29 October 2025: Italian Tutor/LLA Strahinja’s VoluntarItaly Experience
29 October 2025: Italian Tutor/LLA Strahinja's VoluntarItaly Experience
I spent three weeks in Italy last June as part of a VoluntarItaly summer camp program, hosted by the Dante Alighieri society of Michigan, that involved me (and other volunteers from the USA) assisting staff at a parish assigned to us by the program directors. Most of the work involved helping primary school-aged children during fun activities as well as excursions into Milan’s countryside.
I got to meet my host family through a Zoom call. It wasn’t difficult at all, though it was a new to me to have a long conversation with someone from Italy that’s not an instructor of mine and thus aware I’m still learning the language and making mistakes. The “interview” went great, and we agreed on the details about where and when we should meet and how the first day would go. The host family’s house was large, and there was enough space for all of them and me. I was given a room in the attic to myself where I would spend much of my time when it was too hot outside or when I was simply too exhausted to do anything else. We would have dinner every night on the balcony, which was an opportunity for me to taste many different Italian dishes.
The differences compared to other places I’ve been in were at first a genuine surprise to me. The vending machines at the airport contained only tiny packs of snacks, and the water bottles were even smaller. Milan seemed noticeably much cleaner and (seemingly) more peaceful than comparatively chaotic Chicago, though there were a bunch of areas under construction next to the airport that were a contrast to the calmness. Milan’s subway system is, in my opinion, much better than Chicago’s – it was one of the few things I was actually shocked about, as I’m not used to city subway systems with modern trains that are always clean and taken care of. I ended up finding excuses to explore all the different places I could get to by train, though it was always a bit difficult to navigate around the place because I did not have internet access unless I found public Wi-Fi, so I had to rely on my memory to find my way back and my communication skills to figure out the directions to places. Additionally, I was more active in Milan and did much more walking than I would do during a semester of classes here – my endurance was tested the most when we went hiking as a large group on a mountain (or perhaps a big hill) which we climbed for around three hours. The nature was beautiful, and the photo in this blog post is from the trip. I recall traversing tiny paths on the side of the mountain that we had to be extremely careful while crossing to avoid falling.
The parish where I volunteered is only a five minute walk from my host family’s house. On my first day, I got to meet the staff and a couple of members of the community (mostly high schoolers). There weren’t really any other people working for the parish that were my age (22 years old) besides two students from New York. If there was one thing that defined my three weeks in Italy, it was the blazing sun that beamed down upon me once the clock struck noon. Of course, it was not something that anyone could control, but it did make me prefer staying inside the parish during the day, being around the kids who were playing games like musical chairs or tag instead of outside the parish on a relatively large soccer field where the older kids would play. There were multiple groups of kids there, split between the younger ones (6-10 years old) and the older ones (11-14 years old). In my opinion, it was much more enjoyable to play with the former, but honestly I wasn’t much better than the older group when I was their age, so I can’t really criticize them too much for their behavior. Besides our brief excursions outside and everyday fun activities, we also had to prepare the dining room for everyone by cleaning the tables and setting up the chairs. It wasn’t too bad of a thing, so I never minded it. We usually ate pasta prepared by the chefs there, but we also got ice cream and popsicles during the day as a treat.