Programme and action: Youth in Action programme, action 1.1. youth exchange
Date: 1-10 August 2013
Venue: Baia Mare, Maramures, Romania
Participants: Marie Přibylová, Monika Šoukalová, Andrea Surá, Aleš Bém, Adam Marčík
Participating countries: Cyprus, Czech Republic, Romania, Sweden, Poland, Greece, France, Lithuania
Project report:
Project NatVival took place in an isolated area in Maramures mountains, Romania. This youth exchange last for 8 days. First of all I would like to mention something about how we arrived to Romania. It was a bit crazy journey. We had to wait for minibus in Budapest airport. We were waiting there for long time and we tried to call our driver, but he didn´t speak english. So it was a bit difficult to find out where he is. I don´t know how but finally we found him. We were so happy…but after ten minutes he stopped in front of some family house. Nobody knew what happend. We waited for another 2 hours and we had to change a minibus. It was so confusing and during our journey the driver stopped on the highway and started to changing phones with driver who stopped on the other side of the highway. It was like a bad dream but each of czech participants had great sense of humor so we couldn´t stop a laugh :)! We arrived to Baia Mare early in 3 a.m. Organizators were waiting for us and hey prepared welcome dinner. We were so hungry, so by the first impression we knew that we will really like organizators :D!
The aim of the project was to show participants how they can live without modern way of communation. The goal was also to improve communication by face to face not only by social networks, phones. In my opinion the project was succesfful, because we hardly ever catched signals and also there weren´t wifi. So I think that most of young participants learned there how they can spend their free time differentely.
The program was divided into two parts. In the morning we did some energizers, ice breaking games or presented results from group discussions. In the afternoon we usually did again energizers, we played games outside. Each of country organizated one day. We had a topic about hiking. Czech boys prepared route in the nature and participants had to follow yellow papers. The aim of the hiking was to get to the river. Fortunately everybody made it. I think that most of us loved the day when swedish guy learned us survival skills. It was really interesting, we made a fire, learned about plants and tips how we can survive in the nature. It was useful, because we lived so far away from city. We were only surrounded by woods, fields…One day we had a trip to civilization (Baia Mare). Romanian youngsters prepared a performance for us. They danced, sang and during this activities the atmosphere were so great! In return after their excellent performance we played sports with them.
We spent beautiful eight days with people from Romania, Cyprus, Greece, France, Luthuania, Poland and Sweden. Each of country presented thier nation on the intercultural night. They showed national food, drinks and also teach us their national dance. I think that international evenings had biggest success. And I have to admit that our czech group was the best. We had full table of food and drinks and everybody enjoyed our night by eating, drinking, dancing and also playing czech funny games.
During the Youth Exchange in Baia Mare I had really good time. From my point of view good time makes good people. So I would like to thank all of participants from czech group, namely: Adamovi, Alešovi, Andrejce a Monči :))! I enjoyed this project a lot and I have a lot of unforgettable memmories…THANK YOU ALL!!!
Marie Přibylová
