FIRKA | U can touch this

The objective of the project was to motivate active citizenship among young people, raise their interest for social problems, help them frame and share their opinion.

During the 9 days we focused very serious current political topics such as: Brexit, the participating countries, Europe and the European Union’s most important political questions, such as: the positive and negative effects of migration. The participants expressed their views on relevant topics, and discussed them with each other, all of these results more serious “debates” between them. The youngsters have made suggestions to solve the problems, we did not expect immediate world redemption from them, we would like to apply this as a kind of incentive. Many of the young people who came to the program realized it on the spot, like Greece is in a serious crisis because of the refugees arriving in their country.

With our project, we fully achieved our goals, the importance of belonging to the European community was strengthened in the participants, they learned about the functioning of the EU, they got acquainted with the opinions of young people coming from other countries by the program.

The camp was located in the ‘Fürdőkerti Ifjúsági Szabadidőközpont’, Hajdúböszörmény. A total of 30 participants from 5 countries (Hungary, France, Greece, Poland, Romania) took part in the exchange program.

„We can say that we are going through a successful program. We have gained a lot of experience in the 9 days. We have known different countries, different cultures, different perspectives. Debates, group work and brainstorming were an integral part of the program. The diversity of opinions made them thrilling. From different perspectives we looked at current political issues, creating imaginary countries that served as models for workshops.”

Hungarian group

„We felt good; there were many activities during the program, the games and the other funny activities that helped us a lot to get to know each other, to memorize the names, to find out about our cultural differences and we also had a board game night.”

Polish group

„The cultural exchange this group of 30 young people had the chance to take part in was a great human experience, allowing the participants to discover each other's culture. With open ears and hearts, we made the effort to put ourselves in other people's shoes. Just like brothers and sisters, we spoke the same language to express different points of view, all agreeing on the fact that it is time to act as the European family that the EU is meant to represent, pursuing the European interest before the national one.”

Greek group

„The EU should make a point of encouraging every eligible citizen to take part in a European Youth Exchange, because this sort of experience can really encourage the next generations to grow closer, feeling that what divides them is less important than what they have in common. “Unity in diversity”, says the European motto.”

French group

„We had a lot of fun, but we had also serious discussions and debates about BREXIT, different political issues of the participating countries, discrimination and actual problems of Europe and the EU. We had different point of view, we realized that some of the countries have situations that we cannot hear from the TV, from the media, only when we actually meet and talk with people: for example we didn`t know about the situation of Greece, about their actual real problems with the refugees until we met them and they talked about this.”

Romanian group