JEF Belgium

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

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