“I stopped studying to volunteer abroad”

CCovid-19 made Thaïs Gussinyer, who is from Olot and about to turn 18, re­think her life. She knew that after sec­ondary school she wanted to move to Barcelona. She didn’t know what stud­ies to pur­sue, and was con­sid­er­ing sev­eral dif­fer­ent courses, but she was very ex­cited to start uni­ver­sity.

But then the virus ar­rived: “With the pan­demic, I had to do part of the sec­ond term of school, the whole of the third and all prep classes for the uni­ver­sity en­trance exam on­line, and the truth is that I found it quite hard,” she says. “I ex­pected I wouldn’t be able to do 100% face-to-face classes in Sep­tem­ber and the idea of tak­ing my first year of uni­ver­sity through a screen in my room did not ap­peal to me at all. That’s why I de­cided to post­pone my stud­ies and go abroad. Ever since I could think for my­self I’ve wanted to travel the world, al­though tak­ing a year out wasn’t in my orig­i­nal plans. She looked at the dif­fer­ent op­tions avail­able to her and fi­nally de­cided to vol­un­teer abroad.

“Right now I’m in the south of Scot­land, in a camp­site in the mid­dle of the moun­tains, an hour’s drive from the near­est vil­lage. Con­tracts are sim­i­lar every­where: we work about five or six hours a day for five days a week in ex­change for ac­com­mo­da­tion and food. The jobs vary de­pend­ing on where I am, but all I have to do here is take care of the own­ers’ pets, pre­pare the bun­ga­lows for the guests, do small jobs in the gar­den and do any other lit­tle task I’m asked to do.”

She is quite iso­lated from the virus, but also from peo­ple: “I’m in a beau­ti­ful place, but it is quite re­mote. Un­for­tu­nately, I don’t have a car and there’s no pos­si­bil­ity to move around by pub­lic trans­port, so it’s like being iso­lated from the world. I don’t feel like I’m in the mid­dle of a pan­demic here. In ad­di­tion, the mask is not manda­tory in out­door spaces. So the first day I ar­rived, I was very sur­prised to see most peo­ple out­side the train sta­tions or on the streets with­out one. Re­stric­tions de­pend on the level of Covid risk in each area, but most of the restau­rants and shops have not closed. In gen­eral, I have the feel­ing that the mea­sures are less re­stric­tive than in Cat­alo­nia.”

How­ever, Thaïs rec­om­mends the ex­pe­ri­ence and is very happy with the de­ci­sion she has made: “Vol­un­teer­ing is a much more af­ford­able al­ter­na­tive to trav­el­ling con­ven­tion­ally and is a good op­por­tu­nity to get to know a coun­try bet­ter. I’m just start­ing out, but I don’t re­gret it at all at the mo­ment.”