Thursday
All the world’s a stage
Today’s morning was entirely dedicated to the international conventions concerning refugees and migrant works. First there were two presentations and to end the morning another ‘exercise’. We were given several basic rights of migrant workers and were asked to order them. And although our group (minus one) came to a consensus pretty quickly, it is really a harsh job to rank things known as basic rights. I mean, how can you tell which one is more ‘basic’ then the other? After a comparison between the different groups – the differences were actually pretty minimal – it was already time for lunch.
The afternoon started with a fishbowl discussion amongst ourselves. Three random people formed a panel and got presented with a question. After each of them made an opening statement, people could come up to the panel and replace whomever they wanted to replace. If you ask me, it’s a pretty good format for a discussion, but things could’ve been a lot smoother. After this discussion we started to prepare our final declaration for the seminar.
The way this was build, was actually pretty well done. We were split up into three different age groups. At first we all had to write a small statement of three points individually. The second stage was to find a compromise with person across from you. Then with the two people next to you and eventually with the whole group (of 8). This made that we finished Thursday with three different declarations. All three of them were really different. The youngest age group had an extremely practical approach (what should JEF do?), the middle group gave some general solutions to tackle the problem of integration and old group with the oldest people had a philosophical debate and came out with zip. Tomorrow we’ll try to merge all different drafts into one.
Cédric Fernández