“Introduce yourself in a creative way.”
“The youth exchange “I SEE GREEN” is a 10 days youth exchange aiming at raising awareness of 30 youngsters, youth leaders and volunteers of 6 countries (Netherlands, Croatia,Romania,Greece,Latvia and Poland) on environmental education with the use of audiovisual media as a tool.”
So I went to the Netherlands, took part in I See Green and I had a fantastic time. So good was it that not only do I want to participate in as many similar programs as possible in the future, I regret having missed opportunities to do so in the past.
It is very hard to convey in words what happened in Ommen. Those 10+2 days were very “experiential” and a big part of what made them special was the bonding that was powerfully, creatively and disruptively (but in a good way) built up between us by the team leaders, the inside jokes that quickly emerged among us and countless other things that really mean little to anyone but us roughly 30 people that took part. It felt like we were all apprentices in this cult’s ceremonies, cut-off from the rest of the world, staying in that old house in the middle of nowhere for the Netherlands’ standards. That closeness was what made it special.
For example, I will never listen to this song the same way:
(trust me, use loud music if you want people to be in a room on time)
I feel I met people that I’d make good friends with, but once again, just like the ones I made in Denmark, these are relationships that are destined to be long-distance from the get-go. Still, all is well. Matija, Karla, Agita, Marian, Vaggelis, Elisavet, Panagiotis, Dimitra, Sofia (it was a more or less Greek-dominated team), they stood out for me. I don’t want to exclude the rest of the participants of course; everyone has their own special place in my mind for their own reason, be it Stephanie for teaching me dance moves, Jakob for his perfect impersonation of Rose from Titanic (we remade one of the scenes from the movie as part of one of our assignments), Darius for his humour, wit and very special accent, Dede for reimagining what milking a cow can mean, Ioanna for her special Uno rules and one of the heaviest but loveable Greek accents EVER, Edgars for his remarkably bad English but him being even more likeable because of it, Ola for her studying Japanese late into every evening with remarkable dilligence, even when everyone was in altered states around her dancing around her or jumping on the trampoline outside…
Of course, this (try to spot me in both scenes):
After we had to unlearn part of what we had been learning a whole lifetime, our final assignment was to make a video that would promote awareness on an enviornmental issue of our choice. My group had a struggle with the concept (like always in I See Green, we were purposefully given very short deadlines in which we had to come up with our ideas in order to think less and do more); we scrapped two ideas in the process and for good reason: the stage for one of them could easily pass off as the backdrop for an amateur porn movie to the unsuspected passer-by. Panic crept to us slowly but surely in the few hours we had to have something prepared — and it wasn’t the first time we were caught unprepared in the program; in fact most assignments in I See Green we had to have ready in timespans measured in half-hour increments. What we ended up doing though we’re really proud of. We created 5 funny social awareness shorts and then combined them into one for easier presentation and shaing. Enjoy.
And a small extra:
