Participant about Youth Exchange

Let me tell you a story-feelings

Chrystalla Tsoutsouki

I don’t really know how to express my feelings about this youth exchange. The first feelings appeared when I saw the topic of this exchange program. I was waiting every day for my acceptance email. You don’t find easily youth exchanges like this one, programs that are able to change your way of thinking, to teach you more than 6 years in high school managed to do.

 In addition to the project topic, partner countries interested me as well. As a person from Cyprus I find more similarities with Mediterranean countries. Therefore this difference was important for me as I would learn every single time in the project! And that was the reality. In every discussion we had, while we were eating, drinking our coffee, walking, playing I learned and I shared.

I have to say that from the first days I felt really comfortable with the place and the people there. Our trainer Andrej was also an amazing guy! Everyone had to share and was open to receive knowledge, experiences from the others.

During the interviews I felt the luckiest person in the world. Everything I read about all those years were alive in front of my eyes. They were telling their stories to some strangers not because they like to share them. Contrariwise, they didn’t want to remember those times but they wanted to let young people know in order to avoid the same mistakes again.

It was really tuff program, we worked a lot. But personally I enjoyed every single moment working as a team and creating something that was ours and it will connect us forever. Of course sometimes we argued but this is normal and desirable and you work as a team.

I loved and liked people really early, ten days for me were not enough with them. Therefore I hope we will meet soon.