The European Night

06.11.2010
Aachen

A new topic was tackled today. Participants were oriented with the terminology of Gender equality. Though some of us might already have the knowledge needed for discussing such a topic, still sharing everyone's experience with others cannot be more interesting and beneficial.

Excited, is not the right word to describe our status, when we were informed that it was going to be the European cultural night...Nine European countries played their music, cooked traditional meals and transformed a simple room into a dance floor!

  

As it has been noticed that people may steam out their frustration during the reflection groups, it all fade away once socializing happen to be. Since the backgrounds and cultures are such sensitive issues, we have been trying so hard to cope up with the huge diversity in the EuroArab program. Some might and might not be that flexible in handling misunderstandings and cultural shocks...=)

European night with unexpected incident

06.11.2010
Aachen

Having been introduced to the City of Aachen yesterday, we began our day with an introductory workshop on gender equality where our facilitator Ramon attempted to clarify certain points to consider when discussing  gender equality. The facilitator used interactive ways to familiarize the participants with concepts of sex, gender, gender differentiations, gender-based violence. The European and Arabic participants were then asked to divide into groups based on the regions/countries they present in order to help enhance our multi-cultural understanding of these concepts by presenting gender equality and human rights situation in the regions/countries they represent. The follow-up of this workshop took place in the afternoon session after a tasty lunch at a Turkish kebab restaurant. During the afternoon session, the European and Arab participants continued to deliver the presentations and to discuss differences.

I believe that it was a productive way of discussing gender equality (or the lack thereof) with special  tribute to cultural differences, education, employment, and political representation through these presentations. For instance, for me it was interesting to learn from the Palestinian presentation that 70% of the Palestinian students studying in Palestinian universities are women. Furthermore, it was also interesting to see how 'roles' appointed to men and women by societies differ dramatically in European and Arabic countries. Overall, I am able to say the famous phrase from South Park “I've learned something today!”

Following the workshop, reflection groups gathered to review the day and address challenges that were noticed during today's workshop in order to pave the way for more fruitful sessions of multicultural dialogue and useful outputs for our project.

Saturday night was special because it was one of the cultural events, the European Night of the project in which participants from European countries, namely, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Turkey were gathered to prepare and present their oriental foods, beverages and deserts for other participants to discover as they had a chance to dance and socialize with the rest of the people attending the event.

Unfortunately, there was a small incident that occurred towards the end of this great night. Someone who attended the event decided to have a bubble party (!) with the fire extinguisher in the building in which the event took place, thereby making a mess and leaving many of the organizers sleep deprived as they tried to clean it up. This issue is to be further inspected by the organization team in the next days.