How it all started or "we want to host you both"

La primera cosa que vamos a decir hoy : Feliz dia internacional del volontario!!!!!

Second - it takes too long to look for accents on English/Russian keyboard, so sorry :)

We were touched to get this many visitors the first day, so it gave us the desire to keep on writting :)) Thank you all for your kind words.

So now we will go on with our story, and surprisingly start with the beginning :) The beginning was 5 years ago when Lena and Lena met - the first day of University. Right away we understtod that we should do smth great together , but we just didn't know about EVS yet. So we had content ourselves with crazy ideas on local and somewhat international level. This ideas gave birth to L&L group, the label of which you can see as our picture :))) We will not say what L&L stands for - it is up to your imagination. So the beginning of our story goes back to September 2007 and it is not at all in Ukraine, but in a lovely country of Dobra - Poland( who by the way easily gives visas). Both of us ( separately) were selected for a study visit to Gdansk, of course we did send applications in the same envelope cuz we didnt have money for more, but they didnt know we were friends..Anyway, in a wonderful city of Gdansk/Gdynia/Sopot we discovered a whole flat ( or even 2) of crazy EVS volunteers from all over Europe. They showed us what it means to be an EVS - and it was decided right away. The hard part is that in our dear Ukraine noone ( including the Spanish embassy) heard of such a thing. But we were lucky cuz one of the girls from Gdansk - Olya, finished her EVS and wanted to become our sending organisation, she was also glad to help us with all the practical questions. So after signing the papers in University in December - telling them that after our 4th year we are leaving we were already on our trail :))The University didnt let us go willingly, but they had to accept it.

So after New Years a quest for an EVS begun. We would like to assure you that we looked for it separately and were sure that it was impossible to go together. So the aim of both was - Spain. Even though people tried to convince us that it is the hardest country to do an EVS at, because the embassy is kinda weird. But the easy way - is not our way. The quest begun. over a 100 of copy/pasted mails to Spanish NGOs, including some Italian and even Malteese. Even a poor Belgium one, who recieved my mail about how i love Spain...and even replied with a positive answer...In May, when we were in an international exchange in Warsaw, both of us discover that we were preselected by Don Bosco.. We were shocked, and feared that it would be only one of us selected. After a week of exchanging emails and Ruth trying to call us we started to doubt that we were confused as one person, sorry Ruth :))One more week later a crucial call from Ruth to Lena ( La Brune) informed us of a wonderful fact - they were not confusing us, because we had different pictures and they wanted to host us both !!!!

After crazy sending of agreements and euphoria, in the middle of the summer we found out that the project was approved ( both in Russia at the moment) and the only step - last, but not least - was to get a visa :)))

To be continued...