Enter the Skin of a Young Leader – France

I pretty much liked that relaxed mood of everyday sessions. Nobody would really care if someone woke up late, came to the activity center later or was sleeping during meetings. I must say I was expecting that people will be participating more rather than doing their own stuff, but I got used to it after while and I didn’t complain, because sometimes when some of them spoke it wasn’t worth listening anyway.

 

After few days I left behind all assumptions and prejudices, which I had about some participants, and I started to observe them and tried to enjoy every single character in our crew. I’ve learned that no matter how someone can make others upset, there is still something interesting in his/her personality that is worth respecting. Finding out this was probably the best experience from this project and I bet others feel the same.

 

What I didn’t like?

 

They were fine, even though none of them could speak English. They were very friendly but they not always tried to do their best to sort out some issues as we needed. However, these ‘issues’ were usually less important so when they didn’t fulfill our expectations it wouldn’t make us too upset. 

 

Everyday started with warm-up games, then there was a space for feedback to the previous day and then we usually continued with some kind of brainstorming at least for few minutes. Apart of that, most of the time we spent on listening to talks and ‘lectures’ of the chief organizer. Unfortunately, we didn’t work that much in team, although, when we did it was always exciting and we came up with good ideas and results. 

 

We slept in a motel next to the highway. Decent rooms and good breakfast. However, it didn’t provide us any common room whre we could hang out in the evening.

 

Plenty of good food and drinks!

 

All money were given in cash on the last day of the project.

 

Organised trip was ‘just’ city sightseeing for few hours, nothing more nothing less. Angouleme is a small city so when you want to see something else, you can either take a bus to Bordeaux, Cognac, La Rochelle or try to hitch-hike or walk to these places, because transport tickets are quite expensive. 

 

Beside those already mentioned warm-up games and some dancing at the international night we didn’t play any games. Sad but true!