Global Volunteers currently work in four elementary schools. Their names are after the villages where they are located. These are: Cisie, Broszkow, Dabrowka Stany, Lugi Wielkie. Global Volunteers also teach unemployed adults in the Institute of Social Services called Kofoed in Siedlce.

Siedlce (standard teaching programs): A city of about 75,000 people, Siedlce is located two hours east of Warsaw amid rolling farmland and woods. Our volunteers in Siedlce stay at Reymontowka, an old manor house located 12 miles outside the city.

During the school year, the English-teaching volunteers work in rural and urban schools in the Siedlce area, and during the summer, they teach in an informal "summer camp" atmosphere at the Reymontowka manor house. Both volunteers and students reside at Reymontowka during the summer camps but have separate living and eating quarters. Volunteers who come in spring and fall sessions work primarily in elementary and middle school classrooms. The emphasis is on improving conversational English. Volunteers usually teach four hours a day, allowing equal time for preparation and a team meeting. Programs last two or three weeks.

The summer camp schedule calls for English classes and optional organized activities and excursions with students. Groups are small and a camp translator is available to help volunteers with lessons. At the end of the session, parents and other community members are invited to a program in which students perform skits, songs, and poetry readings in English.

Free time may be spent exploring the countryside, visiting the city of Siedlce (the city of Siedlce is the seat of Siedlce County), and enjoying many local cultural activities. On the weekends, volunteers may travel to Warsaw or richly historic Krakow.

Volunteers on Siedlce teams fly into the Warsaw airport, where they are met by their team leader, who will transport them to the program site.

Siedlce (teaching Polish adults): In the summer of 2000, the county government of Siedlce began inviting Global Volunteers to conduct English-language camps for Polish adults. Held twice each summer, these camps are unlike the teaching programs we offer anywhere else in the world. They bring together North American volunteers with young and middle-aged entrepreneurs, business people, and teachers, all of whom are eager to improve their English as a way to enhance their professional skills and the possibility of international communication. These are the men and women who are on the forefront of social reform and business development in Poland and who will lead their country into the free-market economy of the 21st century.

As a volunteer teacher, you will be assigned to a team of just two or three students and will lead lessons for approximately four hours each day. Outside of class, volunteers will have the chance to interact with their students through a variety of free-time activities, including folkdance lessons, tennis, horseback riding, and excursions to nearby historic sites. Because many of the students will be the volunteers' peers and all are professionals in their own right, they will have their own interesting life experiences to share. These adult language camps, then, offer volunteers an amazing opportunity both to influence and to learn from some of Poland's brightest future leaders. What's more, volunteers will be able to forge true friendships with Polish people who may be very much like them.

The logistics of the adult language camps are the same as those for the other Siedlce projects, including lodging and the volunteer's arrival airport.

Zakopane: The scenic Tatra Mountains of southern Poland provide a picturesque setting for the English-immersion summer camps in Zakopane, described as the "Aspen of Poland" by one former volunteer. Here high school students and volunteers live and study together in intense two-week sessions. Most of these students come from the Siedlce area and may be familiar faces to any volunteers who have served in that locale.

Each volunteer works with a group of three to five students, and the emphasis is on conversational English with a dash of grammar and spelling thrown in. Mornings are usually devoted to classes, and afternoons are spent casually with students in excursions and activities. These may include touring castles and churches, rafting the Dunajec River, mountain hiking, visiting woodcarvers' shops, or simply going for a swim—while all along helping the students practice their English.

Evenings are devoted to dinner and volunteer team meetings, followed by informal time with students. Volunteers can enjoy a kielbasa during a lively campfire sing-along, go to an evening folk-dance show, or just shoot the breeze with their fellow volunteers and their new young friends.

Accommodations at Zakopane are double-occupancy mountain chalets where volunteers fall asleep at night to the winds whispering in the pines and wake to the happy chatter of cooks preparing a traditional Polish breakfast or the clip-clop of horses' hooves as a hay wagon or carriage passes by.

Volunteers on the Zakopane teams fly into the Krakow airport, where they are met by an experienced Global Volunteers team leader, who will escort them to the site.