BETting on the future

REPORT ON A YOUTH EXCHANGE: BUILDING MULTI-EUROPE TODAY

RIVOLI, JULY 2016

UFFICIO GIOVANIYouth Office of the City of Rivoli is the one responsible to design and make a number of activities for young people of the city and to make the local Youth centers available to them. One of the activities is “Informagiovani”, a service that’s goal is to provide use-ful information on the following areas of interest: job search, training courses, organiz-ing trips and holidays, opportunities to play sports or volunteering, living experiences abroad, and much more.

For many years Youth Office also offers to young people the opportunity to participate in international exchanges by hosting them and participating as a partner. In the context of international mobility the office develops and organizes a project called Eurolys in Colle del Lys with several other local partners and the cities twinned to Rivoli Municipality. The gathering takes place from Friday to Sunday of the first week of July, since 2000, to commemorate the fallen Partisans during the resistance against the fascism. The event has an European dimension, since a part of the event’s participants is attending the international exchange called Building multi-Europe today in Rivoli. The aim of the collaboration is to provide young people an opportunity to discuss and to get to know some important history events together people experienced them and to search for the correlation with the present events.

Newsroom:Ainoha BernalAlbert DiagoAnca PosircaAndrea Gabriela BiroAriadna MartinezBadr AamiliBeatrice BorsaCarla HermannCharlotte SchänzlinClara InserteEdu BaqueroFlavia MorettoHannes Künstler

Irene RosielloJoan RamonJonas WeberJudith BreuerLindsey LurkinLuigi Chiesa Mattia TalloneMonica ConstandachiPaul BuchholzRazvan Todoran Sami ChettoufSilvia Caviasso

Photo:Irene di Pietra and Raul NeamtiEditing and design:Larisa TomsicProject facilitator:Pasquale Lanni

In your hands you are holding the final publication of the BET-project (Building multi-Europe today), organized by the municipality of Rivoli facilitated by the organisation EUFEMIA, founded by the Europe-

an commission as an Erasmus+ project. Background: between the 27th of June and the 6th of July 2016, 30 persons between 16 and 43 years, sent by five different European countries, France, Germany, Italy, Romania and Spain, met together in the Hostel Rivoli to work on the Resistance, Mi-gration, Moving etc. topics. Purpuse was to xchange and share their own cultures, traditions, their histo-ry, stories and point of view to build multi Europe today. In the following pages you will find our notes

about the things we experienced. We hope you will enjoy reading it!

BET Team

THE PARTISANS: helpful to define a European Identity and shape a future of freedom.

During the event in Colle del Lys, Eu-rolys, we have had the chance to know the history of the Partisans, who desert-ed fascism army and went to the moun-tains to fight against nazi occupation. Meeting the heroes of the past, learn-ing the hard conditions they faced and paying tribute to those who lost their lives for our freedom is not only a ro-mantic affair linked to the old glories but something that has to do with the future we want to conquer.Building a collective memory is the necessary tool to create a European identity and to shape a future of unity and freedom in our continent.Nobel awarded neurobiologist Gerald Edelman has explained how our mem-ories play a key role in the formation of our conscience. We understand the present according to similar experienc-es from the past.Every step we take, every answer and reaction to a new event is conditioned by our memory. Then history becomes a tool to build an active, democratic, free and concerned citizenship. Every-thing going on nowadays, since mi-gration to war, since gender discrim-ination to economic crisis and social injustice must be approached from a collective memory that enables young-sters to understand it. That way we will be able to produce fair and reasonable answers to this events, according to a shared set of values that inspired the partisans in the white mountains of the Alps 70 years ago.

Joan Ramon

During the camping in Col del Lys the guys of BET Eurolys have painted some signs to commemorate the partisans of 17th bri-gade Garibaldi. But this activity wasn’t only a way to remember this important chapter of our history, but also a chance to cooperate and try to craft something with our own hands.

Flavia MorettoA STORY ABOUT THE SIGNS

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Freedom, nowadays it seems so easy to talk about that, it is normal. But how did we get that? Our freedom comes from the mountains, “from the mountains where partisans had fallen.” Who the partisans were? Partisans were abso-lutely normal people, normal guys. But they did something unusual: the desire of freedom, democracy, constitution. That is why decided to fight against fas-cism, against dictatorship. They were very young, and they left cities to go to the mountain. They wanted peace, the wanted Europe founded on love, not on war. They believe in it, and they died for it. They died for us, for our future. And today, thinking about that, we should think: What would we do for freedom and peace? They lost their life. They never had fun again with their friends and they didn´t have the opportunity to see their families again. And if we can do this things, it´s thanks to them. That resistance still exists today. Parti-sans still exist, we all can be partisans. Fighting to protect what they died for. Partisans hadn´t died for a single idea. They died to give everyone the possibil-ity to express their point of view. That´s why I think it is so important to don´t forget what they have done. Be-cause they wanted rights for everyone, they wanted to give to everyone the possibility to be who they are, without fear, in freedom.

Mattia TallonePARTISANS’ RESISTANCE

Moreover, each guy express himself and his country using the colors and the style that are typical of his culture. Indeed, this is the purpose of the project: to build a new Europe, learning from our mistakes and helping each other leveraging our differences.What’s more, lots of messages written on the signs were about peace and world’s citizen-ship, making the perspective broader not only from a single country to Europe, but from Eu-rope to the whole world.

A STORY ABOUT THE SIGNS

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EUROLYS EVENT REPORT

1st dayArrival to Colle del Lys at half past three and accommodation on the camp. The weather was so good that we could play some Energizer games. We felt afraid of what are we going to find in the camp, such as for example, the isolation. The partisan witness was interesting be-cause we felt impressed about the sto-ries he told to us. Also, it was very clear what he said in Italian. The night was cool. We share our time both together around the bonfire. It was such a great experience but we didn’t sleep to much during the night because of the music. To sleep in a sleeping back wasn’t com-fortable but we manage it. Sleeping with our friends was funny.

2nd dayWalking on the mountains was so hard but it was great and we could saw a very beautiful landscape. The Pakistan wit-

Sami Chettouf and Edu Baqueronesses were startling because they said that they had a lot of brothers and sis-ters and all were separated from their families. They also look like younger that their physical appearance. In the afternoon, while it was raining, we had painting boards. We felt involved in partisans conflict. We liked to paint, however, we hadn’t enough colors. In our free time we played lots of games. All nationalities mixed each other more than in Rivoli.

3rd dayThe festivity of partisans we did the last day was really interesting even though we felt a little bit boring because we didn’t understand it at all.

ConclusionFood was great but we believe that it was worse than the food in Rivoli. We consider that we have learnt to come up with some ideas to live in the forest. We improved our survival abilities, too.

Paul Buchholz

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RESISTANCE

RESISTANCE – PAST AND TODAY

Resistance is an issue that always had a huge significance in history. People who didn’t agree on the current situ-ation resisted in order to encourage a change on long term. Resistance is a term including a wide variety of the way one acts.Most of the time the goal of resistance is to achieve more freedom and justice. In the past, people who resisted fought for the situation we are in now, for example the European democracy and human rights. Such as in the French revolu-tion, where they fought for the concept of human rights. Today, resistance in Europe has more differentiated goals, like fighting for the rights of women, which are already present in theory but not always respected, so they basically campaign for disadvantaged people. In the past, the resistance mainly came

Carla Hermann and Charlotte Schänzlin

from the left wing against the current right winged dictatorship, for example the Nazi-Regime in Germany. Today, we have resistance from both wings, because the government is quite mixed and the current migration situation causes a lot of controversy.The distinction of resistance is drawn between violent and peaceful resistance which depends on the issue you’re fighting. Today there is a lot of peace-ful resistance through the media, for example Facebook groups, petitions or the web in general where you can reach a lot of people around the world. Another significant difference is that the youth today isn’t as political moti-vated than the youth in the past, where mostly young people took the reins and resisted. So in our opinion it is very important to raise awareness of the modern issues, especially for young people, because the future relies on us and we are able to change something together as a Eu-ropean unity.

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one of the main causes for migration nowadays.In these ten days we have had the op-portunity to have contacts with some refugees, who shared their stories with us and discussed their critical situation. Similarities can be found between mi-grations in the past and in the present: the most noticeable one is the direc-tions they had taken, from south to north and from east to west. Unfortu-nately conflicts between the different regions of the world caused by the re-ligious, economic and political prob-lems have originated many movements from which we can observe some con-sequences. The youth exchange has of-fered us a chance to face this issue. We consider that mixture of cultures and tradition, languages and habits that are consequence of migration, is a great way to break the barriers between us and to create an united Europe.

MOVING

Have you ever notice that moving from one place to another is nowadays nor-mal? In fact there are several reasons for the movements. During the youth exchange Building Multi-Europe To-day we have been able to take a closer look to the topic of movements. You can move for leisure, work, studies or to find a new opportunities and better life as also our ancestors did. There are many examples in the history: the first mind that comes to our mind is the movement of Jewish people from Eu-rope all around the world during the 2nd World War. Another important migration flow we must remember is the one that took place during the last century. During this movement Euro-peans spread towards the USA from economic reasons. In fact this is still

Ainoha Bernal, Irene Bosiello and Silvia Caviasso

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I’d never felt really European. I’ve trav-elled a lot and was aware of my coun-try being in the European Union but I hadn’t really experience what being Eu-ropean means. Until this week.I thought it was impossible that in a group of 30, where there are so many cultural differences it would be impos-sible for everybody to get along. Then I had some of the best conversations in my life and met some of the most inter-esting people I know.I feel like now I have a European iden-tity, and I understand why there are so many people who feel so proud of it and keep fighting for it. We are all Europeans, and that’s what really mat-ters. This experience has made me re-think the way I look at nationalities, it has made me understand they are only tags, and yes, it is nice to feel proud of where you are born, but please don’t let a simple thing like that interfere with your relationships. I don’t feel like I have ever been part of such a diverse group, with people so willing to understand other countries and accept differences, where every-body feels involved and free to state their opinion. A group where polite debates are the norm and where every single opinion and idea is respected. Also, not coincidentally, I had never been part of such a diverse group.Overall, I feel like if we didn’t have such a diverse group, with people of five dif-ferent nationalities and very different backgrounds, we wouldn’t have had this great of a time and we wouldn’t

had worked so well together in making a more unite Europe. And you want to know why?Because diversity is what makes hu-manity evolve.Every European project has a main tar-get the gathering of youngsters from different countries in a common place and rural the likeness that exist be-tween them. Though , what really hap-pens there?We are not robots. We do not function like machines do. The connection be-tween us, as human beings are bond during long process of understanding what others think and act. We cannot read each other´s minds but we can only guess. We feel the emotions and dig deeper for better explanations. Why people do that?What determines them to end up with those conclusions? Maybe there are some differences, language, culture, traditions, habits, perspectives. Still we have succeeded in enjoying each other´s friendship and became a team.And then, after all, we learn. There is a certain point in this kind of project when, involuntary, each participant starts to learn the basics but in a differ-ent manner and from another point of view. Slowly but steadily we sketched new horizons for tolerance, kindness and determination.Because this is what unity means in the very ending: being involved in some-thing bigger than you, bigger than me and bigger than him, and still as a part of it whose presence matters for it to be seen as a whole.

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CREATING THE EUROPEAN IDENTITYAlbert Diago and Ale Caluseri

EVS: EUROPEAN VOLUNTARY SERVICE

An EVS is an international voluntary service that people between 17 and 30 years can do. Young people have the opportunity to go abroad to gain experiences in the field of action that they like. They have to choose different country than the one they are living in. The EVS can be from 2 weeks to 12 months long.

People who do EVS don’t pay for any-thing. Erasmus + takes care of financial aspects of the service. That means that the volunteer doesn’t pay the travel cost to arrive from its country to the coun-try where the EVS will take place. He/she doesn’t have to find somewhere to live because the organization in which she/ he will work has to find it for the volunteer and the volunteer doesn’t pay the rent. Then the volunteer will receive pocket money for the day life. Some language courses are also provided in order for the volunteer to learn the lan-guage of the hosting country. EVS is a great experience because you can gain also professional experience. It’s a good way to meet new people from different countries. You learn a new language and new skills. It’s also an opportunity to discover new coun-tries and cultures. And finally, the ex-perience will help you to know yourself better.

Lindsey LurkinTo get to know each other better, we did several activities to learn our names, to interview each other … we got a secret friend, who send us secret messages via envelope which has a picture and the name of its front. To be well awake during the main activities, we always start with ENERGIZER. Short , inter-active group games (after breakfast, lunch, ..) to involve everyone, each per-son who knows “energizers” can pro-pose one. At the beginning, we got an overview about the program and the possibility to do small changes. if we have addi-tional ideas or/and proposals this was great, because we had the possibility to be involved in the decisions. To get to know each other letter and the place where we are, we did an “Action-bound “action after meeting the city councils. A kind of interactive game to discover the city and to meet the local people. Following to teambuilding activities, during which we built for example a bridge all together or we found and implemented ideas to be able to let and egg fall from the balk without destroy-ing it, to get to a secret island with all team members to find the right wat to cross a field where just one way is ex-isting, or to find strategies how to turn a blanket while 15 people are standing on it… These are just some examples of activities, which brought the group members closer together.In the context of presentations of each country we learned a lot about the re-

BUILDING MULTI-EUROPE TODAY - my point of viewJudith Breuer

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sistance and the topic and evolution of migration in the different countries… This was quit important, I think, to understand better the present reality. Additional, we discovered by national presentations the countries and cities of the other participants and were able to taste typical specialties, typical mu-sic, movies and even games of each par-ticipating country. The 1st of July, we move to “Colle del Lys” to meet other people and to discover the Italian resis-tance in form of the story of the “Par-tigiani”. I was quite impressed to meet “Lupo” (90-years-old) former partisan, who was supposed to be sent to a Ger-man factory during the Second World War. He didn’t agree and went into the mountains to become part of the par-tisans. We visited the monuments and did a hiking trip together with the peo-ple from different countries. We were even lucky to be able to meet people who had left their countries because of war, religion… On the final ceremony to remember the partisans we put flowers to remember

the dead and fell partisans. An intercul-tural highlight during the camping was for sure the big bonfire at night when we were dancing in the summer rain and the football game between Italy and Germany. I have never seen before people so emotional about this topic. This touched me. At the end of the project we got deep-er in cultural realities and methods to discover people and cultures, for ex-ample in form of a human-library. We got taught how to prepare us to be a human-book and how to present us as book during the final event. This activ-ity was quite new for me and I had the possibility to create my own ideas and to think how I probably could imple-ment his activity in my home country community. In general I am very happy about this intercultural project, about the activi-ties and reflections we did together to become closer to each other to under-stand better our differences and simi-larities to be able to build a multi-Eu-rope today!

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EUROPEAN UNION

Staying with people from different cultures and countries is pretty weird at the beginning: you hear many and languages, and it also may be a little uncomfortable. But not only the atmo-sphere may be alien: also culture influ-ence relationships among people, like reactions that may be shown and based on different points of view directly con-nected to the society in which each per-son lives.European Union exists in order to make links with those different cultures and to enrich each nation by sharing their identity without losing it. To cre-at a union also means to look beyond stereotypes and understand different points of view by respecting them.Our generation is supposed to make a united Europe, not only in what con-cerns economy and trading purposes on which EU was based when it was born) but also by considering ideolog-ical and cultural fields. So we should start together because union makes us strong.

Luigi Chiesa

DIFFERENT CULTURES – PERCEPTION OF OTHER NATIONS

Every country has it´s own clichés, and some of them are completely wrong. We can affirm that, because we have been 10 days with people from five different European countries, we have shared experiences that have allowed us to realize that we are not that differ-ent after all.We have been asking our mates about the difference culture they had about each country. The results are presented in Table 1.

Ariadna Martinez and Clara Inserte

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STRANGERS WHO BECAME FAMILY

These are the main values of a team. Eurolys not only managed to build a team, but an international team. We asked some of the participants what were their expectations from this camp. Ainoah, a girl from Spain wanted to come here in order to learn about oth-er countries, compare their traditions and have fun. Another participant from France, Sami said that he also came here to have a great time with the oth-er participants. Finally, Luigi from Italy told us that he came here to make new friends all over Europe. We observe that from their confessions, they all had the same purpose. So did the coor-dinators of the youth exchange. During the day, all the activities were centered on consolidating our team. Among the activities we mention team buildings, presentations about refugees or the re-sistance in all the countries involved in the project and also cultural evenings in which every country presented their traditions and customs. All of these helped us gain a sense of trust, our first value . Moreover we had to cooperate with each other, that being our second value.

Razvan Todoran and Anca Poșircă

TEAM = TRUST FRIENDSHIP COOPERATION

Have you ever met a bunch of people that seemed totally different from you, only later to be able to call them your friends?This is exactly what happened during our stay in Italy. Even though, we didn’t speak the same language, we didn’t come from the same country or from the same traditions; we discovered that we actually have a lot of things in com-mon. The first thing that helped us to get to become closer and trust each other were the team building games. Learning to work in a team though us how to communicate, how to collab-orate and also each common ground while making the best decision for the group.Staying in rooms with people from another country gave us the chance to exchange ideas, thought and helped us bend more. Not to mention the fact that the cultural diversity gave us a great view on the other’s backgrounds learning about history and tasting tra-ditional food.I personally like to compare our inter-national team to a puzzle, each partic-ipant being a piece, playing a certain role, and only together we can make a whole.

Monica Constandachi

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STRANGER TURNING INTO AN ACQUAINTANCE

On our second day in Rivoli at the Hos-tel we had a little break between the dinner and the next activity. Togeth-er with other Romanian participants we have decided to go on the terrace. In my opinion that is the place which I find the most relaxing around the RIvoli Hostel. Sitting on the chair while watching beautiful landscape in front of you - the surrounding mountains forming an amazing view together with the setting sun, it really helps me to chill after a long day. While we were sitting there we have discussed about activities we had had during the day, a person who I haven’t seen till then cam. Our friendly group leader saluted him and asked him to join us at the table. Sur-prisingly he agreed to sit with complete strangers. At first there was a moment of weird silence in order to break the ice one of us asked him where he was from. He told us he was from Nigeria and that it has been ten months since he arrived to Rivoli as a refugee. He’s name is Steve and he likes this place very much. As the ice was already bro-ken we found out that we have similar taste in music, so the conversation was easy-going. When he heard we are from Romania he asked why we were in Ita-ly. We started explaining him about the project which he has found very inter-esting. While the others refugees seem quite shy I was surprised to see how easy-going Steve was. We exchanged facebook pages agreed to communicate from time to time.

Andrea Biro

LIVING LIBRARY - don’t judge a book by its cover

In the Living Library every person who takes part is a book with a title which sounds interesting for other people, so they want to know more about this book. They are coming to you, if they want to read you. Mostly, you are go-ing to tell a story who fits to your title. After that, the person or the persons who read, can ask you questions to get to know more about the book/you. The goal of a Living Library is to fight against stereotypes and prejudices. When we prepared ourselves for be-ing a book at the Living Library, we thought about an interesting story about us or our life in the country we are from. After we found a good story we thought about a title who fits to that story. While doing that, we also took care about questions that somebody might ask us. But in our opinion, there is one problem with the Living Library. The people who take part should not be shy or afraid to speak about them-selves. And the people who ask ques-tion should be respectful and sensitive in order to avoid offending the Book

Hannes Künstler and Jonas Weber

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Eufemia is a non-governmental organisation that was born from the experience of peo-ple who were already working as promoters of active citizenship, nonformal education and youth mobility through European programs.The main objectives of the association are:• To initiate practices of active citizenship and participation, to spread a culture of human rights, to facilitate mutual understanding, and to celebrate diversity in order to prevent and fight prejudice.• To promote training activities based on nonformal education, international mobility projects and exchanges.• To facilitate the process of European integration and reflecting on European citizen-ship through the practices of active citizenship and democratic participation, exchang-es and international projects..• To sensitize and inform the citizens about topics of European relevance, in particular about the opportunities that the European Union offers to young people in order to promote their international mobility.

www.eufemia.euinfo@eufemia.eu

EUFEMIA