Friday
All ends well
Today is the last day of the seminar, end quite frankly…I’m tired. Tired in a good way, that is… The keyword for this final day of the seminar is “output”. We need to produce some output for the seminar. Different ideas were noted and then we could split up in groups and get to work. The different projects were: a animated movie, formulate ideas for articles for the new federalist (thenewfederalist.eu), create a declaration (which we already made drafts of yesterday) and make concrete ideas of “integration in action”.
Since I joined the group that worked on the declaration, I cannot tell you how the other groups worked, I can tell you that each group came back with some great stuff. For example the group working around “Integration in action” came back with a serious plan on how to get the youth involved and try to tackle the prejudices concerning migrants. On the making-of of the declaration I can give you some insight: it was actually quite difficult – and not only because I was really, really tired.. There were essentially two camps who couldn’t come to an agreement yesterday. Today, they actually could, kind of. The writing of the declaration took us more time than we had available so that met skipping the lunch break (not lunch itself) and missing out on the world café – which took place right after the lunch break.
The last event for this seminar was a panel debate in Valetta, where we were joined by the participants of the conference. The panel was quite interesting, but the round of questions was really weak. If you only allow three, on beforehand prepared questions, don’t say “and now the floor is open for any question to the panel”. That’s just stupid.
Our time in Malta ended with the Europe United party in Valetta-Waterfront. I must say that this little island surprised me, it was an amazing location for the seminar. There were some great people who made this seminar even more worthwhile.
So thank you JEF and especially JEF Malta for hosting us. Until the next time…
Cédric Fernández