing a project like Offshoots, but also small things that are important in gardens or in social behaviour. I ran my own workshop and made friends at Offshoots.

What were the challenges and how did you manage them?
Of course I struggled with the English language at the beginning of my adventure here in England, but I didn’t hesitate to speak and listened carefully. I think my biggest challenge was to slow down a little bit. The English way of working is less fast than in Germany and it took some time to adapt. But finally I managed to relax a little bit and I am now fully aware of my position and value in Offshoots.

What are your plans for the rest of the placement to get the most out of it?
I will work as good as possible and try to find something, a workshop or an improvement or something, that reminds the volunteers and staff from Offshoots that I have been there after I left. I want to get stronger involved into funding applications to learn how to write them and in the end I want to be able to write a formal text in English without problems.

How is your cooperation with colleagues and management in your placement organisation?
The site manager as well as the Offshoots staff and the volunteers work closely together with me. We get along really well and have fun with each other. They know that they can rely on me and I know I can rely on them. Some of them are friends now.

How do you experience to speak another language at work?
Sometimes I struggle with explaining interesting facts about plants, traditions or working methods so that the English language seems to be a barrier. But in normal case the person I speak to is patient enough and helpful so that I can manage to say what I wanted to say. I really enjoy speaking English.

What have you learnt so far?
I learnt that I´m quite good in teaching children. I learnt that it seems to be difficult for teenagers from Burnley to get in contact with me. I learnt how to clean a chainsaw and build it together again afterwards. I learnt how to light a fire. I learnt that it is good to stay calm in events of fire at site, frozen pipes or simply heavy workload. And I learnt that I really love England and that I want to stay here.