O testemunho no. 1 da Chiara (SPEA)

LISBONA 2.0

Lisbon with new eyes, this was (and still is) the challenge. How can you reinvent yourself and continue to be amazed in an environment that has now become your comfort zone? How can you get out of this shell you’ve built around yourself, in a year of experience? 

These are the questions that I ask myself almost daily, but on the other hand, lead me to an awareness: I want to live an uncomfortable life, a life sometimes with edges; edges and ripples that force me to adapt, readjust, re-invent and reshape my habits according to what I have around me. That's exactly how I want my new Lisbon (Lisbon 2.0), a Lisbon that can still call me to look around, to discover, again and again, the beauty of its palaces, its boulevards and its majestic trees, its bars with the menu written in chalk, a Lisbon that doesn’t give any opportunity to "I already know it, I've already been there, it's not worth it!" but which makes my inner genuine enthusiasm grow and ready to welcome new opportunities.

I am an intense, energetic person. How to catch the fullness of things in the Covid era? How can you be satisfied with 1% of experiences when you finally are ready to accept and live them 100%?? At the same time, how can you be able to show your enthusiasm for the project, for the work, for the colleagues through a computer screen that makes things, experiences, and faces cold and sterile?

How to meet a person for the first time, though with a mask? Me, who is quite expressive, expressive, who seeks physical contact, that even a smile is able to change my mood, how can I be satisfied with knowing a person through half a masked face? Well, among all these doubts and uncertainties, at least I have the answer to one thing: I realized that to know a person, or better to recognize a person, sometimes the eyes are enough.

It is from the eyes of Vanessa and Carolina, in fact, my two tutors from SPEA, Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds, that some of my worries began to melt, I felt, in fact, taken by the hand in this challenge, that that first of all is mine, but also shared with them in a difficult, unexpected and different period such as the one we are facing.

It is also from the eyes of the children at the schools where I started giving environmental education lessons,where they asked me to speak because they wanted to listen to my funny Portuguese accent, which they consider to be of Ukrainian origin, which I get, despite everything, the desire to return to the beauty of the normality of a classroom lesson between chatting with friends and running during the break time.

* Doubts and awareness of an Italian girl in her second year and in a pandemic era in the city that smells of sun.