Cheltenham Twinning Association are having an Open Evening next Tuesday (25th January). The meeting will be held at the Municipal offices on the Promenade in the Montpellier rooms.
Morgan will be giving a talk about Global Footsteps! Twinning Officer Annette Wight sent through the following information. Hope to see you there:
Please come along to the Cheltenham Twinning Association Open Evening next Tuesday 25 January, from 6.45 for 7 pm start, until approx 8.30pm. There will be wine, soft drinks and nibbles and time to chat.
We will be telling you more about this year's big event - the 60th anniversary visit to Göttingen from 29 July to 5 August. Come and hear more about the trip and ask any questions you may have.
Global Footsteps' Director Morgan Phillips, will also be outlining the international development work that this local charity are involved in and some young people will give brief presentations on visits made last summer to Hungary for an international dance and culture festival for young people and to Göttingen for the International Peace camp. So please come along and give them your support and hear about their experiences.
The evening is open to all - not just Association members, so do bring family and friends along.
I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible next week and if you are able to send a quick email reply to indicate whether you are able to come along, that would help us with the number of glasses we shall need!!!
Best regards Annette
PS : if you can't make the meeting and have registered your interest with me in the visit to Göttingen, information will still be sent to you within the next couple of weeks.
Day 2 at Footstep 12 was our first in the village of Stara Bystricia, 20 km from Cadca. Jana Eyssel reports on the goings on!
The second day of the Foostep 12 conference began early at 8 o'clock in the morning with a Slovak breakfast served by the KERIC volunteers. We had sweet bread and Zavin s makovou naplnou, sweet bread with poppies, together with jam. For our first workshop we had a walk through the hilly area around our acommodation – but this wasn't to be a normal walk, it was a Philosophy walk. The group got in pairs, discussing different questions. The questions tackled the issues of sustainability, consumerism, over-population, happiness and travel experiences. After having come back to our accomodation, we discussed the questions together: very different views and experiences came together.
The Philosophy Walk was followed by the Kenyan project presentations. Introducing the „Kisumu Links and Sister Cities“ project Mikidadi gave a short introduction of the roots of the link between Kisumu and Cheltenham, reemphasizing Dennis' role. Margaret was next, presenting Kosimbo, a charity founded by her supporting widows and orphans. Third, Steven spoke about CADIF Kenya, a youth based organisation, coping with a wide range of different problems people face in Kisumu (e.g. HIV/AIDS, climate change, children becoming orphans).
After a tasty Slovak lunch we went on with the project presentations: Monika presented Tilia, an ecological association based in Torun, Poland. Among others, they run a forest school providing ecological education.
We hoped Ramnicu Valcea, Romania, would be represented at the conference. I travelled to Romania in March this year on a Global Venture meeting Irina who took me to several projects willing join the GF network. Despite their enthusiasm, their resources are so stretched currently that they could not spare the time to join us here. Teo, a student at the University of Gloucestershire, is here at the conference also representing her home country Romania. Together, we presented the current voluntary and social work situation in Ramnicu Valcea and Romania more broadly.
I also presented my home town Göttingen, which used to be one of the strongest link in the GF networks. However, this connection lapsed in the last years and needs to be reestablished. As I don't live there anymore, we do not only need to identify projects interested in linking with GF, but we also need a contact person in Göttingen.
Being the last group presenting today, Desmond, Janet and Michael from Saint Ann, Jamaica, told us about their college, Moneague College having implemented a very sustainable way of waste recyclying. All the presentations gave an insight into the backgrounds out of which the projects have developed in their communities and also highlightened difficulties they are coping with. However, the representatives already started to connect with each other, discussing possible solutions. If we move on like this for the rest of the week the conference's goal might be in sight!
Right now, we are having a break waiting for the first national dinner: It's the Jamaicans' turn. It already smells very nice!
Irina and I went to see another project, which had been implemented in the community a short time ago. With the help of the Göttingen waste management, a system of waste separation had been installed and a new waste land was being built. As the other projects we saw, this too is EU-funded.
Back in Irina’s office, we did not stay for a long time but left for La Journée de la Francophonie, the French days in Valcea. Schools were presenting short plays by Molière and Romanian playwrites in the library and this was a nice opportunity to join some local cultural events without struggeling with the language barrier – at least almost, as the Romanian plays were in Romanian. We had lots of fun watching and couldn’t take our eyes off the smallest children running around in their traditional costumes.
Later, we went to the market place again to get some food for my journey from Valcea to Sibiu, which was due the next morning. In the evening, I went out alone and strolled through Valcea’s city centre, taking pictures and being happy with the experience!
Irina came to my place to pick me up at noon and we drove to her office together where I had some time to prepare myself for holding the presentation about Global Footsteps and the conference in August. At 2pm Irina, some of her colleagues and I went to a conference room in the municipality building for installing the beamer and the laptop. The head of the Social Department, Simina, Carmen and other employees joined us. When I started giving the talk, Irina translated from English into Romanian. After I had finished the women had a quite long discussion about the subject – everyone was impressed and thought of it as a great idea, but, as I understood, there were also doubts about Romania’s role in this network. How helpful could be their community for the network, as they have so many difficulties to cope with themselves? And could they profit from their engagement in conference and the future cooperations? Although I only understood a bit of what they were saying and Irina could not translate everything for me, it became clear to me that the conference and the linking between the communities and projects means something different depending what the basis of the respective project is. For the project in Valcea, becoming active in the GF network and investing time and work into it, seems to mean investing much more than a project from e.g. Germany would, because they have such a great lack of funds and employees. Being part of the network can be a great chance for them, but becoming active only seems to make, if they can really profit from this.
Having come to an end, everybody thanked Irina and me for the presentation and I felt quite relieved that it had gone well.
After a short break and some cookies, Irina, Simina, Carmen and I drove to the outskirts of Valcea to visit the MARA centre for autistic children, another project realized by the Social Department. The centre offers therapy for children and advice for their parents. The children live with their families but come to the centre for their therapy every day. The MARA also is EU-funded and the only centre dealing with autism in the area of Ramnicu Valcea. Studying psychology, this visit was very intersting for me as I already had courses about autism but never had met autistic people before. A worker from the centre gave us a tour through different therapy rooms, presenting different groups of children to us, who ranged between 2 or 3 years up to about 11 years. The groups also differed in the children’s type of autism, and so did the therapy. Some therapists were working on the children’s concentration through drawing or making simple crafts, others focussed on language, as some autists hadrly ever speak. We also saw a gymnastics room where the children can play and move to music during their therapy. There we encountered a little boy having the svant-syndrom. According to our guide, he was very gifted doing all sorts of calculations. At the end of the tour we all were sad for leaving.
Jana Eyssel from Gottingen, a long time member of Global Footsteps and part of the Footstep 12 conference management team paid a visit to our Romanian link, here is the first of four reports on her Global Venture.
Morgan Phillips had asked me to help with organising the next Global Footsteps conference in Cadca, Slovakia, in August 2010. My job was to visit communties, which are part of the Global Footsteps network, to identify community capacity building projects and to invite project representatives to the forthcoming Footstep 12 conference. Therefore, I prepared myself to travel to Ramnicu Valcea, representing Romania in the Global Footsteps network. Irina Sandulescu, whom I knew from the Footstep 10 in 2005, was my contact person in Valcea and organised my stay on ground. She is working for the municipality and thus has a good knowledge of projects in her town. Before my departure, she presented me a list of projects, among which we hoped to find one or two, that could be part of the conference and the future network.
First day in Romania, 14th March 2010
After a very long ride on the coach from Leipzig to Romania, which took about 26 hours and served as a nice introduction to the country of my destination, since I was the only German on the trip and everybody spoke Romanian, I finally got off the coach in Sibiu. Irina's husband was in town and picked me up. Since we had to wait for Irina’s brother who would arrive a few hours later from Italy by coach, we went for a drink to the historic centre of the town.
Sibiu is situated in Transylvania and for a long time has been the centre of the Saxons living in Transylvania, or Siebenbürgen, as they call it. This German heritage is still apparent, for instance in the architecture. Some streets reminded me of old German villages, which seemed very paradox to me, as I was quite far away from home and was being prepared to discover a country and a culture very different from mine.
The town also hosts a great deal of sights and has an important cultural heritage. In 2007 it has been the European Capital of Culture and therefore the picturesque historic centre is very well renovated. To profit from our time in this nice place, we visited the Brukenthal Museum, which exhibits a large collection of paintings and beautiful furniture from the 18th century.
In the afternoon, having picked up Irina’s brother, we left Sibiu for Ramnicu Valcea. Irina had prepared dinner for us and later brought me to the room where I could stay during my days in Valcea.
