Not two people in charge, but three!

If you have worked at Oye LENA as a volunteer or intern before, you will know that we always work with volunteers who stay at the project for a longer period and who receive room and board in exchange for more responsibilities. However, this has changed in January 2020! Now, we don’t have two people in charge, but three!

Before, we always made a distinction between the function of the coordinator of the volunteers and the coordinator of the toddlers. The first is mainly responsible for the reception and guidance of new volunteers and students. The coordinator of the toddlers mainly takes care of everything that has to do with the toddlers and the classes.

In practice, these tasks are really mixed up. There is also our permanent employee Sara Defoor, who joined our team in 2017. She became the person in charge of special education. She takes care of our children with disabilities, their lessons, and keeping their files up to date. But, as a permanent worker, she does much more than that, of course!

Everyone works closely together and in cooperation with Stefanie, they make sure that the project runs well. However, because everyone’s tasks grew bigger and bigger every year, we decided to ‘hire’ an extra volunteer from January 2020. From now on, this person will combine two jobs: on one hand, he or she will work as a physiotherapist, and on the other hand, he or she will help with the coordination of homework support for primary school children.

Lien Dejaegere was the first who took up the challenge and performed this task. Unfortunately, due to the compulsory repatriation to Belgium, she was only able to do this for three months. Fortunately, we already have three new people in charge who will start this summer: An-Sofie Van Leemput, Peter Gansbeke, and Kato Doms… Hopefully, the Coronavirus doesn’t screw things up! We keep our fingers crossed.

Because we are so grateful to all those volunteers who have been at Oye LENA, we would like to take this opportunity to put them in the spotlight and thank them again for their commitment.

Without you, Oye LENA would not be possible! Thank you so much!