Standing in Belgium, Germany and The Netherlands at the same time

08.11.2010
Aachen

Okey!!! Where should I start? The days are going so fast. Today like the other days. We had many events and activities. We walked a lot. We talked a lot. We discussed a lot. Many „lot” things. But anyway it was fun.

So if I should start from the beginning. After breakfast we went to a conference which was about gender equality. The presenter gave some informations especially the examples from Germany. I think, I learnt some important examples from Germany. It was quite good session.

After the session, we had lunch in University mensa. It was good to be there in lunch because it was easy to pass another event which is city surveys. By the way, I can say the city survey activity was not good for me generally. Why? Because it was hard to communicate with the people and not because of language but especially because of most of the people were not interested. Anyway because we were in University, that city surveys was quite easy.

The most interesting part of the day was our excursion trip to „Dreilander” which was quite funny trip. The place where we went was interesting and special to have three countries border. To reach there for us was not easy but it was funny. We walked a lot and also we missed to short cut. So it was funny that the people who were coming before us, they reached the point before we reached it. When I reached to place, I was quite disappointed because the maze was closed. But anyway it was good to be there with other participants. When we decided to go back it was already night. And it dark and the weather was so cold. And we were alone at top of the hill. It was quite scary at the first sight but again it was funny and exciting.

So as a conclusion, again we talked a lot, we discussed a lot, we walked a lot. But as a matter of fact it was a good day.

The last Day in Aachen

08.11.2010
Aachen

Finally, on a our last day in Aachen a ray of sun broke through the heavy clouds...well..literally and metaphorically!!

Today the atmosphere seemed much less tense and we could cooperate well and forget all the small misunderstandings we experienced during the first days. To some extent, from what I learned so far ´understanding each other´s challenges can be a challenge itself!! And this is not just a sort of stereotype or a common standpoint, it is a matter of fact. Obviously I am not talking about getting on well with people with different backgrounds, having fun together or start new friendships, what I am referring to is something more, how to say, ´personal´. In other words when delicate issues come up, a discussion it is never easy to moderate. What I noticed until now is that approaching politically/socially sensitive issues, can lead to serious discussions if we are not taking into consideration all the different participants´ points of view. Personally, I see this event as a ´building-up process´ where pre-concepts can easily be broken simply by discussing with someone who do not exactly live in the same context you usually live. This  is the best way to clarify  things which sometimes appear a bit confusing if not experts. From this point of view, EuroArab can be considered a successful case-study so far.

This morning, after a brief introduction/quiz about European Union institutions and their functions, we luckily had the chances to get to know more about the ´Students' Forum Institute´ in Palestine, and ´ Better World´ an NGO organization based in Egypt.

They are both non-profit organizations, which deal with youth education and develop projects to improve literacy and occupation possibilities. The two presentations were very various, but both extremely interesting.

While the Palestian´s presentation focused more on the projects linked to education in order to enhance their awareness and understanding of sound governance and democracy, with the aim of increasing political and social involvement among the Palestinian youths, the Egyptian´s presentation was very professional and it covered a lot of the projects they are recently running.

It was very motivating to hear about these two 'extra-European' associations, about their structures, goals, programmes. I hope these presentations will inspire new 'adventures' and new valuable connections:)

They are both willing to share their experiences and opinions, so feel free to ask for the material!!!

After lunch we had the second session of the surveys. They were mainly done in the university surroundings. Although the range of people interviewed was not that various, me and my partner Ruba had ten 'pretty' different results.The afternoon continued with an excursion to the place where 'Belgium, Germany and Netherlands meet. I didn't participate in the trip, so I hope that the other (Arab, European, well Turkish) participant went and can explain it in his blog :p

Apologies for the delay in writing this 'travelogue', but I hope you will enjoy it. Comments and suggestions are warmly welcome!:)

p.s. Well, after only day left before the end of this event, I want to thank you all for had shared moments, words, smiles and hugs with me!!

The 3 countries borderline and lots of German CHEESE

08.11.2010
Aachen

Heading to a point at the German borders you can actually be present in 3 countries in the same time! Only makes you realize how symbolic borders are.. Unless we could see the flags of the 3 countries  (Belgium, Germany and Holland) and the thin painted lines on the ground, we wouldn’t even realize that we just traveled from one country to another!

We were 3 walking through a German forest, carpets of autumn tree leaves varying in colors from greenish yellow to orange in a forest of endless tall trees; a picture I used to see in my German language high school book when it was describing the different seasons in the Deutschland. Air is too cold for my Southern nature (yes, in Europe you learn that Mediterranean is South, South of Italy is Deep South, and Egypt is Africa..!)

It was a very interesting and inspiring visit. The unsuccessful attempts to Hitchhike on the way up. The conversations we had in the 3 country-ial cafe and the idea of having a sip from your hot chocolate at one country, using the toilet in another and paying the cheque on a third were extremely amusing!

On the earlier half of that day, it was a pretty interesting in terms of understanding gender equality/inequality in Germany knowing that Aachen as a center for engineering studies, 70% of the students belong to the male gender; only makes you realize that something is not really balanced and that there must be reasons why not as many females are taking the same approach.

Carrying out the street surveys and knowing the professional obstacles females usually face if they want to proceed their careers as university professors or some certain other professions was pretty interesting to discuss with students at the university mensa(Cafeteria).

All in all, it was pretty enjoyable day, the only sad thing about it though was that after all the running, walking, talking and cold weather, when we came back to the hostel there was awaiting for us tons and tons of bloody German… CHEESE!

Started in a church ending in a bar ;)

07.11.2010
Aachen

I like Aachen except the weather; it has been raining the last few days not giving us a lot of time to just enjoy the beauty of the city. The last few days in Aachen were somehow relaxed than the ones in Koln and the schedule was a little flexible than before.

Day started later than planned :)  in a beautiful church called the Dome of Aachen, it was an optional visit to the church and attending the mass. Many people joined though with a good mixture of Europeans, Turkish, Palestinians, and Egyptians. A mass was running for around 2 hours with several hymns and choirs in a very organized way. Even though, I am Christian Orthodox, I can still relate several movements and songs to the mass back home. This means that if it not because of the language barrier, I could have joined them in some parts. Some people took communion and my question after this to the organizers: Does this church believe that the bread and wine changes to the blood and body of Jesus (which is a strong believe in the Coptic orthodox church) and he said it does have the same believe (which shows that even they are from different culture, some churches still have the same believes…

From Gender Equality to Misunderstanding and Respect: this was my title for the morning session. Our focus in this was not anymore the gender issues but rather the internal way of communication of the whole CST teams. Relating this back to management and organizational evaluation technique, this was a good approach to refresh the main values in this conference; which are intercultural understandings and ways of communication.

Aachen team did a great job, trying to make sure that they do the right things and at the same time tried to make sure that the CST participants are happy. The city tour was great-Thank you Andre. You can be a tour guide as a side job ;)

Later in the day after having lunch that was prepared by Aachen organizers, we went to a Mosque and we had a good but long chat with an immigrant family over there. Several interesting topics were brought to the ground however; we did not go in depth in most of them. Later in the evening, we went for a drink to celebrate the last day in Aachen.

We never stop learning

07.11.2010
Aachen

9. 00 AM : Check who wants to go to the church? We have to leave at 9.30 AM.
9. 10 AM : better checking again…
9. 15 AM : Maybe tell them to hurry up.
9. 20 AM : They said they’ll need 5 more minutes, fine.
9. 28 AM : Where are the people?
9. 30 AM : We have to leave now.
9. 35 AM : Guys, we really have to leave now!
9. 40 AM : Let’s go… all who are here.
9. 45 AM : Come on, you’re the last ones, RUN!!
9. 50 AM : *breathing heavily*
9. 55 AM : There we are… finally 
9. 59 AM : Mass starts. Germans… 1 minute earlier..

For many people it’s a weekly spiritual and religious event but for most of us it was the first time to attend a Sunday mass in church. Those of our group who were willing to get up before 10 AM went to the beautiful dome of Aachen this morning and listened to the words and choir. Although it was held in German and therefore not understandable for everyone it was still an impressing and interesting experience for both our Christian and Muslim members because we could see both differences and similarities between Coptic masses, prayers in a mosque and a so to say German mass.

What a nice warm up for the day.

Our morning program got a little bit changed and so not gender equality but another challenge became our topic: how to get along with cultural differences and misunderstandings within a group of people who all want to share their ideas and are following different aims?

Respect, that’s what all of us see as the most important base for a good working group.

But we found out that there is not a lack of respect in our group but because of our backgrounds and cultures we sometimes see behavior in another way. For one person it might be the most normal thing on earth for another one it’s disrespectful.

During the last days the groups got to know each other and had a lot of fun. You can say it’s a team. But of course sometimes there are different points of view. We just have to respect all of them. As we said on the first day, we have a lot of things in common that connect us with each other, such as same aims, fears, and expectations. On the other hand we’re still all different which makes everybody special and interesting. As long as we keep on being tolerant and open minded we will for sure spend one more great week together!

For not letting us starve our great Aachen people prepared a nice lunch for us: homemade lentil soup. Thanks by the way to these organizers who really do a lot of effort to make us feel comfortable and welcome here!!

30 happy tummies later we went to visit the second oldest Mosque in Germany and met its representative and his family who were so kind to answer all the questions people had regarding the Islam and told us about the mosque and their life.

Also this family reminded us of our first topic, migration and integration. A perfect integrated family with migration background in Germany!

This visit was another chance to compare how Muslims in the Arabic world and in Europe live and follow practice their religion.

Bilal mosque 2
Bilal mosque 3
Bilal mosque 4
Bilal mosque 5

In order not to ignore our current topic, gender equality, we used our free time we had afterwards to talk about that… e.g. the question if women can walk as fast as men, who can carry heavier bags or is there the same amount of meat in kebabs for men and women?

Again our German organizers prepared food for us and after dinner and the reflection/ complain/ discuss/ find solutions groups the highlight of the day waited for us.

Andre  from the AEGEE Aachen Team took us on a city tour which was really interesting and funny thanks to the stories and legends we were told in a very nice way!

We were shown the beauty of this city and also learned about its history. At night Aachen's sights such as e.g. the Elisenbrunnen, “the needle people statue”, different fountains, the market square with its town hall and of course the dome looked even more beautiful and impressing at night. We can say that Aachen is a wonderful charming city which is totally worth to visit it and a great place for our CST.

Let’s enjoy our last day here, keep in mind what we are talking about regarding the respect and look forward to all the other activities we are going to do in this week!

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.

Aachen: halfway of a journey through different worlds

05.11.2010
Aachen

After four unforgettable days in Cologne - the land where religions live peacefully together  - it is now time to move to the second part of the Case Study Trip, in the medieval German city of Aachen, where Charles Magne (one of the first men to unify Europe) was crowned.

During the past days it was time for first impressions, getting to know the participants and trainers and understanding the flow of the programme. Now, we got to the second stage, we changed the topic of discussion so deeper thoughts, a committed and open-minded attitude are required. The intensity of the trip leads everyone to exhaustion, but we all know we are here with a purpose and no one misses one single second of this experience which is truly once-in-a-life-time type.

After a warm reception at the Town Hall, we all felt welcomed in this historical city. The topic is now "Gender Inequality", to which we have been introduced when we got to Aachen after a 50-minute train connection from Cologne. A simple workshop at the end of the day was enough to prove that despite the cold in this city the discussions are going to be hot and everyone will have the chance to share their opinion. Differences are obvious but that is what makes this event unique: despite various points of view we are all working together to understand each others mindsets, aknowledging different cultures and interacting to accomplish the goal of learning about global challenges.  Furthermore, we are dealing with totally different worlds: the Arab and the European. Gender Inequality is certainly an appropriate issue to be discussed among young people from both sides who care about the diversity of our world. I am sure that in the next days we are all facing high-quality workshops and discussions about the topic and we can all expect excellent results from all our work.

The Case Study Trip has been such an experience: not only are we able to learn in a quite international atmosphere - which has worked extremely well, I must say -, but also the fact that we can merge all differences into one group of young people, friends, workshop partners, enthusiastic speakers who are willing to exchange ideas is just amazing and enriches all of us not only professionally but also socially. This is definitively a starting point for an inter-cultural project that will mark us all forever and expand our perspective of the world as a whole.

From Cologne to Aachen

05.11.2010
Aachen

As every day in this project we started our day by waking up all the participants, because today we have to transfer from  Cologne  to Aachen, so we ate our breakfast and then started to leave.

We left the hostel to catch the train, and then we took another train to Aachen and it took more than 1 hour to get there,  at 11:00 we arrived at Aachen hostel, we had a little rest, a free time and then we got out to have a city tour. After that we had lunch at 1:15 and it was good :)

After the lunch we went to a historical place in Aachen to have some information about the historical background of European identity and we had a reception by the mayor  of Aachen and we met  a woman who told us the story of the historical building and shared some information about the photos and the pictures which were in the walls of the building. After that we had our free time which we spent in a small coffee shop  and also went shopping.

Then we went to the workshop building and we had a workshop about the stereotypes we had about others especially the gender stereotypes. The workshop seemed longer than we needed to the topic, but it was okey.

We went to the hostel after that and everyone chose his room and bed and there was a small issue about the shower and the bathrooms  because of the Arabian girls but the issue solved by the organisers  hopefully

every body took a rest while they were waiting for the dinner, and then we had a nice dinner in the hostel. It was a nice day, after that some people went to have a party night.