Buddy System is Social

Buddy System is the student organization that takes care of foreign students coming to study at the University of Economics, Prague. One of the main goals of Buddy System is to enable integration of exchange students into local community. This is done via Social Erasmus activities where exchange students get possibility to involve in volunteering activities that help local community, disadvantaged or minority groups.

By intensive involvement of foreign students Buddy System tries to help a good thing as well as enrich the stay of exchange student at VSE. Exchange students get a valuable experience, meet some locals, get to know Czech country, culture and also Czech mentality.

In summer 2014 Buddy System organized a wide range of educational, sport and beneficent activities:

• Country Presentations and Buddy Café Lingea: Exchange students from all over the world prepare for Czech students interactive presentations full of music and useful information about living in the home country. Students also introduce cuisine and traditional clothes. The Buddy Café Lingea follows after the presentations. The BCL is the language meeting that break down language barriers. Only during last term (summer 2014) the foreign students of 15 nationalities presented their country and everyone could practice their speaking skills in 8 foreign languages.
• Soccer Day: the all-day sport event was organized on 8^th May for Czech and foreign students living in Jarov dormitories, and also for young refugees living in Prague. The event was organized in cooperation with the Organization for the Aid to Refugees for the third time already. The purpose of the event was to bring together all young people regardless nationality and ethnicity and spend a nice day together. Students and refugees could spend a day together and challenge each other in football, volleyball, basketball, table tennis, try powerbocking or trampoline.
• Help4homeless donation: Buddy System asked the exchange students to donate belongings which they don’t want to carry home at the end of semester. There was a very helpful exchange student Michelle Lingg that involved in organizing the event and helped us to collect the items from other students. The collection met with great success. Many students were willing to donate the winter clothes, shoes and leftover products. The distribution of donated clothes among homeless followed on 25^th May. Students gathered around U Bulhara (street close to Main railway station) and hand out all collected items to homeless.

• Hartenberg castle: Exchange students spent an adventurous weekend 25. -27.4. in a gothic castle close to Josefov, Sokolovsko region. The main goal of the weekend was to help with the restoration of the castle. Already more than a thousand volunteers from all over the world participated in the repair of the castle and now the Hartenberg is known for the largest volunteer program in Europe. The participants were cooking over an open fire, sleeping in the sleeping-bags around the castle and explored the surroundings of the castle during their spare time. You can read the story of Matthew Hopper from New Zealand who shared his castle experience with us:http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mhopper/1/1398638649/tpod.html

All information about Buddy System can be found on this webpage: http://buddy.vse.cz/web/en