By Gabriella Dixon | Co-Founder
Things were continuing to go well at the ECHO HUB Athens since our last report in February. Our student numbers at the HUB had `reached an all-time high of 959, we had a full and diverse schedule and class attendance at maximum capacity. Our team of volunteers was built of capable and fun team and wonderful teachers creating an atmosphere of learning and community.
Then COVID 19 arrived also in Athens forcing us to shut down like so many of our partners in the field.
We luckily managed to evacuate all our foreign volunteers just in time before flights were grounded and borders closed. It took as about a week to digest the new situation and come out of the Corona shock. We ZOOM assembled all our teaching staff to try and find a solution on how to teach and reach out students at a distance. We ended up by moving all of our English, Greek, French and German language classes to online. The creativity and variety of the teaching material made available on different channels to our students by our teachers in these last weeks is impressive. We had teachers from every corner of the world speaking to their students on a daily basis. Language groups were well attended and we even had extracurriculars such as exercises videos (some even prepared by one of our students), photography classes, yoga and relaxation, drawing and many more.
It was important for us to maintain contact with our students and volunteers throughout this hard time to ensure we didn’t lose momentum but also offered something to help pass the time and help with mental health. We truly wanted to give a sense that even though we were apart we were very much together in all of this. It was the perfect time for many of our volunteers to showcase their skills and share them with our larger community. The response from our students was very positive and we were happy to show our dedication to them through our online channels.
We are back! It is now one week that we have reopened the HUB under strict safety rules. Only our language classes are on offer with a limited number of students allowed per class to maintain social distance from each other. We have followed all of the ministerial guidelines to ensure safety for our volunteers and students. Instead of the HUB buzzing with sounds of activity from art classes, debate groups, boxing and barbershop, the HUB is more muted, dominated by face masks (in all shapes and forms) and disinfectant sprays. In order, to accommodate as many students as possible we have split classes and doubled our schedule. Class attendance is still low as some students are hesitant to return to ‘normality’ for fear of infection. Today we received the good news that we are good to go to restart our football program next week, which is one of our favourite outdoor activities and a huge boost to our morale. With attendance numbers reaching roughly 30 per session the outdoor activity is the perfect way to start introducing group activities and to bring our students back together again. It’s very clear we’ve all missed each other a lot.
The ECHO100PLUS Team is fully dedicated to persevere in these difficult times and standby to restart a full program as soon as possible. Whilst always considering the safety and wellbeing of our team and students throughout. Watch this space!
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