Introducing Molly and Reuben Apirana

Hi there,

Thank you for signing up to follow us on our adventures with Atlantic Bridge. Its great to have you along for the ride. We have had a great time so far – in Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary and then traveling across to Portugal through Austria, Italy, France and Spain. Our two weeks in Portugal is nearly up and we are looking forward to heading off to the USA in just a few days. It will be sad to leave Europe behind. We have had such a great time here and enjoyed meeting so many young people across this wonderful continent.

COFFEE

Some of you will already know, but for others it may be a surprise…..We LOVE coffee.

While we are traveling we try to find somewhere to have a coffee and seek out the best place – the best coffee we can. Fortunately in Europe they make great expresso – the flavour is almost always good. But for us who hail from the great southern land it’s the milk that is the big issue. Long life milk just won’t cut it, and to make the best coffee the milk has to be steamed just right. Our favourite coffee back in Australia comes from The Wine Bar, a small café on The Noosa Marina, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. Its pretty hard to beat, but we found one to match it in Bergen Op Zoom in The Netherlands. Its not only about the coffee. Its about the service and the atmosphere.  The only thing missing in Bergen Op Zoom was the music. Our hang out back home has live music, which is another reason we go there. 

 We have loved traveling around Europe and meeting you all in the various schools we have visited. Coming from a multi-cultural family, with a white Australian mother and a Maori father has given us a different perspective on life and we love meeting people from different cultures and learning about their different ways of life. We thought it would be fun to make a hang out space and wondered if you would like to join us: tell us about your favourite hangouts and what you like to do there. When we are at home we go to the Wine Bar – we don’t always drink wine there but do have our favourite coffee – Reuben has a latte and Molly has a flat white. We go there to hang out with friends and listen to live music. It’s a great place and hopefully if you are visiting Queensland you will get to come there too. Mean time, maybe you could share with us your favourite place to hang out and post pictures of you and your friends there so we can all share it.

So far our favourite places are Formartines in Aberdeenshire, Scotland and Crusio’s in Bergen Op Zoom. Great coffee, great atmosphere and great service just like the Wine Bar back home.

We are on tour with Atlantic Bridge, till December, joining our parents, Steve and Ainsley Apirana on a Family Tour after which we will be on our own. Atlantic Bridge plans to bring us back to Europe in the summer of 2015. They would like us to tour various countries across Europe for 12 months as part of a Circuit Riders Next Generation team. We are looking for two young people to join us on this new venture - a team leader and a team administrator/ driver.   If you are interested in being a part of this team we would love to hear from you.  More from us very soon………..

MOLLY & REUBEN

Diego's dream

Unfortunately, if you are young, ambitious, a big dreamer and you are always thinking on improving yourself as much as possible, Spain is probably not the best country to live in at the moment. So many things have changed compared with a couple of years ago; now the government is not that interested in supporting people who want to make good careers anymore because they have other ‘priorities’. There were no jobs, bad faces, not so many choices, and too much broken dreams around me. It was a toxic environment; that’s why I needed another way of thinking and some fresh air. Looking at the EVS (European Volunteer Service) program, I found a “Youth-Worker” organization based on many Christian values called Atlantic Bridge in which I could fit perfectly. I applied, I was accepted and, since a few months ago I’ve been living in Zeeland, the southwest province of The Netherlands.

But first of all, let me introduce myself. I am Diego Fernando, I am from Colombia originally but I spent the last 9 years in Spain. That’s a long story for another day. I really love Spain but I really consider that this is not the time for me to be there. 

Currently I live in a big house in a small village with eight other amazing people from all over the world. We are so much different from each other but, at the same time, we are so similar. We, luckily, found the way to mix all of our different ways of living, languages, customs and even religious backgrounds to get into a really good team: people who cook together, work together, travel together and support each other.

And it is quite interesting how when someone asks me about what we do as a team in our daily work with Atlantic Bridge, the first thing that came up is “share with others what we experience together: 9 volunteers from 8 different countries with different “everything”, have learned how to become a team in spite of the cultural, religious, ethnic and communication walls between them. We, as a team, are learning how to create meaningful moments, ‘clicks’, but at the same time we share with others how to do it.

One of the activities of Atlantic Bridge, the organization I am now volunteering for, is to help young people find their roots, especially their spiritual roots. That’s why, together with the other volunteers, we organized a Heritage Hunt in Antwerp last Sunday. It was a lot of work and a lot of fun. We tried our best and we received many positive feedback. From now, I guess this is the beginning of some more adventures in building new bridges and exploring new worlds.