It’s almost the final stage of my internship, only 2 weeks left. I’m already used to many things here. The only thing I cannot get used to so far is the ubiquitous smoke and smell of the cigarettes. In Kosovo, almost everyone is smoking: from young to elderly people. Perhaps this is due in some way to the traditions or just because cigarettes are very accessible. However, I was lucky with my colleagues and people with whom I spend my time here, among them, there are no smokers.

Most of the time now we spend on the preparation of the Summer camp. Summer camp is going to be for the high school students. It will last 2 days. The program includes 4 sessions: Makerspace, Entrepreneurship, Media literacy, and Music session. I am responsible for the content and organizing of the Entrepreneurship session (I’ll write more about it in the final post). In parallel with this work, ASSET team is underway to identify other partner schools. Today more than 10 MoU has been signed with local municipalities and other schools.

In addition to the core activities ASSET team launched a summer internship program for the students of Kosovo. Therefore since the beginning of July, two more interns joined our team. Now there are three of us. The interesting fact about new interns that they have much things in common: they are both passionate about education and human rights, have the same interests like traveling and shopping. They even have the same name – Hana. It means “moon” as they told me. They are both graduates of American University of Kosovo (RIT) and majored in Public Policy and Management. Having passed the selection among other students they showed the best results. They will intern next 6 months in the office of KEC.

As I wrote in the previous post having familiarized myself with Makerspace in manned schools, it was interesting for me to learn and try the latest technologies in action. In order to get know more about it, I and my colleague Shpend decided to try the 3D printer. First of all, we had to decide for yourself what we want to make. In this case, the large number of different resources like http://www.thingiverse.com, http://www.3dhubs.com, and others helped us. From a large number of sketches, we chose the plastic phone holder. We uploaded the design of the phone holder and then added the inscription “OLZHAS” turning it into a personalized product. The printing process took about 4 hours. It was interesting to observe how the printer needle places millimeters of the plastic layer by layer. There are also 3 types of filler with the different color: black, yellow, red and green. Since I have a black iPhone 7 (and this is not an advertisement) we decided to print it with black filler.

By the way, I almost forgot that at the end of July I became wiser for one more year (as an ASSET project). I was quite surprised when my summer colleagues congratulated me and gave me the birthday present in the early morning that day. Later we all gathered together and ate delicious cake cooked in my honor.