Hello everyone, I am Elif. I am from Bilecik, Turkey. I am 22 years old, actually almost 23 but I don’t want to accept this truth yet. I am still a bachelor’s student at Kadir Has University. My major is Radio, Television, and Cinema. This is my senior year so I feel a little bit worried about the future.
I was living my best possible life in Istanbul before the pandemic. I was doing theatre at my university’s theatre club for 4 years. I was making unforgettable memories with my friends. We were enjoying Istanbul and loving every part of it. We were getting together all the time, going to concerts and some festivals and even doing our own theatre festival once a year. So I had a very busy life which I had no complaints about. At my university, where I am very happy to be a student, I was taking many courses that attracted my attention and had the opportunity to develop myself in many subjects both practically and theoretically.
In all these beautiful years, I had a chance to go abroad and have an Erasmus experience in Austria. These 5 months are the highlights of my life. I had a spectacular time with my new international friends who became really close to me. We have a special bond that we still keep alive. The people who I met, the places that I have visited, the things that I learned about myself during this period, made me who I am today.
After the pandemic, everything has changed for all of us and it affected our way of life. During this process, I felt like there was a void in my life, even though I had developed positive habits for myself in so much negativity and tried to focus on positive things. While I was feeling like drifting in a river, I met people who had been involved in ESC projects before and asked myself why I wasn't involved in such a project. With the comfort of taking my lessons online, I realized that I wanted to make the most of this time and I started looking for the most suitable project for me on the dates suitable for me.
After a search, I came across ICDET's project and I thought it was very suitable for me. I thought that I could contribute to this project with my background and experiences. I felt very lucky that I found a project where I could improve my language, my skills, my ability to communicate. Meeting people from different parts of the world, getting to know a new country and the people of that country, getting out of my comfort zone, and trying to be a better version of myself made me very excited.
Thanks to the trainings I have received at ICDET so far, the events I have attended and the people I have met, I believe that I will return to my country with much more than I expected. I know that we are going to improve each other and ourselves a lot, thanks to the opportunities we have here.
Elif Mülayim, volunteer@ICDET