The winter in kuterevo, every volunteer was afraid about this topic! Lika is known as a cold region, and the condition are difficult. But nowadays we’ve crossed most of the period of winter and we are still alive J, how and what did we do during all this period?

First, the beginning of January was really soft, all the snow which fell in December went away and every day was sunny. Then we begin again to work outside, we could continue to work in our botanic garden with collecting plants in the wild!

But then, every thing changed in February! The fearsome -20°C during the night arrived we couldn’t have water anymore, and the snow was falling every day so we had to change our main activities. Our every day tasks are principally concentrated around warming up Postalja and taking care about animals. As well some of us it was spending time with locals to learn traditional handcrafts: Daniel has been learning how to make chairs, Max how to make several wooden crafts and Zoe how to make “coklje” (kind of slippers).

In this same time, Amélie have been spending all her day in Ivan’s home to collect and order papers about his life and about the refuge. The idea is to find out all what’s happen this 10 last years in the refuge to document it in one final work!

Futhermore to this, we had enough time spending inside to prepare several interesting projects:

•  Millo has worked on outdoors workshop about nature for schools which are going to be driven in spring and summer. He will try to spread knowledge about birds, trees, plants, amphibians, insects and environment in general.
• Daniel and Millo have been preparing a project of saving amphibians populations again car’s crashing. Some first action will happen in March with a team of Croatians volunteers from the high school of Otočac.
• Zoe and Amélie have been managing the future volunteers groups who will arrive this summer, something sure is that we are going to be a lot!
• Max has been managing, every Sunday, German classes with young people from Kuterevo, from every ages (10 to 22). More and more people are interesting in!

And even after working time, we’ve participated in a lot of event (Carnival of Rijeka, 11^th of February, Concert in Picasso, Kuterevo meeting in Zagreb …) and every evenings in Postalja was full of activities: we had time to learn playing guitar, playing accordion, juggling, to improve our Croatian, to study bears, birds, trees …

So finally, even if the weather in Kuterevo was unfriendly, we didn’t have the time to get bored, this winter was more than busy!

Millo