Hello, my name is Alba, and I am going to talk about my experience in the project “Combating extremism with youth force”.
The first day we arrived to the hotel I was so tired because we haven’t gotten many sleep the night before because our flight arrived to Istanbul a bit late. The hotel we stayed in during the project was beautiful and there were a lot of places to go around like a swimming pool, a basketball net, etc.
The next morning after breakfast we went to a big salon where we spent most of the time during the project. There we got to know each other with some icebreakers and the organisers showed us the program for the week.
During the project we learned a lot about extremism and radicalisation. We watched a documentary film about a terrorist attack in Norway so we could discuss the push and pull factors, we talked about politics, terrorism, discrimination and other topics and each group got to prepare presentations about the situations in each country and the organisers prepared games and dynamics, so we got more into the topics and we empathize with people in hard situations. We also learnt about Erasmus + different projects and certificates and how to get into them.
There were also two intercultural nights, and everyone got to explain their countries culture, to bring some typical food and to teach us the typical dances. There were people from Turkey, Poland, Macedonia, Italy, France, Romania, Portugal, Greece and obviously Spain. There was a day in which we also proposed ideas to bring to our countries the things we had learnt by creating a project to share with people information about radicalisation and extremism as well as Erasmus +.
We also explained what was Eo, Eo , our sending association, and how we were related to it. We even had a free day that some of us used to travel to the city centre, but there where also people who went to the beach, hiking or just stayed at the hotel’s swimming pool.
Not everything was learning and working, we also got to know some amazing people from all over Europe and got to make new friends and have a lot of fun.