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Campus Feature

My intern days in Poland

Samia Aziz

Poland - during winter the most appropriate phrase to describe the country is 'the white desert of snow'. Especially for many people like me who were seeing the snow fall for the first time in their life, it made the natural beautification of this country hard to explain. Poland made me its passionate admirer from the very beginning, just after getting down from the plane on 4th February, 06.

The writer(extreme right ) with some friends

The Local committee of AIESEC ( an international student organization which provides youth with a platform to discover and develop their potentials) in Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB) gave me the opportunity to experience this 2 months challenging traineeship in POLAND. I, along with another student from our university went there to join a project named PEACE the lessons of tolerance, organized by AIESEC in Poland under the patronage of UNDP. The purpose of the project was to spread the knowledge of tolerance among the high school students in Poland as well as make them aware about the UN Millennium Development Goals and different cultures. Altogether 28 trainees from 19 different countries from all over the world met in Warsaw on 6th February and the most fascinating journey of my life till now started.

At first we were little bit nervous thinking about the cold weather and whether we could cope up with them but very soon we found our entire team and all the Polish people to be very friendly and gladly welcoming us. The first week was really incredible as well as tiring. We had training for the whole day and became very close with other trainees, got to know each other's country-cultures, customs and traditions. After that we were divided into 7 groups of 4 in each.

The voyage of discovering Poland started. Each group went to different regions in Poland and spent one week in each school in separate towns and villages. The next 7 weeks passed by in a flash. In every school we were hosted by student's family and became more acquainted about the traditional polish food, culture, trends and tradition. The first polish sentence we learnt was 'nie yestem gwodna' which meant 'I am not hungry'. Each family fed us like a 5 years old baby and they were not at all ready to hear 'NO'. Polish hospitality, family bonding really amazed me and reminded me of my own country's culture and made me to value it even more than before. It crushed all my stereotypes about Europeans. Taking six lessons everyday for 45 minutes each was a little bit exhausting, but the curious eyes of the polish students and their enthusiasm about such an exotic country like Bangladesh kept me going. Every single day I felt myself as a better and wiser person than before, working with the people from Ukraine, Colombia, Check Republic, India, Australia and Armenia increased my self-confidence, knowledge and my communication skills.

I was really proud to be there as a representative of Bangladesh. Spreading the name and culture of my country to the remote places in Europe was truly incredible for me. I would like to show my deepest gratitude to my university and AIESEC in Independent University Bangladesh for supporting me. My fairytale is turned into reality -Thank you AIESEC!